Yes, I agree.

Good stuff. Right now I choose the way of dialectics: to ditch the metaphysics but also maintain the dichotomy. The dichotomy is not just a mistake—or if it is, it’s an important one.

I may return to these fascinating issues later.

If ↪Jamal had only said that disagreement can only take place against, and so presupposes, a background of agreement, instead of saying it presupposes objectivity. — Banno

Maybe it means the same thing. Maybe I'm bringing the concept back to its roots.

But sure, point taken.

Great post. I hope to reply later. I suspect I will conclude that all of that makes objectivity difficult, but not impossible.

I’m not sure I’m understanding you, but maybe you just have a different way of reaching a similar interpretation. I think Adorno, particularly with that bit you quoted—“instead of
recognizing how very much its immanent truth depends on such, down to its innermost composition”—is saying that what was not quite conscious for Hegel can now be raised up to unashamed awareness, namely that it is in its very finitude, its narrowness and limitation, that philosophy can find truth. When philosophy finally understands that it is itself socially conditioned, it can proceed with confidence.

Does this fit with your interpretation at all?

What do you think? — Pussycat

I think the “this” is either the ludicrousness of philosophy’s confusion of the scholastic with the world-concept, or the retrogression itself (retrogression of philosophy to the scholastic or narrowly scientific).

So Hegel knew this as a mere moment of reality, an activity among others. And he knew it “in spite of the teaching of the absolute Spirit to which he assigned philosophy”.

Adorno is saying that Hegel, though officially claiming that philosophy is the culmination of absolute Spirit, representing total knowledge, actually knew that philosophy was a finite, socially situated activity. I’m not sure how he thereby restricted philosophy, though: just by knowing this about it? Or evidenced in the philosophy?

In the previous paragraph, it’s not just that the attempt to use outdated concepts seems futile, but that it seems futile to those who attempt it. So the line we’re discussing now refers back, implying Hegel knows that philosophy is somewhat futile, or at least is more restricted than he claims outwardly.

This would be more interesting if Adorno explained how this shows itself in Hegel’s philosophy. There is a clue in lecture 9, where he says that in the Logic Hegel writes…

that philosophy is itself merely one element in the actual life of mankind and should therefore not be turned into an absolute.

Unfortunately, the note says that this statement has not been found in the Logic or anywhere else. However, we could assume that Adorno has not just dreamt up this view of Hegel’s, that it might actually be found in his work, though perhaps not stated so clearly as Adorno remembers. I’m not enough of a Hegelian to know.

but people can argue all day long about how the color blue makes them feel. — MrLiminal

But these arguments are stupid. Since they are not arguing about something shared, their argument is meaningless.

What people actually do is dress up subjective differences as objective, e.g., “the sky’s colour has a peaceful quality” vs “no, the sky’s colour has a stressful quality”.

Practitioners in the Humanities, like historians and philosophers, endeavour to do more than that, i.e., to give their arguments about objective qualities some substance, even if they cannot be decided. “The primary cause of the Second World War was the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles” cannot be proved, measured, or agreed upon, and is certainly not “self-evident”, but it’s not merely subjective.

And I’m saying it implies there is an objective fact of the matter. If it were merely subjective, there would be no reasonable disagreement. It would be e.g., “I find this boring” vs “I find this exciting”.

The subjective is about the subject. The moment people disagree, they are talking about what is not specific to a subject.

If nothing else, there have been so many conflicting theories of art and what makes it good that it seems impossible for there to be a single "standard" for what makes objectively good art. — MrLiminal

Disagreement doesn’t disprove objectivity; it presupposes it.

This does no good when not one of these itself can be objectively measured. — hypericin

I don't know what “does no good” means. Maybe you mean that because they are not quantifiable, they are not objective? But that doesn't follow.

When two critics cite passages from a novel to show that its characters are or are not emotionally complex, this is more than “I like it/I don’t like it”. About the latter, there can be no reasonable disagreement, but the former involves shared standards. The intersubjective is a kind of objectivity.

Yes, your grammar and spelling were pretty bad 6 years ago. I’ve definitely noticed an improvement.

:up:

But note that in this case he had spent many hours editing out the content of his posts. I don't know how far back he got but he got a good chunk of it. There’s no way I would have taken the time to go through the change log and reverse all those edits.

I think that’s why I submitted to his request to remove his account and all of its content, which I wouldn't normally have done and which I now mildly regret.

I think we can identify several objective criteria for the evaluation of art. Since you mentioned books I’ll focus on novels.

A good novel often has the following:

• Diversity of interpretations
• Distinctiveness and mastery of style and structure
• Powerful, unique, and effective narrative voice
• Technical skill (prose, description, pace, plot)
• Depth of characterization
• Moral complexity
• Emotional depth, power, or maturity
• Staying power
• Formal innovation
• Where there is symbolism, it is thematically important

These are neither necessary nor sufficient for a great novel, but I think they’re good contenders to answer your question. There are many others and I’ve probably missed some important ones.

People will disagree over whether a novel satisfies any one of these criteria, but that's actually an indication that they are objective.

The closest thing I have come up with for a mode or standard is emotions, but there are works that I consider cheap that still inspire emotions. — Red Sky

I think it’s a pretty good criterion, and I think we can recognize in ourselves the difference between a cheap emotional or sentimental response and a complex and profound one.

The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao. — T Clark

So even the eternal Tao is not the eternal Tao.

Members cannot delete their own posts. They can edit them, so they can replace the entire text of a post with a single character, which is what happened in this case.

I explained what happened in the Shoutbox.

One particular member began editing their posts to remove everything they had written, because they'd decided they didn't want to be a member of TPF any more. When I asked about it privately they asked me to delete their account and blank their posts in one fell swoop.
— Jamal

The whole story:

Mystery member posted a new discussion that consisted of a book title, a link to the book, and basically nothing else except for some words to the effect of "here is a book" (not even anything concerning the book's content). I deleted it for low quality and neglected to tell mystery member why I did so. Mystery member began self-erasing, and the rest is history.
— Jamal — Jamal

:up:

If they would like to join again, they can send an email to infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom.

Nicely put.

Is the Feedback category accessible without signing in? — Amity

Yes, feel free to start a thread there asking for clarification, and I'll respond with information I've so far scattered across various threads.

If he comes to regret his departure he could always send an email to infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom, and I could send him an invitation.

I explained what happened in the Shoutbox.

One particular member began editing their posts to remove everything they had written, because they'd decided they didn't want to be a member of TPF any more. When I asked about it privately they asked me to delete their account and blank their posts in one fell swoop. — Jamal

The whole story:

Mystery member posted a new discussion that consisted of a book title, a link to the book, and basically nothing else except for some words to the effect of "here is a book" (not even anything concerning the book's content). I deleted it for low quality and neglected to tell mystery member why I did so. Mystery member began self-erasing, and the rest is history. — Jamal

Introduction: Reality and Dialectics

This law is however not one of thinking, but real. Whoever submits to dialectical discipline, must unquestionably pay with the bitter sacrifice of the qualitative polyvalence of experience. The impoverishment of experience through dialectics, which infuriates mainstream opinion, proves itself however to be entirely appropriate to the abstract monotony of the administered world. What is painful about it is the pain of such, raised to a concept. Cognition must bow to it, if it does not wish to once again degrade the concretion to the ideology, which it really begins to become.

This refers back to the previous paragraph, where he mentioned the mainstream complaint that dialectics reduces everything to contradiction and thereby ignores the richness of experience, the polyvalence and difference. His response is another "that's too bad": this reductive approach is "entirely appropriate" for the world we live in, in which polyvalence is reduced in actuality.

This almost suggests that he thinks an experience of polyvalence is possible but believes that as philosophers we should not stop to celebrate it while so much of it is suppressed and distorted (his philosophy is not neutral). Instead, we need to persistently identify contradiction to maintain a focus on these sites of suppression and distortion, i.e., the non-identical. Polyvalence, the multiplicity and richness, stands as another instance of Adorno's negative utopianism.

But that's actually an over-simplification. I've made it look like Adorno is saying yes, we could philosophically stop and smell the roses, but we ought not to in present conditions. But this is not his view. Instead, he thinks that any such attempt is bound to be something like an ideological romanticization, and thus in itself another distortion. This is what he means when he says it would be to "degrade the concretion to the ideology."

The next paragraph develops this idea:

Another version of dialectics satisfied itself with its lacklustre renaissance: with its derivation in the history of ideas from the Kantian aporias and that which was programmed into the systems of his successors, but not achieved. It is to be achieved only negatively. Dialectics develops the difference of the particular from the generality, which is dictated by the generality. While it is inescapable to the subject, as the break between subject and object drilled into the consciousness, furrowing everything which it thinks, even that which is objective, it would have an end in reconciliation. This would release the non-identical, relieving it even of its intellectualized compulsion, opening up for the first time the multiplicity of the divergent, over which dialectics would have no more power. Reconciliation would be the meditation on the nolonger- hostile multiplicity, something which is subjective anathema to reason.

I take the point to be that some versions of dialectics have been far too hasty, acting like they can achieve the utopian reconciliation of unity and complete understanding, and attain the full experience of polyvalence. Genuine reconciliation would make dialectics obsolete, but these lacklustre dialectical philosophies have effectively abandoned dialectics long before such an obsolescence is possible, and are thereby effectively justifying present conditions, i.e., ideological.

The "intellectualized compulsion" that the non-identical would lose in this utopia of mediation is the form it currently takes in negative dialectics. This is referred back to later.

The last line of the paragraph is nice:

Reconciliation would be the meditation on the no-longer-hostile multiplicity, something which is subjective anathema to reason.

The multiplicity or polyvalence—which I've also described as diversity, difference, and richness—is currently experienced as hostile, as anathema to the subject's reason. This is because it reveals the subject's inability to fully capture it. In contrast to this failed mediation, genuine reconciliation would produce a happy mediation, a successful and non-dominating one. (This reconciliation is the ultimate secret goal of dialectics; see "dialectics serves reconciliation" in the next paragraph)

It's worth stopping to notice these more positive and utopian moments in Adorno, because I think they're important, even if there probably aren't many of them.

I don't really know which lacklustre versions of dialectics he is referring to. Right Hegelians? Orthodox Marxists? (He does mention Marxists a couple of paragraphs later)

Dialectics serves reconciliation. It dismantles the logical character of compulsion, which it follows; that is why it is denounced as pan-logism. In its idealistic form it was bracketed by the primacy of the absolute subject as the power, which negatively realized every single movement of the concept and the course of such in its entirety. Such a primacy of the subject has been condemned by history, even in the Hegelian conception, that of the particular human consciousness, which overshadowed the transcendental ones of Kant and Fichte. Not only was it suppressed by the lack of power of the waning thought, which failed to construe the hegemony of the course of the world before this latter. None of the reconciliations, however, from the logical one to the political-historical one, which absolute idealism maintained – every other remained inconsequential – was binding. That consistent idealism could simply not otherwise constitute itself than as the epitome of the contradiction, is as much its logically consistent truth as the punishment, which its logicity incurs as logicity; appearance [Schein], as much as necessary.

I puzzled over the second sentence for a while. Dialectics "dismantles the logical character of compulsion, which it follows; that is why it is denounced as pan-logism." It refers back to that "intellectualized compulsion" I was talking about above, the compulsion that dialectics feels (or should feel) when confronting the non-identical. This compulsion is intellectualized, taking a logical form—because that's how we do philosophy, and particularly in dialectics we are dealing with the logical category of contradiction—but it also "dismantles" this logical character. Dialectics dismantles the very logical character that it follows, i.e., undermines itself. This again is a gesture towards the utopia of reconciliation in which the non-identical could be experienced outwith such logical categories as contradiction, when dialectics has obsoleted itself.

But the last clause is troublesome: "that is why it is denounced as pan-logism". The "that" seems, grammatically, to refer to the dismantling of the logical character of the non-identical, when surely it is the logical character itself that leads to the perception of pan-logism.

Well, dialectics is denounced as pan-logism because in dismantling the logical character of the compulsion it must operate by that logic. If it were not engaged in dismantling the logic, it wouldn't be doing logic all over the place (recall that by "doing logic" I mainly just mean seeing contradiction everywhere). So both the compulsion and its dismantling have this logical character.

The rest of the paragraph describes the failure of the idealist version of dialectics.

The next two paragraphs trace the history of dialectics, particularly its degeneration at the hands of official Marxist-Leninist dialectical materialism on one side, and academic Hegelianism on the other. Adorno believes only a negative dialectics can revitalize the critical spirit that Hegel's philosophy contained but also ultimately undermined.

He also at this point makes the distinction between the two bad routes for philosophy in the twentieth century, namely mundane and formalist, where "mundane" is clearly another name for what he calls "arbitrary" in the lectures:

Its contemporary version falls back, wherever anything at all substantive is dealt with, either into whatever mundane world-view is handy or into that formalism, that "indifference", against which Hegel rebelled.

I'll have a go at unpacking the concluding paragraph of the section.

Hegel’s substantive philosophizing had as its fundament and result the primacy of the subject or, in the famous formulation from the introduction to the Logic, the identity of identity and non-identity.4 To him, the determinate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit. Without this supposition, philosophy would, according to Hegel, be incapable of cognizing that which is substantive and essential. If the idealistically-achieved concept of dialectics did not hide experiences which, contrary to Hegel’s own emphasis, are independent from the idealistic apparatus, then nothing would remain of philosophy than the unavoidable renunciation which rejects the substantive insight, restricts itself to the methodology of science, declares this latter to be philosophy and thereby virtually cancels itself out.

Since I was struggling to understand that last sentence, I finally worked it out by putting it in the form of modus tollens: If Hegel's dialectics had not hidden the non-identical then philosophy would have collapsed into positivism and nihilism; but philosophy has not collapsed into positivism and nihilism, therefore Hegel's dialectics did hide the non-identical.

Adorno's idea is that although Hegel hid the non-identical by turning contradiction into reconciliation and subsuming difference—and did this with idealism, insisting on the identity of concept and object—it was in order to produce substantive knowledge. If he had not asserted this right of philosophy to find truth, then there would be no other philosophical tradition except those that resign themselves to the reduced role of handmaiden to science.



How does that fit with your interpretation? I did not interpret Adorno as criticizing Hegel for reading contradiction into the objects. Not saying you're wrong, just don't really get it.

Really?! Och, Jings Almighty. Whatever can be done... — Amity

In this quotation I’ve replaced the ID number with the post’s full URL, which you can get from the share button at the bottom of every post. I’m guessing you won’t get a notification, even though you wrote the post.

Trouble is it opens in a new browser tab.

So, there ya go. 'Moliere' can now be replaced by 'Author'. I like it! — Amity

But Moliere will probably still get the notification, because he posted the post identified by the number.

Yes, that is true. But that only happens when the blue link (name) is activated, no? When you leave it simply as a nameless quote that doesn't happen, does it? — Author

That’s right, the numeric code after the semicolon points back to the post.

So that it jumps back to the point in the essay... — Amity

It jumps back to the top of the post but not to a point within the post, unless there is a special way of implementing anchor links that I’m not aware of.

We'll see how the reading progresses, but the critical question seems to be what is the best approach toward a knowledge of the object. If, there is a natural separation between the concept and the object, and the effort to unite the two in some form of identity is a mistaken approach, because that identity is a mere illusion, then what are we left with? If we wanted to analyze the difference, how could we even start? I would say that each instance of failure of identity, is a demonstration of that difference. — Metaphysician Undercover

Good questions. The idea of constellations will be important.

Your post strikes me as perspicacious.

The essay starts with a straw man fallacy (an argument that misrepresents an opponent's position and then attacks it). — RussellA

It doesn't. It starts by stating the conclusion that will be argued for in the main body of the essay. The argument hasn't been presented yet, so there can be no fallacy at this stage. Have you ever read a philosophical essay before?

The essay looks great, but I haven't read it yet.

I don't think "real" solves the problem. If our primary distinction is between concepts and objects, and we are talking about relations between concepts and objects, all three are "real", concepts, objects and their relations. — Metaphysician Undercover

Fair enough. I just meant something like not fictional or not imaginary, in other words not purely conceptual. This has to be emphasized because Adorno sees contradiction as where the non-conceptual, thus non-subjective, is revealed.

So my proposal was that since we understand such relations as concepts, the relations must be themselves concepts. You don't think Adorno would accept this, so he must have a third category, something which is neither concept nor object, but consists of the relations between these. Do you think that this is the case? Would we put "identity" in this category? Is the category itself "identity", or does "non-identity" fit into the category as well, as a relation which is not an identity relation? — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't share your love of metaphysical taxonomy. Non-identity is precisely about where categories fail. But I suppose we can talk about a third relational term, namely mediation—without thinking of it as an ontological category. Identity, centrally, is a failed mediation; and the non-identical, rather than a negation of identity, is the remainder of that failure.

If you must talk in terms of ontological categories, at least see that for Adorno they're dynamic and provisional, and that it's about processes more than things.

At the risk of hand-waviness, note that these issues are exactly what negative dialectics is about, in the sense that Adorno uses concepts that despite everything are not quite right (to expose a world that is not quite right).

The way I'm using "objective," it does not mean "mind-independent," or pertaining only to what is not dependent on a subject. It means it's not just an invention or artifact of the subject. It's opposed to subjective in the sense of purely conceptual and thereby in some sense unrelated to what is outside it (depending on what we're talking about). "Objective" used in this way describes social reality, not just the concepts produced by subjects involved in that reality.

I can see why it might be confusing though, since it's not just the object we're talking about. We could distinguish between your traditional sense of "objective" and my dialectical one. In any case, I thought mine was legitimate and fairly easy to understand.

Anyway, in the end you seem to choose the route of total subjectivization, which I don't think is a good way of understanding Adorno, even if it's the way you like to look at things.

But I'm happy to use "real" instead. What would you say to that?

Ultimately, I have nothing against making the situation clear in the rules next time.

Thank you. I think it would be good to clarify for future events. — Amity

Yes, I agree. What we need in future is to establish how much people want to be able to publish their TPF work elsewhere. Perhaps some people are unaware that essays already published on the internet often cannot be published in magazines and other publications. It's common knowledge, but it hadn't occurred to me when I put my plum pie in the TPF oven of competition.

EDIT: On the other hand, only two participants have ever shown any concern about getting their work published (me and hyper) and it is otherwise assumed that posts on TPF will be public.

Feedspot — Jack Cummins

Feedspot is a blog reader and content aggregator and is thus nothing new and nothing to worry about in particular.

TPF is a website, by default all posts on TPF are available to non-members and search engines, so people are free to copy TPF content as they are with any other site.

We could make the site entirely private, so all the content would eventually disappear from search engines and things like Feedspot, thus reducing the risk of content theft and plagiarism. I doubt the members here would want to do that, since they joined on the understanding that TPF is a public website.

And if we did make TPF private we wouldn't attract any new members, because we would lose our high ranking in search engines.

So I don't think Feedspot or similar aggregators and feed readers are relevant to the issue of the essays under discussion at the moment.

Introduction: dialectics not a standpoint

The first paragraph stands up for (a kind of) dialectics and leads towards the first introduction of the concept of the non-identical.

Its name ["(negative) dialectics"] says to begin with nothing more than that objects do not vanish into their concept, that these end up in contradiction with the received norm of the adaequatio.

The norm of adaequatio refers to the expected correspondence between concepts and objects. Under this norm, contradictions appear because correspondence is imperfect, i.e., concepts do not exhaust their objects.

The contradiction is not what Hegel’s absolute idealism unavoidably transfigured it into: no Heraclitean essence. It is the index of the untruth of identity, of the vanishing of the conceptual into the concept.

For Hegel as for Heraclitus, contradiction is an essential part of reality. Adorno denies this, saying rather that contradiction is the result of a concept inadequately matching its object. This is a bit puzzling, because doesn't he say in the first or second lecture that contradictions are more than this mismatch, that in fact they inhere in the objects themselves (society really is full of them), not only between objects and concepts? How isn't this an inconsistency?

The answer, I suppose, has to be that the claim that contradictions are inherent in the object is not a claim of metaphysical essence. Instead, it is a claim that contradiction is neither solely on the side of ontology nor just a subjective inadequacy, but is an objective feature of the relation between the two. There is more to be said here but I'll leave it for now.

The second paragraph is fun—incredibly dense and really crucial. It goes from the important admission that identity thinking is fundamental to thought and cannot be completely avoided, to the idea of the non-identical.

The appearance [Schein] of identity dwells however in thinking itself as a pure form from within. To think means to identify.

The impossibility of avoiding identity-thinking is not a pessimistic point, because the pure ideal of bringing heterogeneous things together in unity can be used well or badly. Reading the chapter on identity and non-identity in Brian O'Connor's book Adorno helped me understand this. He makes the distinction between coercive and non-coercive identity-thinking:

In contrast to the coercive attitude – the one Adorno finds in modern society and in its philosophy – the non-coercive attitude attempts to close the gap between it and the object, without the authority of preconceived categories. — Brian O'Connor, Adorno, p78

This is backed up in Adorno's next sentence:

Conceptual schemata self-contentedly push aside what thinking wants to comprehend.

So for Adorno, identity thinking expresses a utopian ideal of unity, in which contradictions and antagonisms are reconciled and understanding is reached without domination. But what happens is that conceptual schemes subvert this ideal and turn it into domination and violence (both metaphorically and literally, of course).

O'Connor calls the utopian ideal "rational identity."

Adorno’s critique of identity thinking, then, is not of ‘rational identity’, but of the coercive attitude which, in the ways we have seen above, force an identity onto the object. — O'Connor

This raises the question, why does Adorno spend so much time attacking identity-thinking when in fact he could be positively promoting the good kind of identity thinking? The reason is that bad identity thinking is where we are at—the ideal is unattainable in our present material reality. It follows that negative critique of reality is what we need, not positive affirmation of what can only be a fantasy in present conditions. This negative critique takes the central form of an emphasis on the non-identical, that which resists (coercive) identity-thinking.

But I want to look at that paragraph's opening two sentences again:

The appearance [Schein] of identity dwells however in thinking itself as a pure form from within. To think means to identify.

This word for appearance, Schein, is the same as in appearance/essence, and it similarly suggests illusion. Here, the illusion is that thought has exhausted the object, that mind and world are united completely. But this is an illusion that arises from within, from the way we think: to think means to identify.

He goes on:

The former [the appearance or illusion of identity] is not to be summarily removed, for example by vouchsafing some existent-in-itself outside of the totality of thought-determinations.

In other words, we cannot (or ought not) deal with the mismatch between mind and world by appealing to a noumenal realm beyond concepts, saying it's inevitable that we cannot encompass objects with our concepts since real reality is inaccessible to them anyway.

Instead, we should deal with it by pushing thought to its limits from within:

To the consciousness of the phenomenal appearance [Scheinhaftigkeit] of the conceptual totality there remains nothing left but to break through the appearance [Schein] of total identity: in keeping with its own measure.

In other words, once we see that the conceptual system as a whole only appears to be complete—this is the illusion of total identity—there is only one option, namely to break through this illusion. "In keeping with its own measure" means we do this using the same conceptual means as we use in identity thinking, or in all thinking as such.

Since however this totality is formed according to logic, whose core is constructed from the proposition of the excluded third, everything which does not conform to such, everything qualitatively divergent assumes the signature of the contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself.

"This totality" refers back to "the conceptual totality" quoted above. It's the conceptual system as a whole, a result of identity thinking and giving the illusion of being the result of rational identity. So he says here that this system is shaped by logic. According to the law of the excluded middle, A or not-A with no third option. But reality is ambivalent and complex, so becomes contradictory according to this logic (or this zealous application of logic). For example, Duchamp's "Fountain" is both art and not art, and this is precisely what it means, so it appears contradictory.

So we can see (if we had forgotten) why contradiction is so central to Adorno. Negatively, it is the site of truth, meaning it is what shows there is something wrong, both with our concepts and with the reality described by them.

In the last paragraph of this section, he makes the conclusion explicit, that dialectics, with its treatment of contradiction, is the kind of philosophy we should be doing:

Dialectics is the consistent consciousness of non-identity. It is not related in advance to a standpoint. Thought is driven, out of its unavoidable insufficiency, its guilt for what it thinks, towards it.

Next, he notes that dialectics is seen as reductive. It "grinds everything indiscriminately in
its mill down into the mere logical form of the contradiction," overlooking the real polyvalence that might be better described just as difference. But Adorno doesn't back down:

That which is differentiated appears as divergent, dissonant, negative, so long as consciousness must push towards unity according to its own formation: so long as it measures that which is not identical with itself, with its claim to the totality. This is what dialectics holds up to the consciousness as the contradiction.

Lastly for now...

Thanks to the immanent nature of consciousness, that which is in contradiction has itself the character of inescapable and catastrophic nomothetism [Gesetzmaessigkeit: law-abiding character]. Identity and contradiction in thinking are welded to one another. The totality of the contradiction is nothing other than the untruth of the total identification, as it is manifested in the latter. Contradiction is non-identity under the bane [Bann] of the law, which also influences the non-identical.

He said before that "contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity" and here says that "contradiction is non-identity under the bane [Bann] of the law," because identity imposes itself as laws, particularly the law of the excluded middle and the law of identity.

So the bane of the law is identity-thinking's tyrannical character, and the non-identical is actually affected by this ("also influences the non-identical"). I often say that the non-identical is that which "escapes" our concepts, but in fact, it suffers under their systems. Or, it is distorted by them and appears as contradiction.

What I haven't addressed so far is how dialectics is not a standpoint and what this has to do with anything. I suppose what it means is that dialectics is not a position, but is rather a process. And rather than taking sides, it tries to understand those sides as aspects of a single system. Maybe I'll come back to this when I have more to say about it.

I don't know if the potential publishers of philosophical essays apply the same exclusivity criteria as many of the fiction magazines do. From my very cursory research, they seem to be more permissive, meaning that if someone wanted to get their essay published, for example on Aeon, it might still be possible.

If anyone is thinking of doing that they should speak up and I'll do what needs to be done. As it is, most if not all participants would have assumed the essays were going to be viewable to non-members, since that is always the default on TPF and discussion forums generally.

What has changed regarding keeping essays or stories private for the sake of publication? — Amity

Nothing has changed, except that @hypericin wanted to share essays with non-members.

I made the symposium viewable only by members because I wanted to submit stories to magazines, and because @hypericin had (I think) expressed a wish to do so too. That doesn't apply to the philosophy essays—nobody has expressed a desire for them to be members-only—and on the other hand, someone wants to be able to share them.

How's that sound to you? — Moliere

Good, except I don't think the “power” and “hegemony” that philosophies of Spirit are directed towards or against refer to the technicians per se. Technicians are just agents of the hegemony; the hegemony itself is the totality of industrial capitalism. So these words, “power” and “hegemony”, refer back to “immeasurably expanded society”, i.e., immeasurably developed in terms of industry, administration, control and ideology.

Whether that makes much difference, I’m not sure.

the event can move on — Amity

:up:

@Moliere @hypericin @Baden

I have made the essays public, as promised.

Although @Baden and @Amity were against it, they did not give any reasons beyond speculation that some participants might be relying on the fact that the category is members-only. But I don't think this is a realistic possibility, and nobody with such a concern has spoken up. Against that, @hypericin has a real need to share the essay with some non-members, and it is pointlessly cruel to disallow this on the basis of basically no good reason at all.

The short stories were once public too, and nobody complained. I made them private because I, and I think @hypericin, were trying to get our stories published in magazines.

As far as I know, nobody has voiced a desire that this unusual permissions scheme be extended to the philosophy essays. It just happened to be the default because I applied the members-only permission to the whole Symposium.