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.

Leon, you go on about true philosophical engagement but this exchange between yourself and Moliere demonstrates perfectly that it must be bullshit. You know very well that Moliere meant there is no relevant difference, and yet you chose to pretend you didn't know it. It's eristic, clear as day.

but I personally have sent Jamal or other moderators no messages like that — ProtagoranSocratist

In fact, I haven't received a single private message complaining about this discussion.

That set's a rather large task for oneself though, no? "Christian ideology," is incredibly broad. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I didn't mean I have to account for the entirety of Christianity. The task is just to trace the argument back to its source, not in Aristotle or even Thomas, but in Christianity as it finds itself now (in America, probably).

However, I am thinking of revising my original argument to show that engaging directly (what I called "immanently") can, e.g., by exposing contradicitons, serve as a basis for metacritique (which I think it effectively did in my big post). — Jamal

Under this scheme, eristic is what happens when I fail to escape from the direct engagement, i.e., in Adorno's terms, fail to move from the particular (Bob's argument) to the metacritical universal (Christian ideology). But the point of my revision is that I do actually have to engage.

Eristic is something like fighting because one likes to fight, or arguing because one likes to argue. It usually connotes a desire to win for the sake of winning, without any regard for whether what one says is true or false, sound or unsound.

So no, I don't think it is a proper philosophical approach. My first thread was related to the topic. Actually, I think everyone generally agrees that eristic is problematic. Jamal's post seemed to begin with that premise. — Leontiskos

Oh, then maybe I misunderstood Jamal; or perhaps I misunderstood the term. I thought they were giving an psychological account of why I am coming up with the Aristotelian account of gender because they wanted to provide a metacritique of the genesis of my views. — Bob Ross

Yes, I think we all agree that eristic is not good in a philosophical context. My claim was that engaging directly would result in eristic, and that I had another option, which was metacritique.

It isn't a psychological account. At least, it's not meant to be. If my account veered into psychology---meaning that I imputed dishonesty and hateful feelings to you and explained your attraction to Thomist Aristotelianism in those (or other psychological) terms---that's a risk which is always tempting when I'm discussing things I care about with someone whose views I find morally objectionable. But one can examine someone's personal motivations from a sociological, rather than psychological, viewpoint---as representative of an ideology's operation in society. The problem is that since the focus is in some sense on the person, it can look a lot like ad hominem. But there is a difference, which is that the ideology critique aims to explore the social function of certain beliefs expressed or implied by your interlocutor, rather than simply discrediting that interlocutor.

This is actually a pretty common confusion in philosophy. Rather than directly confront the validity (or soundness) of a Christian's moral precepts, Nietzsche tried to expose their genesis, namely in the hatred and resentment of the slave. Rather than arguing that the plans of 19th and 20th century penal reformers were inhumane or resulted in recidivism, Foucault traced the genesis of these reforms to developing technologies of power, a result of more thorough social control even while being less brutal.

I think both these philosophers have been accused of committing ad hominem or the more general genetic fallacy. Imagine Foucault saying to a penal reformer, "your view represents the internalization of a new, more insidious form of power". To which the penal reformer might say "Ad hominem!" But of course, that's not what Foucault is doing. Genetic reasoning is not always fallacious.

I'm not saying all this to get myself off the hook. I'm saying that there is a central argument which remains to be dealt with after you remove all personal attacks and instances of ad hominem.

However, I am thinking of revising my original argument to show that engaging directly (what I called "immanently") can, e.g., by exposing contradicitons, serve as a basis for metacritique (which I think it effectively did in my big post).

I haven't seen a "censorious impulse" from Bob. I actually think a lot of people within this thread are desirous to see Bob himself censored. — Leontiskos

Just a quick note to say that the word means severely critical of the behaviour of others, like someone who polices public morality (like the Roman censor). It's not about wanting to silence people.

Otherwise, I may respond to some of your interesting criticisms in the coming days.

In lieu of this, might it not be that we need a pragmatic approach to morality, given we are unable to get to truth or even agree upon axioms? Why let the perfect be the enemy of the good? I would take it as a given that anything human is going to be limited, imperfect, tentative, regardless of the era. Could we not build an ethical system acknowledging this, and put aside notions of perfection and flawless reasoning, focusing instead on what works to reduce harm? Just don't ask me how. — Tom Storm

Good stuff. I mostly agree. Where I think this runs into difficulty is in how to uncover and decide on the causes of harm/suffering. The tools I favour are the critique of ideology, which I've tried to do here, and the analysis of social relations to reveal systemic domination. These can show the way harm gets baked into life and appear as normal. Liberal pragmatism doesn't really have this toolkit, since it doesn't have a robust scepticism towards social structures, so it can inadvertently end up preserving them and the harms they cause.

For example, both I and a liberal pragmatist might want to do something about the problem of widespread depression, agreeing that this is a significant harm or suffering. But while the liberal might want to solve the problem with better access to drugs and therapy, I and my quasi-Marxian critical theory buddies will question the diagnosis, saying that depression is a rational response to conditions of alienation and atomization, made to seem normal by ideologies like the work ethic, the performance society, and so on---and then link all that back to social and economic relations.

The solution, arguably, is not to discard neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence, but to show how it can be used well, setting out a more humane, and more inclusive teleology—like one that shows how the telos of a human being is fulfilled in relationships of love and mutual flourishing, which can take many forms. I want to say that abandoning the concept of human nature and purpose because it's open to misuse is to surrender the very ground on which we can build a progressive vision of the good life. — Jamal

So, does this make you a foundationalist? Do you think, for instance, Rorty’s neopragmatic view of morality is limited because it doesn’t rely on objective moral truths or universal principles? If all things are socially constructed, contingent conversations, then why do anything in particular? — Tom Storm

Good questions, although I balk at the suggestion that I'm a foundationalist. Otherwise ... it's complicated.

The qualification "arguably" is there because I am undecided, so one answer I can give to you is that I just don't know. But even if I fully endorsed the neo-Aristotelianism, I don't think that would entail foundationalism, if that is meant in a strong metaphysical sense, i.e., the belief in a fixed nature and purpose that provides normative justification for moral judgements.

My position right now is maybe something like a negatively teleological virtue ethics. I'm here to criticize ideas that seek to frustrate the telos of human flourishing, as I believe Bob's do, even if I don't have my own settled conception of what that human flourishing is. And settling on a conception of human flourishing is something I suspect is impossible in what I regard as a fragmented and chaotic human world. In other words, MacIntyre is right that modernity has produced people who, when they talk about ethics, don't know what they're talking about---and since I don't exclude myself from that, I have to be careful---and Adorno is right that while we might be able to see the sources of our norms and values, we cannot in our present circumstances find rational justification for them, such is the lack of access to a coherent socially embedded tradition.

So if there's any foundation to my moral thought, right now it's along the lines of Adorno:

The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.

As for Rorty, I'm not very familiar with him, but on the face of it yes, his view is limited without objective moral truths or universal principles, just as every other moral philosophy is. This standard is impossible to meet in the post-Enlightenment world, and the question is if Rorty's response navigates a good path between the Scylla of dogmatism and the Charybdis of relativism-nihilism. As far as I can see he sails too close to the latter.

This seems to me to touch on my questioning of the veracity of Bob's Neo-Aristotelianism . My vague recollections of Aristotle do not much cohere with the reactionary and authoritarian direction that our Aristotelian friends hereabouts seem to share. — Banno

True. Aristotle's exclusion of barbarians and slaves, and partial exclusion of women, from the moral and political community was a presupposition rather than an active reactionary position.

But I'm sceptical as to teleological accounts that link what it supposedly is to be human to what we ought do - although I might be convinced - grounding "ought" in teleology appears to be a category mistake. And the turn to "traditional" values is just too convenient.

The core of my disparagement of Aristotelian essentialism is the hollowness of "that which makes a thing what it is, and not another thing". It doesn't appear to do any work, and to presuppose a referential approach to language that I hold to be demonstrably false. — Banno

Fair. I am undecided on it myself.

There is indeed an unresolved tension in my thinking, in an admiration for both Anscombe and Foot (to whom Macintyre owes a great debt) together with a more progressive attitude than either. I do not accept the authoritarianism of Anscombe, nor the emphasis on tradition in Foot. I'll add Rawls and Nussbaum to the mix, and I think we might translate Aristotelian ethics into a modern, inclusive agenda. I'd hope that we might proceed without a "thick" ethics of tradition or evolutionary constraint, and proceed instead with a "thin" ethics of autonomy, dignity, and realised capabilities. Small steps over grand themes.

Excellent post, Jamal. I hope you succeed in shaking up the conversation here. — Banno

:up:

To provide the context for this mega-post, let's look at MacIntyre's diagnosis of modern moral debate:

The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on—although they do—but also that they apparently can find no terminus. There seems to be no rational way of securing moral agreement in our culture. — MacIntyre

Every one of the arguments is logically valid or can be easily expanded so as to be made so; the conclusions do indeed follow from the premises. But the rival premises are such that we possess no rational way of weighing the claims of one as against another. For each premise employs some quite different normative or evaluative concept from the others, so that the claims made upon us are of quite different kinds. — MacIntyre

If this is the case for all moral debate, are we all condemned to engagement in eristic, i.e., rhetoric with the sole aim of winning, a practice which is unphilosophical or even irrational? In other words, is this discussion necessarily just a fight rather than a shared quest for truth?

The answer, I think, is not exactly. MacIntyre in that second paragraph is referring back to his examples, which show a tendency in our culture, perhaps not a necessity. I think we can argue rationally for the superiority of our premises, but with the aim of persuasion, i.e., of winning the battle.

Traditionally, going back to Socrates, you're either seeking truth or trying to win. But why not both? In the case of this discussion I think I can produce an argument with a dual function: (a) to be read by those who share my premises (e.g., that homosexuality is not immoral, degenerate, or mentally or otherwise defective), it strengthens our shared understanding or explores how we can understand these moral positions better; and (b) to be read by wavering opponents and fence-sitters, it is simultaneously a public demonstration of our moral framework's superiority to that of the Christian conservatives.

Regarding (b), this superiority isn't a matter of preference, but rather of rational justification: a moral framework is better if it is more comprehensive, coherent, and leads to a more humane society. I hope to show that Bob's framework fails on all three counts.

So...

The natural ends of a sex organ, as a sex organ, is to procreate; which is exemplified by its shape, functions (e.g., ejaculation, erections, etc. for a penis), and its evolutionary and biological relation to the opposite (supplementary) sex organ of the opposite sex. — Bob Ross

I was giving you an example to demonstrate that it is bad. Badness is the privation of goodness; and goodness is the equality of a being’s essence and esse. Rightness and wrongness are about behaving in accord or disaccord with what is good (respectively). If you don’t agree with me that it is a privation of the design (or ‘function’) of the human sex organs to be put in places they are designed to go, all else being equal, then we need to hash that out first. — Bob Ross

(My bold)

So one side says anal sex violates the natural ends of both organs and is therefore a privation of goodness, and the other says no, it doesn't and it isn't (maybe they point out that singing is not a violation of the natural end of the mouth). Who is right? What would it mean to "hash it out"?

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

Pointing out the weakness or fallaciousness of these comments would be uncharitable (everyone ought to get some leeway when it comes to rhetoric)---were they not so revealing. Assuming that MacIntyre's diagnosis is about right and that engaging Bob on his own terms would be yet another of those interminable debates, we're each free to engage in metacritique, examining the opponent's ideas in terms of their genesis, while ignoring their validity (the latter is uninteresting: if non-procreative sex is immoral/bad/unnatural, we'll grant you all the rest).

I mean, we could critique the position immanently by pushing its concepts to breaking point. For example, if all non-procreative sex acts are degenerate and morally corrupt, then heterosexual anal sex, oral sex, and even kissing and touching, are degenerate and morally corrupt. That diverges sufficiently from human experience that it strikes one as preposterous. But if only some of those acts are bad, why? Why isn't kissing a violation of the natural end of the mouth and a privation of goodness? And if some non-procreative sex acts are morally ok if they provide a context for procreation or if they are the same kind of act as procreation, then what justifies the privileging of this kind of act over another? It must be something separate from biological function. (It is, of course, the prior commitment to conservative Christian morality.)

But ultimately there's little benefit in hashing out the telos of the rectum. The proponents of Thomist natural law no doubt have many elegant and logically consistent responses to all of the objections above, and we get another instance of interminable moral debate that doesn't touch what I think is interesting and important, namely the genesis and the social meaning of the ideas.

Homosexuality is defective: it can be defective biologically and/or socio-psychologically. Heterosexuality is defective sometimes socio-psychologically.

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); whereas heterosexuality is not per se because, at a minimum, it involves the natural attraction to the opposite sex.

Now, heterosexuality can be defective if the person is engaging in opposite-sex attraction and/or actions that are sexually degenerate; but this will always be the result of environmental or/and psychological (self) conditioning. The underlying attraction is not bad: it's the lack of disciple, lack of habit towards using that attraction properly, and (usually) uncontrollable urges towards depriving sexual acts. — Bob Ross

So I'll now do a metacritique which attempts to expose the genesis of Bob's ideas. Note that I'm not addressing the OP so much as other comments made in this thread, so if I focus on homosexuality instead of transgenderism, that's why. If that counts as off-topic, I'm dreadfully sorry.

I'm going to make use of a concept from Adorno's philosophy: the non-identical.

Identity thinking is the reduction of things to instances or specimens of an abstract category, thus failing to capture or coercively suppressing the thing's singularness and its actuality. What the categorial concept either fails to capture or suppresses is called the non-identical.

In the Negative Dialectics reading group I included the following as an item in a list that answered the question, what's so bad about identity thinking?:

Stereotyping and prejudice: Individuals are treated merely as representatives of group identities — race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation — and their unique features are ignored. Individuals are collapsed into presumed essences. — Jamal

Bob's arguments constitute a textbook case of this identity thinking: he must reduce the whole person to the act he finds disgusting to justify a coercive impulse to force everyone into his chosen norm of being. No attempt is made to understand the lived experience of gay or transgender people, to listen to their voices, to appreciate their diverse experiences of love and intimacy. That's all pre-emptively obliterated under the force of the categories of degenerate, defective, violation of nature, and so on, and the total person is reduced to the function of sex organs, the context of the act ignored in the act of imposing the category of non-procreative act.

This is not accidental. It is the symptom of real conflict, suffering and domination. The genesis of this particular discourse is not in Aristotle or even Saint Thomas, but in the specific social trauma of the contemporary culture war. It is the response of a fundamentalist ideology, whose proponents have long since been unable to assume cultural dominance, to the threat of pluralism. It may even represent the assertiveness of a revitalized Christian right that now hopes to get over this marginalization. Coercive identity thinking is a form of psychosocial compensation: it seeks to resolve through forcible categorization the social anxiety produced by a world it cannot control.

As it happens, even the categories of trans person, gay man, etc., are examples of identity thinking and therefore have this coercive potential, if we forget that individuals are more than that. So Adorno wouldn't deny that categorization is necessary even just to think; what he alerted us to is the constant risk of coercion built into reason.

But that's the point. Bob represents an identity thinking of the coercive kind. The censorious impulse on display in Bob's more careless comments reveals that he is not presenting the result of a disinterested contemplation of organs and sexual practices. Rather, his arguments work to impose, to force, and to control, according to those impulses. But I don't want to reduce this to psychology: in its reliance on pathologization and its anachronistic demand for public priority---it demands priority over all other frameworks despite the fact that it's pre-modern and decontextualized---the argument functions politically, regardless of any personal motives: to impose a social hierarchy by cancelling rival ways of life.

It is clearest in his least philosophical comments. Note the language: "disorder," "defect," "degeneracy," and "privation". It's a tactical move that translates a social and political question about which forms of life our society should recognize into a clinical one about how we diagnose and cure this illness. This allows the argument to present itself as compassionate (always the protestation "I don't hate them, I just want to help them") while its function is to negate the legitimacy of certain ways of being.

The mention of "an organ designed to defecate" pretends to be a scientific or common-sense observation but is really a public performance of disgust, an attempt to bypass rationality by invoking a visceral reaction to justify exclusion.

And it's in comments like those that Bob is most forceful and genuine, which again indicates that the genesis of Bob's arguments is not in reason, but in prejudicial feeling, an aspect of a certain kind of ideology. Despite the Aristotelian clothing, Bob doesn't properly engage or inhabit any tradition at all, if we understand a tradition along with MacIntyre as a "historically extended, socially embodied argument".

This takes me back to my first comment in the discussion.

My thoughts are that all you're doing is cloaking bigotry with philosophy to give it the appearance of intellectual depth, as part of a hateful and destructive reactionary political and religious movement. — Jamal

I admit that this was immoderate, in the personal nature of the attack. But I want it to be understood as a description of the ideological function of Bob's comments, rather than a personal accusation. In more detail, this function is the anachronistic use of Thomist Aristotelianism as the respectable-looking outward appearance for an attack on pluralism, an attempt to use the language of timeless nature to delegitimize a rival social vision and re-establish a lost cultural dominance---and along the way, to exclude, stigmatize, and pathologize people on the basis of aspects of their identity and of the private, consensual relationships in which they find human connection, and which produce no demonstrable public harm.

To all the wavering opponents and fence-sitters: I hope I've gone some way towards demonstrating the superiority of my premises. The way it breaks down is that respect for the rights of gay and trans people and the refusal to accept that they are, merely according to those identities, degenerate, immoral, or defective---this moral framework is superior to Bob's premises because it is...

1. More comprehensive: it accounts for the full range of human experiences of love, pleasure, and intimacy.

2. More coherent: it avoids arbitrarily picking one biological function as the sacred one, while damning all the others to hell.

3. It leads to a more humane society: no loving couples are told by authorities that what they're doing is a privation of goodness or that they are sick in the head.

Lastly...

I am saying a particular kind of sex act is wrong if it is contrary to the natural ends and teleology of a human. I think this even holds in atheistic views that are forms of moral naturalism like Filippe Foote’s ‘natural goodness’. — Bob Ross

Odd that Bob managed to misgender Philippa Foot. :razz:

We all have our idiosyncrasies. I suppose I have to "pin down" something, i.e. to assume to have understood something, in order to have something to talk about. This pinning down is an application of force which others may find irritating. To me, understanding is an application of force, like when Adorno talks about doing violence to the concept. It's sort of unavoidable because understanding requires that concepts get melded together. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yeah that makes sense.

I'm starting to really like Adorno. He was a bit difficult to understand at the beginning, but with time I'm catching on to his style. I like him because he actually goes very deep with his ontology. It's common to just select idealism, or materialism, and this provides principles which allow the philosopher to end the analysis, or begin the ontology. But Adorno doesn't stop here, he sees flaws in both, and that drives him deeper. — Metaphysician Undercover

Awesome.

I think so too. We can say indispensable for any sort of understanding, but at the same time understanding always contains some degree of misunderstanding, so a falsity as well. — Metaphysician Undercover

:party: :grin:

Please do. — Tom Storm

Weirdly, I've decided to start out by criticizing Banno:

It yet again shows the poverty of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence — Banno

I disagree with this. I think what the Christian conservative use of neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence shows is that teleological frameworks are powerful and thus open to abuse. It's what makes them philosophically substantive, in contrast to the emotivism criticized by MacIntyre.

Emotivism is the doctrine that all evaluative judgments and more specifically all moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling, insofar as they are moral or evaluative in character. — MacIntyre, After Virtue

MacIntyre argues that all modern moral philosophies that drop teleology have ended up here, without always knowing it. And the problem is that emotivism cannot provide any rational justification for moral claims, expressing only preferences. It is not open to abuse because it makes no substantive claims that can be abused.

The notion of essence in neo-Aristotelianism, on the other hand, makes meaty claims about human nature and flourishing, so it gives us a framework for rational moral debate, one that unfortunately can be weaponized by bad actors. You might say that it is neo-Aristotelianism's richness that is the problem.

The solution, arguably, is not to discard neo-Aristotelian ideas of essence, but to show how it can be used well, setting out a more humane, and more inclusive teleology—like one that shows how the telos of a human being is fulfilled in relationships of love and mutual flourishing, which can take many forms. I want to say that abandoning the concept of human nature and purpose because it's open to misuse is to surrender the very ground on which we can build a progressive vision of the good life.

No doubt there are other options, which you find preferable.

I guess I should get around to criticizing Bob, who after all is the proper target for those who wish to defend marginalized people from reactionaries, but it's a thankless and tedious task.

Looks like this thread is revealing itself as the Conservative Christian echo chamber that it at first pretended not to be. No doubt it will go for another forty pages of theological babble.

No need for others to provide the walls. But it remains a puzzle as to why such stuff is permitted in a philosophy forum. — Banno

It very quickly produced a heated philosophical debate, and I've been enjoying posts by you and others which oppose the OP's bigotry and religious dogmatism. So I'm going to let it stand.

And as @Count Timothy von Icarus points out, the discussion is the perfect specimen of the degenerate state of moral discourse described in the first chapters of After Virtue, in which (in my loose interpretation) Christian conservatives rely anachronistically on concepts that no longer have any shared social basis, and the liberals, leftists, and moderate conservatives (if they still exist) are largely emotive in their opposition.

Well, that's MacIntryre's view. Me, I'm definitely not on the fence. I'll make a post about it, maybe.

Introduction: TRADITION AND COGNITION

From the last section, which looked at the temporal, historical dimension of philosophical thought, to this section in which Adorno looks at how this dimension has fared in modern philosophy: only dialectics is keeping it alive, the mainstream being thoroughly de-historicized.

One can no longer paddle along in the mainstream – even the word sounds dreadful – of modern philosophy. The recent kind, dominant until today, would like to expel the traditional moments of thought, dehistoricizing it according to its own content, assigning history to a particular branch of an established fact-collecting science.

"The recent kind" could refer to phenomenology, logical positivism/analytic philosophy, and also perhaps to existentialism. They are all ahistorical in their own ways.

These academic schools of philosophy, on the model of scientific specialization, regarded history as belonging only within its own department, away from philosophy, whose content was not purely philosophical if concerned with the historical.

Ever since the fundament of all cognition was sought in the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given, there have been attempts, in thrall to the idol of the pure presence, as it were, to drive out the historical dimension of thought. The fictitious one-dimensional Now becomes the cognitive ground of inner meaning. Under this aspect, even the patriarchs of modernity who are officially viewed as antipodes are in agreement: in the autobiographical explanations of Descartes on the origin of his method and in Bacon’s idol-theory.

Not only empiricism but also rationalism and more recently phenomenology seek the foundation of cognition in "the presumed immediacy of the subjectively given," although in Descartes this would be innate ideas and the cogito rather than sensory stimuli. Adorno is describing a kind of foundationalist philosophy that founds its claims on presumed-to-be immediate, dehistoricized, this-and-not-otherwise givens.

It's interesting that he says ever since Bacon and Descartes, philosophers have been trying to drive history out of philosophy. The standard view is that there was no historical dimension to philosophy at all until Vico and Hegel. Before them, there was no historical dimension to be driven out.

But Adorno is just saying that such was the ahistorical nature of philosophy from the early moderns through to Kant (and beyond, among those who ignored Hegel), that anything historical would always be driven out. It was actively anti-historical without even trying.

What is historical in thinking, instead of reining in the timelessness of objectivated logic, is equated with superstition, which the citation of institutionalized clerical tradition against the inquiring thought in fact was. The critique of authority was well founded. But what it overlooked was that the tradition of cognition was itself as immanent as the mediating moment of its objects.

Modern philosophy and the Enlightenment equated history with religious tradition, superstition, and authority, but it went too far and came up with ways of thinking that left no space for the historical.

The bolded statement means that enlightened philosophy overlooked the fact that its own cognition was formed historically, because the tradition itself is immanent to thought, i.e., history is always already bound up in our ideas. Philosophical thought has an immanent historicity whether philosophers acknowledge it or not.

Cognition distorts these, as soon as it turns them into a tabula rasa by means of objectifications brought to a halt. Even in the concretized form in opposition to its content, it takes part in the tradition as unconscious memory; no question could simply be asked, which would not vouchsafe the knowledge of what is past and push it further.

The mainstream philosophers distort objects when they freeze them in place---pinning them down---with their atemporal objectifications, erasing their history, the "texts of their becoming". In seeking greater objectivity, philosophy has only succeeded attaining a distorted understanding.

And even a new philosophical movement which opposes the philosophical content of the tradition, with a form such as dialectics, will be marked by it. Through an unconscious memory, this determines the questions that will be asked and the approaches that might be taken.

This is true for negative dialectics, but it's not a bad thing. In asking those questions we take up ideas with a history, and carry them forward while transforming them.

The form of thinking as an intra-temporal, motivated, progressive movement resembles in advance, microcosmically, the macrocosmic, historical one, which was internalized in the structure of thought.

The dialectical method, a process happening in time, looks like the movement of history in microcosm. This is because that historical movement is immanent to thought.

Among the highest achievements of the Kantian deduction was that he preserved the memory, the trace of what was historical in the pure form of cognition, in the unity of the thinking I, at the stage of the reproduction of the power of imagination.

Kant makes the synthesis of the manifold of sensible intuition depend on the imagination, which connects concepts to successive appearances, and Adorno interprets this as the trace of history, since it determines inner sense, i.e., the form of the succession of appearances, that is, time.

Because however there is no time without that which is existent in it, what Husserl in his late phase called inner historicity cannot remain internalized, pure form. The inner historicity of thought grew along with its content and thereby with the tradition.

Kant's notion of time is inadequate. The immanent historicity of thought that I mentioned earlier is not just a separable pure form as time is in Kant.

The pure, completely sublimated subject would be on the other hand that which is absolutely traditionless. The cognition which experienced only the idol of that purity, total timelessness, coincides with formal logic, would become tautology; it could not grant even a transcendental logic any room.

Philosophy without history would be formal logic ("one gigantic tautology," as he said somewhere else)---pure form with no content.

Timelessness, towards which the bourgeois consciousness strives, perhaps as compensation for its own mortality, is the zenith of its delusion. Benjamin innervated this when he strictly forswore the ideal of autonomy and dedicated his thinking to a tradition, albeit to a voluntarily installed, subjectively chosen one which dispenses with the same authority, which it indicts autarkic thought of dispensing with.

It's no coincidence that philosophy began to strive for a timeless objectivity in the period of capitalism: the bourgeois consciousness strives for immortality as the logical culmination of its project of sovereign autonomy (free of all history and practical contraints).

Walter Benjamin brought life and energy to this observation by explicitly rejecting the ideal of the philosopher as sovereign autonomous individual. He knew he could not be free of a tradition. However, the tradition he embraced was one he put together himself, combining Jewish mysticism, modernism, and parts of Marxism.

Perhaps this for Adorno is the model of the correct approach to tradition. If we are aware that tradition is at work in our thoughts, we can make use of it deliberately, as Benjamin did.

Although the counter-force [Widerspiel] to the transcendental moment, the traditional one is quasi-transcendental, not a point-like subjectivity, but rather that which is actually constitutive, in Kant’s words the mechanism hidden in the depths of the soul. Among the variants of the all too narrow concluding questions of the Critique of Pure Reason, one ought not to be excluded, namely how thought, by having to relinquish tradition, might be able to preserve and transform it; nothing else is intellectual experience.

Tradition is the opposite of the transcendental. The latter is, despite the imagination's role in the synthetic unity of apperception, ahistorical. As far as time gets into the transcendental deduction it is a pure form belonging to an individual subject. It has nothing to do with historical or collective time, therefore tradition opposes it.

The transcendental ego is not only lacking in history but is lacking in almost anything at all, as a point-like unity. The real subject is not like this: it is thicker, full of history and the "empirically real," all the way down.

However, tradition is also in a sense transcendental, in that it is the condition for the possibility of subjective experience. Kant wrote that the mechanism of the application of the categories to sensible intuitions "is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul". Adorno says the secret is tradition, or history (But I don't want to suggest that Adorno is answering Kant's precise question).

Intellectual experience means relinquishing tradition while also preserving and transforming it. This looks a lot like sublation or determinate negation. And next we get...

The philosophy of Bergson, and even more so Proust’s novel, abandoned themselves to this, only for their part under the bane of immediacy, out of loathing for that bourgeois timelessness which anticipates the abolition of life in advance of the mechanics of the concept. The methexis 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.

Philosophy, as the determinate negation of the tradition, means the interpretation of texts, without enshrining them or treating them as vessels of absolute truth.

Do you think my post missed a subtlety or was incorrect in a way that yours clarified? I'm really trying to understand it and Wittgenstein's writing style isn't always helpfully clear. — Hanover

Instead of saying...

The Wittgensteinian approach (and I could be very wrong here, so please anyone chime in) does not suggest there is not an internally recognized understanding of the word when the user uses it — Hanover

It would've been better to say that Wittgenstein is not saying you can't understand a word differently from everyone else. Wittgenstein isn't denying that words mean different things to different people. We needn't make this "internal", is all I was saying. And that inspired me to riff on the notion of the internal.

Perhaps it was a minor criticism.