Plenty can be lobbed your way. It's just not worth it. I have my sanity and peace of mind to preserve.

That is a really stupid post.

Obviously if "man" is only about sex, trans men are not men. But this "if" is what is being debated, so you're just begging the question.

The debate has been going on for years, and you have made no attempt to research it or address the arguments that defend the notion that trans women are women etc., i.e., the sophisticated arguments which try to show that the terms "man" and "woman" are more complex than your snappy definition allows.

See for example the idea that "man" and "woman" are cluster concepts:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-gender/

Sorry for ranting. — bongo fury

:cool:

For some reason it always puts spaces between em-dashes, which is a stylistic faux pas outside a few style guides (basically just AP), and so this is one way to tell between usages—also, it virtually never uses an em-dash for a single trailing clause, instead always bracketing a clause in them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is useful information. I had it in my mind that it didn't use the spaces, so I started using spaces to distinguish myself. I guess I'll go back to spaceless em dashes. (But I think either way is ok, despite what style authorities might say)

But the fact that it never uses an em dash for a single trailing clause—this is very good to know.

Anyhow, it seems to me that the main risk of them are:

Sycophantic confirmation bias; anything said to GPT in particular is "genius;"
Hallucination of sources, which is bad for any information environment when they get repeated. — Count Timothy von Icarus

:up:

Yes, the hallucination is still quite bad.

Please identify the author and source of that quotation so it can be read in context.

This is obviously missing the point. We knew the order of listing was biased and constantly under attack from bots. It was our job to filter and find actually authored texts, and attribute their epistemic value or lack of it to the genuinely accountable authors. — bongo fury

And we have to do something similar with LLMs. So it's a "no" to this:

You honestly now want to defer those epistemic judgements to a bot? — bongo fury

As for the thesaurus issue...

No. Well done you. Getting the thesaurus to suggest whole phrases and sentences is obviously plagiarism. The gaping difference denied, again. — bongo fury

I'm not denying the difference between a word and a phrase. I'm just wondering where the line is in your mind. One word is ok, but a two word phrase isn't? Three, maybe?

If you're here just to rant, I guess that's ok, but I won't be carrying on a discussion with someone so rude and confrontational. There really is no call for it. What I want to do — now that @T Clark and @apokrisis have clarified this for me — is develop a set of best practices. Since the technology won't go away, your complaints are beside the point from my point of view as someone who wants to work out how best to use it.

I'm mystified that percipient philosophers can't see a gaping difference between (A) using a search engine to produce a list of texts containing a given string (well done, us and it) and on tother hand (B) swallowing the insulting fantasy of interaction with an intelligent oracle. — bongo fury

This is obviously a false dichotomy. One can use LLMs without committing to the latter.

That is, I can't understand or sympathise with them admitting to reading the AI summary, instead of ignoring that insulting click-bait and searching immediately among the genuinely authored texts. — bongo fury

This is quite amusing. The regular Google results have been garbage for years, and it was partly this fact that led to the tendency getting its own name: enshittification. And search engines have never simply produced "a list of texts containing a given string". To think that the AI-overview is clickbait, but the actual clickbait, i.e., the sponsored and gamified results that actually try to get you to click are somehow not — well, you've got it completely the wrong way round.

Yes — bongo fury

Is using a thesaurus to write a novel and saying you wrote it lying?

I don't know what's going on there. It could just be bad, lazy, or inconsistent use of LLMs. If there are any applications which are not terrible, they might be written by people who are better at using them.

Part of that discussion has to be putting our cards on the table, and refusing to be ashamed of it. It's not a matter of using AI vs. not using AI; it's how we use it.

Currently, its use frowned upon and seen as cheating — like using a calculator to do arithmetic — such that most people will be reluctant to admit how much they use it. It's like telling the doctor how much you drink: you don't completely deny drinking, you just under-report it.

Take me for instance. Although I use LLMs quite a lot, for everyday tasks or research, in the context of philosophical discussion or creative writing I always say I never directly cut and paste what they give me. But sometimes they come up with a word or phrase that is too good to refuse. So — was I lying?

But using that word or phrase is surely no worse than using a thesaurus. Which leads me to think that it probably ought to be seen as, and used as, a multitool.

I sympathize. But you're proposing something and instead of telling us why it's a good proposal you're saying "if you want reasons, go and find out yourself." This is not persuasive.

And it isn't clear precisely what you are proposing. What does it mean to ban the use of LLMs? If you mean the use of them to generate the content of your posts, that's already banned — although it's not always possible to detect LLM-generated text, and it will become increasingly impossible. If you mean using them to research or proof-read your posts, that's impossible to ban, not to mention misguided.

The reality, which many members are not aware of, is that a great many posts on TPF have been written in full or in part by LLMs, even those posted by long-term members known for their writing skills and knowledge. I've been able to detect some of them because I know what ChatGPT's default style looks like (annoyingly, it uses a lot of em dashes, like I do myself). But it's trivially easy to make an LLM's generated output undetectable, by asking it to alter its style. So although I still want to enforce the ban on LLM-generated text, a lot of it will slip under the radar.

And there are cases where a fully LLM-generated post is acceptable: translation comes to mind, for those whose first language is not English. Maybe that's the only acceptable case, I'm not sure. But then it becomes fuzzy how to define "fully LLM-generated": translations and grammar-corrected output, it could be argued, are not fully generated by the LLMs, whereas the text they produce based on a prompt is — but is there a clear line?

Anyway, the following comments, though totally understandable, are significantly outdated:

I guess I’m naïve or maybe just not very perceptive, but I haven’t recognized any posts definitely written by AI. There have always been enough overblown and oratorical but poorly thought out OPs and posts here on the forum even without AI that I don’t know how easy it is to tell. Perhaps it would be helpful if people called them out when you see them. — T Clark

Interesting, I haven’t noticed particularly. But I avoid reading lengthy and didactic posts which are often poorly written. The AI stuff I’ve seen often seems peculiarly worded and difficult to read. — Tom Storm

LLMs now routinely write clear and flowing prose.

people can educate themselves about that by undertaking a search in whatever search engine they use — Janus

Where they will now get an AI-generated answer, which will be infinitely better than the enshittified results that Google was giving us until quite recently.

This is the reality:

The A.I.-derived OP’s are likely to be better thought-out than many non-A.I. efforts. Banning A.I. is banning background research that will become built into the way we engage with each other. Think of it as walking around with a host of sages constantly whispering purported words of wisdom into your ear, and it is up to you to sort out what is valuable and what isn’t, what is true and what is false. — Joshs

The tool is now ubiquitous. Every intellectual is going to have to factor it into their practice. Time to learn what that means.

If you need to cheat to pass your exams or publish your research, then in the end it is you who suffers. But if AI can be used in a way than actually expands your brain, then that ought to be encouraged.

PF seems a suitably low stakes place to evolve some social norms. — apokrisis

:up:

It cannot be avoided, and it has great potential both for benefit and for harm. We need to reduce the harm by discussing and formulating good practice (and then producing a dedicated guide to the use of AI in the Help section).

Stop starting discussions to discuss discussions you've been having on Quora and Reddit. I'm closing this.

Had Zizek posted that here without us knowing it him, he'd be ridiculed relentlessly. — Hanover

They're not Zizek quotes.

:up:

I'll be delving into his work soon.

Nope, across the board people do end up stupider for using it. — Darkneos

I already understood that you believed so. I told you that I disagreed, and you just re-iterated your belief. This is not how discussion works.

Which. Studies.

Studies have found that people who use AI have lower cognitive ability than people who don't, you're making yourself worse off for using it. — Darkneos

Which studies?

I think what it comes down to is that it depends on how it's used. This is where it gets interesting.

There is only so much garbage I can tolerate on the forum, and I'm not going to spend my time deleting posts one by one. So please up your game or be banned.

To be clear, I am not saying that Aristotle's accidents are equivalent to Adornos non-identical. Equivalence itself is taken as an identity type of relation which would be misleading in this context. I am using Aristotle's approach to the object, defining it as primary substance, as an analogy to help understand Adorno's approach. So I am pointing at a similarity between the two. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I suspected so. I should have just said that I appreciated the analogy.

So I am definitely not saying concepts=bad, and intuitions=good — Metaphysician Undercover

Cool.

Thank you for closely reading my post. I appreciate it. And I'm glad you agree with my conclusions.

However, I don't think we'll agree on those details. I enjoyed the idea that Aristotle's accidents are equivalent to Adorno's non-identical, but in the end of course, they are very different. I'm not sure I understand the rest. If your central point is that for Adorno, concepts = bad and intuitions = good, that's not right at all.

Otherwise, I think there's quite a lot of agreement between us.

Introduction: QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED (ii)

This contingency meanwhile is not so radical as the criteria of scientivism would wish. Hegel was peculiarly inconsistent when he arraigned the individual consciousness, the staging-grounds of intellectual experience, which animated his work, as the contingent and that which is limited. This is comprehensible only out of the desire to disempower the critical moment which is tied to the individual Spirit. In its particularization he felt the contradictions between the concept and the particular. Individual consciousness is always, and with reason, the unhappy one. Hegel’s aversion towards this denies the very state of affairs [Sachverhalt] which he underlined, where it suited him: how much the universal dwells within that which is individual. According to strategic necessity he denounces the individuated as if it were the immediate, whose appearance [Schein] he himself is destroying. With this however the absolute contingency of individual experience disappears, too.

"This contingency" refers back to the previous sentence: it's the contingency of the individual subjectively making qualitative judgements. The key statement in this passage is, "the universal dwells within that which is individual." I said last time that "we have to adjust our expectations and see that the better kind of reason, and the better kind of knowledge, is contingent and worldly." However, this contingency is not an anything-goes meaningless chaos—the subject is part of a greater whole and is shaped by its universal structures. More than that, the universal only exists at all through particularity, and the result is a kind of mediated contingency, not a random one. The subject is the site where historical, social, and conceptual forces are concentrated and find expression.

The argument takes the form of a critique of Hegel. All I'll say about that is: the gist is that Hegel had this insight about mediated contingency, but dropped it for systematic reasons in favour of the Absolute Spirit. The reason Adorno makes an argument which is primarily against scientism by means of a critique of Hegel is that it brings out both the necessary insight and the lack of the same insight. Scientism is able to dismiss the subjective owing to its mere contingency, but Adorno counters that this contingency is nevertheless structured according to objective reality.

The argument is then fleshed out:

It would have no continuity without concepts. Through its participation in the discursive medium it is, according to its own determination, always at the same time more than only individual. The individuated becomes the subject, insofar as it objectifies itself by means of its individual consciousness, in the unity of itself as well as in its own experiences: animals are presumably bereft of both. Because it is universal in itself, and as far as it is, individual experience also reaches into that which is universal. Even in epistemological reflection the logical generality and the unity of individual consciousness reciprocally condition one another. This affects however not only the subjective-formal side of individuality. Every content of the individual consciousness is brought to it by its bearer, for the sake of its self- preservation, and reproduces itself with the latter.

Individual: the biological human being
Subject: the unified self-aware "I", which reasons and knows

So it's through participation in language and thought (the "discursive medium") that the individual finds its grounding in the universal. At the same time, the individual becomes subject. These two moments are two sides of the same coin: (1) a reciprocal conditioning where the universal provides concepts and the necessary logical form for self-objectification—including the identification of oneself as a member of a class of objects; (2) the act of self-objectification—becoming a self-aware "I"—is how the universal is actualized in a thinking being.

Grounding in the universal <--> Self-objectification

But the grounding in the universal only comes to be actualized in the subject, so the former is both the condition and the result of the latter.

The result is that to accuse the individual's judgements of being "merely subjective" or contingent, is misleading, because it implies such judgements have no possible objective structure or meaning, and this is far from the truth. Because the subject is constituted by the universal, its experience is never just private but is always already connected to and structured by universal reality.

The result will be that through the universal, the subject reaches for the objective.

By the way, it has become doubtful that all animals are bereft of the unity of the self and subjective experience, but this doesn't really affect Adorno's point.

Through self-awareness it is possible for the individual consciousness to emancipate itself, to expand itself. What drives it to this is the misery, that this universality tends to exert its hegemony in individual experience. As a “reality check” experience does not simply mirror the impulses and wishes of the individual, but also negates them, so that it would survive. That which is general in the subject is simply not to be grasped any other way than in the movement of particular human consciousness. If the individuated were simply abolished by fiat, no higher subject purified of the dross of contingency would emerge, but solely one which unconsciously follows orders. In the East the theoretical short-circuit in the view of the individuated has served as the pretext for collective repression. The Party is supposed to have a cognitive power a priori superior to that of every individual solely due to the number of its members, even if it is terrorized or blinded. The isolated individual [Individuum] however, unencumbered by the ukase, may at times perceive the objectivity more clearly than a collective, which in any case is only the ideology of its committees.

Here Adorno turns from pure philosophy to politics, so I think this and the next paragraph are crucial in understanding how abstract philosophy and political engagement are connected in negative dialectics. In a way it might seem a bit dated, since he has East German totalitarianism in his sights, but on the other hand the threat of authoritarianism has hardly lessened for us in recent times, so I think it's very relevant.

He is standing up for individualism: an expansive critical reason just isn't possible without autonomous subjectivity. "The people," though above and beyond the subject, is not thereby in a better to position to determine the objective. On the contrary, it is the autonomous subject, unshackled in its thoughts by the ukase (official decree), which can better perceive the truth.

It's become common for Leftists, especially American ones, to emphasize the collective over the individual. This is partly because American conservatism is so reliant on the assertion of uncompromising individualism, that its opponents feel obliged to take the opposite view (which is fair enough). Adorno and his fellow Frankfurt thinkers had a horror of the coercive collective as much as they did of selfish individualism, understandably given their own experiences in Europe.

But of course, there is a dialectic between individual and collective, and they're interdependent.

In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all. — Communist Manifesto

Marx and Engels here clearly make the freedom of the individual a necessary condition for a free society. But which one we may want to emphasize in our political statements depends on when and where we are. On top of that, Adorno would make the point that what ideologically presents itself as individualism, as freedom of the individual particularly in the United States, is really no such thing. This is why he and others were so critical of bureaucracy, the culture industry, and conformism in advanced capitalism.

But I'm digressing. Adorno repeats and elaborates on the argument:

Brecht’s sentence, the Party has a thousand eyes, the individual only two, is as false as any bromide. The exact imagination of a dissenter can see more than a thousand eyes wearing the same red- tinted glasses, who then mistake what they see with the universality of the truth and regress. The individuation of cognition resists this. The perception of the object depends not only on this, on the distinction: it is itself constituted from the object, which demands its restitutio in integrum [Latin: restitution in whole] in it, as it were. Nevertheless the subjective modes of reaction which the object needs require for their part the unceasing corrective in the object. This occurs in the self-reflection, the ferment of intellectual experience. The process of philosophical objectification would be, put metaphorically, vertical, intra-temporal, as opposed to the horizontal, abstract quantifying one of science; so much is true of Bergson’s metaphysics of time.

This is the poem by Brecht that Adorno is referring to:

In Praise of the Work of the Party

Man has only two eyes;
The Party has a thousand eyes . . .
Man alone can be annihilated;
The Party cannot be annihilated.

Brecht was the kind of Marxist Adorno hated: the orthodox Party loyalist. The statement that the Party has a thousand eyes, the individual only two, is not only a chilling celebration of the coercive collective [EDIT: actually that's quite uncharitable] but is downright false, if it means that the Party can see clearer.

But Adorno's final point is that despite the necessity for subjective judgement, constant self-reflection is required so as not to lose sight of the object's real qualities, i.e., so as not to get carried away with one's own concepts.

This self-reflection, which is also the process of "philosophical objectification," is vertical and intra-temporal, rather than horizontal, abstract, and quantifying, like science. I understand the metaphor like this: science casts its conceptual net out horizontally, and anything underneath—the qualitative and non-identical—is ignored. Philosophy, on the other hand, should excavate downwards to the real objects in all their diversity and qualitative variation. As for time, he agrees to some extent with Bergson's critique of spatialized, quantified time: to be intra-temporal, then, is to be in time, not just laying down a scale on top of it.

I'll close this discussion instead of deleting it, since it has gained a response. If you would like to try again, please use text, not images, to present your ideas. And please do not just copy and paste.

Yes, and there's still a shallow area around there, a sandbank called Dogger Bank.

That's the one.

Last year.

On the other hand...

In an introduction to Adorno's essay, "Subject and Object," Ruth Groff succinctly summarizes his view:

Subject and object cannot be pried apart, he insists. To begin with, subjects are always and only embodied: there is no such thing as a subject that is not also an object. Transcendental subjectivity itself therefore turns out to presuppose material objects that are not themselves synthesized a priori by pure reason. For if there were no such objects, there would be no bearers of reason to do the synthesizing. Admittedly, there exist objects that are not subjects—and in this respect the relationship between subject and object is a-symmetrical. Adorno famously refers to this a-symmetry as the “primacy of the object.” But of the objects that are not subjects, many are artifacts that are made by subjects. Moreover—and more important for Adorno—any object that is an object for a subject is thereby directly mediated, for the subject, by the socially-mediated subjectivity that is his or her embodied consciousness. Even if one does not want to go as far as Kant does in the Critique of Pure Reason in saying that it is transcendental subjectivity that constitutes phenomenal objects as objects, nevertheless it would seem to be that, for subjects, there is no access to objects that bypasses subjectivity. Indeed, the very concept of pure materiality presupposes a subject to conceive it. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno suggests that the most basic epistemic challenge is to ensure that the unavoidable mediation of objects by subjects, in our experience of them, does as little damage as possible. — Frankfurt School Writings on Epistemology, Ontology, and Method

Assuming this is correct (I think it is), am I wrong in thinking it might help us get past our current impasse?

I'm glad we found some agreement MU.

However, I don't know what to say about the other stuff. You didn't like what I had to say before, but now you're bringing it up again. I fear that if I respond, you'll complain that I'm lecturing you again. Ultimately, I agree that subjects are also objects, but the rest of your interpretation of "the object" makes little sense to me, and since trying to address it before was counter-productive and thus even worse than a waste of time, I'm not willing to engage with it any more.

Currently:

Adorno: The Recovery of Experience by Roger Foster, which is densely analytical but great.
Open Socrates by Agnes Callard, which is also great.

On the list:

Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon, which will be out in a few days
Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai
The Book Lovers by Steve Aylett
Malarkoi and Waterblack by Alex Pheby
Doggerland by Ben Smith
Capital by Karl Marx, the new translation

The qualitative moment is dismissed within the social context, as "subjective", and therefore is neglected and escapes cognition. This relates back to what he said about truth in "Privilege of experience" — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep.

The "capability of distinction" is a relation between the nonconceptual object, and the conceptual subject, within the individual person. It is a judgement the person carries out. — Metaphysician Undercover

Although I obviously don’t think this relation itself is “within the individual person,” it’s true that Adorno is interested, in the introduction, in intellectual experience, so the precise way that the philosophical subject relates to the object is the main focus at this stage. So I think we probably agree on at least this: that he wants to see subjective qualitative judgement make a comeback.

Good summaries! — Moliere

Thanks :smile:

But, then, I also may just be thinking that because it gets along with my own notions, and Adorno really does think that philosophy is superior in the sense that the qualitative distinction is what "grounds" the quantitative method -- being able to differentiate what something is from what it is not is the basis of being able to count and individuate, i.e. think quantitatively. — Moliere

Yeah, but in his utopian mode I think he would say not that philosophy is superior, but that all thinking, scientific-empirical and otherwise, stands to benefit from this wider kind of reason that doesn't leave qualities behind. Like I was saying recently, he doesn't think that philosophy and empirical science are separate domains.

But given the state of things, a kind of philosophical elitism might be apparent. He really tries to persuade us that it's not that (which is kind of funny considering that many of the people who knew him and worked with him said he was a genius).

So, yes to this:

a generic defense of philosophical thinking in a scientistic society — Moliere

Introduction: QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED (i)

The quantifying tendency corresponded on the subjective side to the reduction of that which was cognized to something universal, devoid of qualities, to that which was purely logical. Qualities would no doubt first be truly free in an objective condition which was no longer limited to quantification and which no longer drilled quantification into those forced to intellectually adapt to such. But this is not the timeless essence which mathematics, its instrument, makes it appear as. Just like its claim to exclusivity, it became transient. The qualitative subject awaits the potential of its qualities in the thing, not its transcendental residue, although the subject is strengthened solely thereto by means of restrictions based on the division of labor.

The bolded "this" must, I think, refer back to the "quantifying tendency". It and its claim to be the only valid form of reason are transient: the exclusively mathematized image of nature is not nature's timeless essence but is rather a historical artifact, as is the arrogant claim that there is no other valid form of reason.

The "qualitative subject," i.e., the subject that thinks qualitatively, is receptive to the qualities of a particular thing. It "awaits" the thing's qualitative potential rather than pre-emptively imposing itself by means of its categories and metrics. And it is the concrete thing it is interested in, not a pure transencendental abstraction.

But this is a puzzler:

although the subject is strengthened solely thereto by means of restrictions based on the division of labor.

Another dialectical twist. Does it mean that only in our alienated modern society in which everyone must be an exclusive specialist of some sort could there be people, like Adorno and his peers, capable of focusing intently and deeply on the qualities of things? If so, this is a natural follow-on from the "Privilege" section.

The dialectical point would be that bureaucratic capitalism, the very thing that has created the problem of scientism (of reason as measurement and instrumental rationality) has also created the social capacity for its solution, in the shape of the division of labour.

The more meanwhile its own reactions are denounced as presumably merely subjective, the more the qualitative determinations in things escape cognition.

In reference to the qualitative subject, i.e., the philosopher making qualitative determinations, he says that "its own reactions are denounced as presumably merely subjective". Those who believe that mathematical science has uncovered the eternal essences of nature are inclined to regard the identification of qualities as merely subjective, as a matter of opinion and of the individual's finitude, its particular and eccentric perceptions and ideas etc. Reason in its supposedly highest, most objective form is meant to get beyond such diverse perspectives, which owe too much to the constitution of the individual and too little to the eternal and essential realm of objective reality.

But maybe this is not the most commonly held attitude in science, being found mainly among cosmologists, physicists, and mathematicians, so we might ask: is this just Adorno's straw man? Well, I don't think so; it's just that I've described it too narrowly, on the basis of his "timeless essence" from the first paragraph. There's a more general attitude that wants to label all qualitative determinations—including those used in the criticism of artworks, the analysis of historical periods, and psychological case studies, to name a few—as "merely subjective". This is so widespread among educated people that I hardly need to argue for its existence; we see it on TPF every other day. So Adorno's target is not so much the explicit Platonism of mathematicians as just the idea that if it can't be measured, it isn't real.

And the more that this idea holds sway, the more that the qualities of things will be missed—and, it's tempting to add, the more stupid we will become.

The ideal of the distinction [Differenzierten] and the nuanced, which cognition never completely forgot down to the latest developments in spite of all “science is measurement” [in English], does not solely refer to an individual capacity, which objectivity can dispense with. It receives its impulse from the thing. Distinction means, that someone is capable of discerning in this and in its concept even that which is smallest and which escapes the concept; solely distinction encompasses the smallest. In its postulate, that of the capability to experience the object – and distinction is the subjective reaction-form of this become experience – the mimetic moment of cognition finds refuge, that of the elective affinity of the cognizer and that which is to be cognized. In the entire process of the Enlightenment this moment gradually crumbled. But it does not completely remove it, lest it annul itself. Even in the concept of rational cognition, devoid of all affinity, the grasping for this concordance lives on, which was once kept free of doubt by the magical illusion. Were this moment wholly extirpated, the possibility of the subject cognizing the object would be utterly incomprehensible, the jettisoned rationality thereby irrational. The mimetic moment for its part however blends in with the rational in the course of its secularization. This process summarizes itself in the distinction. It contains the mimetic capability of reaction in itself as well as the logical organ for the relationship of genus, species and differentia specifica [Latin: specific difference]. Therein the capability of distinction retains as much contingency as every undiminished individuality does in regards to the universal one of its reason.

Distinction, characteristic of qualitative judgement, "receives its impulse from the thing". It is executed by the subject, but it doesn't have its source in the subject. In other words, qualitative determination is not merely private and idiosyncratic; it is a mimetic response to the qualities themselves and is the only thing that can see through the crude concepts that trample all over them, to the thing itself in its non-identity. This qualitative determination, distinction in particular, is where mimesis still operates, in the guise of "elective affinity": a resonance between subject and object, a non-coercive cognitive engagement.

Crucially, we must take care not to interpret Adorno as recommending feelings or intuitions over reason like Bergson, as if the mimetic capacity is the alternative to reason. Reason as it ought to be holds them together: (1) the "logical organ" of distinction, and (2) distinction's mimetic adaptation to the thing's own distinctions. These combine in an expansive non-instrumental reason.

And yet, even though this is the better kind of reason, because it is open to qualities, we should not think of it as thereby elevated to a status above that of the fallible, contingent individual. Rather, we have to adjust our expectations and see that the better kind of reason, and the better kind of knowledge, is contingent and worldly.

Anyway this bickering is not productive, and I'm participating here to read and discuss the text, not to have you lecture me on "exactly what Adorno is against". I had enough of that kind of thing in school. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nae bother pal. :cool:

Well, I've really tried to be clear but the more I say, the less of my view you seem to understand. I have not said and would not say that concepts are immediate. So, much as I'd like to compromise, I can't do so if you don't know what it is I'm saying.

I don't think we could call it "philosophy" if the interest is something external to the subject. Wouldn't this bring us into the field of empirical sciences. — Metaphysician Undercover

Ah, why didn't you say so! The answer is no. This notion of philosophy is exactly what Adorno is against. Never forget that for Adorno, the need to let suffering speak is the condition of all truth. The suffering of the victims of genocide is an utterly external, material reality. To claim that philosophy should only be interested in our concepts of that suffering, and not in the way the reality of that suffering shatters our concepts, is to make philosophy ethically monstrous. This is Adorno's deep motivation.

He isn't turning philosophy into an empirical science. He's arguing that a philosophy which only looks inward at its own concepts becomes a pointless academic game, blind to the real-world suffering and domination that its own thought-structures help to enable.

So his interest is indeed in "external" things, but particularly insofar as our concepts falsify them or break down under their pressure. So if we want to compromise, maybe here is where we can do it: Adorno's philosophy is about the relation between concepts and things, where concepts are subjective and things are "external to the subject". If we can agree on that then we've made progress.

But as it happens, Adorno rejected the philosophy vs. empirical science dichotomy. And he not only expressed that rejection but actively practiced the fusion of the two. In fact that was the foundational aim and modus operandi of the Institute for Social Research (the Frankfurt School).

@Metaphysician Undercover It occurs to me that you are thinking of Adorno's non-conceptual along the lines of Kant's manifold or Bergson's (naturally non-conceptual) intuition. I think this is because from the outset you are looking for the non-conceptual within consciousness. But Adorno doesn't have much time for that kind of non-conceptual, at least not on its own:

Bergson as well as Husserl, the standard-bearers of philosophical modernity, innervated this, but shrank away from it back into traditional metaphysics. Bergson created, by fiat, a different type of cognition for the sake of the non-conceptual. The dialectical salt was washed away in the undifferentiated flow of life; that which was materially solidified was dismissed as subaltern, instead of being understood along with its subalternity. Hatred of the rigid general concept produced a cult of irrational immediacy, of sovereign freedom amidst unfreedom. — Adorno, ND, Interest of Philosophy

Intuitions succeed, however, only desultorily. Every cognition, even Bergson’s own, requires the rationality which he so despised

Going back to the Solidified section...

For consciousness is at the same time the universal mediation and cannot leap, even in the données immédiate [French: given facts] which are its own, over its shadow. They are not the truth.

The non-conceptual is what philosophy aims for, as Adorno has explicitly stated. This is because it is the site of truth. And here he says that they, the given facts (by which he means the immediate, since he is contrasting it with "universal mediation"), "are not the truth". Therefore the non-conceptual is not the immediate.

Generally speaking, the idea that the very thing Adorno is interested in is something internal to the subject is the opposite of Adorno's meaning, to put it very mildly.

And this, that which extends beyond the concept, the nonconceptual, indeterminate, is shown to be what is immediate to the subject. — Metaphysician Undercover

But where? I don't see the evidence in those quotations.

Note what I said before about that section:

Here in the "Solidified" section, he makes the point that generally speaking what is given in immediacy and unrelfected-upon is not a good candidate for a fixed point, because these things are mediated in ways that are non-obvious. Immanent critique begins in concrete material reality, but it doesn't take it for what it appears to be; it must analyze the ways in which the concrete givens are mediated socially, historically, and via their "affinities". In other words, the material (the social) is indeed some kind of ground or fixed point, but it is not an unquestionable foundation.

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

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

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

The last point there sort of aligns with your current opinion, but I'm not sure I believe it any more.

Introduction: Qualitative Moment of Rationality

To yield to the object is so much as to do justice to its qualitative moments. The scientivistic objectification tends, in unity with the quantifying tendency of all science since Descartes, to flatten out qualities, to transform them into measurable determinations. Rationality itself is to an increasing extent equated more mathematico [Latin: in mathematical terms] with the capability of quantification. As much as this took into account the primacy of the triumphant natural sciences, so little does it lie in the concept of the ratio in itself.

Here he contrasts actually existing rationality with ratio, or "ratio in itself". The latter is reason or rationality in its widest or most originary sense, embracing both its meaning in classical Greek philosophy and also its even more expansive potential. It is reason before it was hijacked by quantification, i.e., before the Scientific Revolution made mathematics the paradigm of rational thought—or else it is reason as it could have been and could be. The important point about this is that quantification is not essential to reason: it does not "lie in the concept of ratio is itself."

It [quantification] is blinded not the least because it blocks itself off from qualitative moments as something which is for its part to be rationally thought. Ratio is not a mere sunâgôgê [Greek: gathering, assembly], the ascent from disparate phenomena [Erscheinungen] to the concept of its species. It demands just as much the capacity of distinction. Without it the synthetic function of thinking, abstractive unification, would not be possible: to aggregate what is the same means necessarily to separate it from what is different. This however is the qualitative; the thought which does not think this, is already cut off and at odds with itself.

The "qualitative moment" is indispensible to reason, so a reason centred on measurement, which forgets the importance of qualitative variation, goes wrong. Reason as such is not just about abstracting categories from phenomena. If it were, quantification would be an appropriate kind of rationality, because both categorization and quantification involve abstracting away from the particulars—to a general class or to a number, respectively.

The other side of synthesis—the synthesis required for the categorization of multiple phenomena under a single category—is the act of making distinctions, and this fundamentally qualitative. Felix and Tom are both cats, but Rover over there is not a cat.

Now, quantification may come along and claim that distinctions can be reduced to different measurements, but in doing so it is unknowingly parasitic on qualitative distinction.

Plato, the first to inaugurate mathematics as a methodological model, still gave powerful expression to the qualitative moment of the ratio at the beginning of the European philosophy of reason, by endowing sunâgôgê [Greek: gathering, assembly] next to diairesis [Greek: a dividing] with equal rights. They follow the commandment, that consciousness ought, in keeping with the Socratic and Sophistic separation of physei [Greek: by nature] and thesei [Greek: thesis], snuggle up to the nature of things, instead of proceeding with them arbitrarily. The qualitative distinction is thereby not only absorbed by the Platonic dialectic, into its doctrine of thinking, but interpreted as a corrective to the violence of quantification run amok. A parable from the Phaedros is unambiguous on this score. In it, the thought which arranges and nonviolence are balanced. One should, so runs the argument, in the reversal of the conceptual movement of the synthesis, “have the capacity, to divide into species corresponding to its nature, to carry out the cut according to the joints, and not attempt, after the manner of a bad cook, to shatter every member”.

This is a satisfying and rather counter-intuitive interpretation of Plato, not as the progenitor of a top-down rationalism contemptuous of particulars, but as a philosopher concerned with doing justice to "the nature of things".

The physei/thesei distinction in Plato seems to be primarily about language, but Adorno is using it in a wider sense to connote modes of reason.

Thesei (by convention): a mode of reason that imposes its theses on things
Physei (by nature): a mode of reason which is open to that which is objective and other than thought (this is where the snuggling comes in)

Adorno claims that Plato is careful not to bypass or dismiss the physei, because he keeps the two in balance. One must divide up nature, but not however one likes, i.e., not the way necessitated by the system one happens to be committed to already (i.e., "arbitrarily"), but rather follow the joints ("snuggle up to the nature of things").

That qualitative moment is preserved as a substrate of what is quantified in all quantification, which as Plato cautions should not be smashed to pieces, lest the ratio, by damaging the object which it was supposed to obtain, recoil into unreason. In the second reflection, the rational operation accompanies the quality as the moment of the antidote, as it were, which the limited first reflection of science withheld from philosophy, as suborned to this latter as it is estranged from it. There is no quantifiable insight which does not first receive its meaning, its terminus ad quem [Latin: end-point], in the retranslation into the qualitative. Even the cognitive goal of statistics is qualitative, quantification solely the means. The absolutization of the quantifying tendency of the ratio tallies with its lack of self-consciousness.

The first sentence demonstrates on a micro-scale the same argument as found in Dialectic of Enlightenment, where it's shown that reason, in its very attempt to lead us out from under the spell of religion and superstition, nevertheless becomes myth again—this is the "recoil into unreason" on a larger scale. Here, the primacy of quantification mirrors this instrumentalization of reason.

The meaning of "first reflection" and "second reflection" seems clear enough now, but it tripped me up at first. The first reflection is science, or the mode of rationality characteristic of science, which does not question or know its presuppositions (including qualitative distinction), and just carries on in the conventional way—which for historical reasons happens to be the way of quantification. The second reflection is the philosophical mode, which is able to bring back the qualitative as an antidote to this quantification. The second reflection examines science's presuppositions and reveals that the qualitative is fundamental to thought and cannot be cast aside without going wrong.

Insistence on the qualitative serves this, rather than conjuring up irrationality. Later Hegel alone showed an awareness of this, without any retrospective-romantic inclinations, at a time to be sure when the supremacy of quantification was not yet so widespread as today. For him, in accordance with the scientific formulation, “the truth of quality [is] itself quantity”. But he cognized it in the System of Philosophy as a “determination indifferent to being, extraneous to it”. It retains its relevance in the quantitative; and the quantum returns back to the quality.

Hegel showed the way. He was not a Romantic irrationalist, harking back to a pure, pre-rational past or appealing to an intuitive engagement with reality. He held quality and quantity together in some kind of balance, or made them interdependent. So the goal is not to destroy quantification but to sublate it along with quality into a more balanced kind of reason.

I am not quite sure, but I think "the truth of quality [is] itself quantity" means that quality implies the possibility of quantification. Quality leads to quantification but the latter does not or should not just surpass and cancel out the former. In fact, "the quantum returns back to the quality" in their sublation, meaning that the measurement, or data point, or maybe unit of measurement, is revealed through this union with quality to be an aspect of that quality, or to be meaningful in a qualitative context.

Ontological anti-realism isn't the view that reality is constituted by the mind. You're thinking of Dummett's anti-realism.

Ontological anti-realists wouldn't try to settle the debate about whether the mind or the body takes precedence. Sometimes it's the kind of skepticism we find in Wittgenstein, which is that we don't have a vantage point from which to rule on the question. In continental philosophy, it's dialectics: that mind and body are thesis and anti-thesis. What's the synthesis? The Absolute, which was once another name for God. The fact that the Absolute inherits shades of divinity contributes to the illusion that it's something static. The only thing we'll ever know about the Absolute is the experience of following the contours of the mind, which is dialectics. It's very cool to be reminded of that. — frank

Yeah, ok :up:

I'm struggling to fit Adorno into my philosophical landscape, and this is another thread to it: Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche all orbit around suffering, primarily with the aim of accepting it as part of life: and not just an unfortunate part, and definitely not a result of capitalism, but rather the primary engine of the psyche. Does this trivialize or denigrate suffering? Actually, I think it does. The philosophy of acceptance needs to be tempered by actually facing it. — frank

Exactly.

Adorno was an ontological anti-realist. He wouldn't take the concept, as you're using the word, and materiality to be anymore than a dichotomy that plays out in one kind of dialectical story. — frank

I disagree. He's not a naive realist, and he's not a realist in any other ordinary way, but I don't think he believes that reality is constituted by the mind. The priority of the object, the insistence that reality precedes and resists the mind (resists concepts and identity-thinking) despite its mediation, point to a realist thrust in Adorno's philosophy. Add to that his commitment to aspects of reality denigrated or ignored by other philosophers: the particular and contingent, and suffering. Suffering and the non-identical are not just "stories," and his anti-idealism gains its passion and commitment from this ethical orientation, namely that suffering has revealed the hubris and falsity of idealism.

But I see where you're coming from: we cannot break out of mediation. But Adorno believes this knowledge of our mediation can reveal mediation's crimes and misdemeanors.

The nonconceptual has been shown to be the immediate. — Metaphysician Undercover

For Adorno, this is very much not the case. Can you remember which passages made you so convinced of this?

I have not found any reason yet to think that Adorno thinks of identity thinking as good. — Metaphysician Undercover

Of course not, I wouldn't make that claim.

really think that it is this tendency of yours, to categorize the nonconceptual as some form of external object, or the thing in itself, which misleads you. We have no need or warrant to look at external things, because they are completely ineffective in the realm of concepts. That is because the intuitions lie between, as the medium. And the intuitions are nonconceptual. So we have our conceptual and nonconceptual right here, without looking toward the thing in itself. — Metaphysician Undercover

I get it straight from the text.