I don't know anything about negative theology but yeah, it looks like it. As I understand it, how close negative dialectics is to negative theology—to what extent it's more than an analogy—would depend on how ineffable the non-identical is meant to be. Adorno appears to say it is and also is not ineffable, which is a reflection of philosophy's essentially paradoxical nature.

Introduction: The Antagonistic Whole (continued)

Sooner than I thought.

Despite the idealist tendencies of dialectics, the contradictory system does not in fact equate to Spirit:

The system is not that of the absolute Spirit, but of the most conditioned of those who have it at their disposal, and cannot even know how much it is their own.

Society is a system of human beings whose roles, behaviour, and thoughts are to a great extent determined by forces that seem out of their control but which are actually entirely made up of them, i.e., capitalism looms over and dominates the individuals who constitute it.

Or perhaps it's not just capitalism that does this, but all societies, and history in general? As Marx wrote:

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. — Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The subjective pre-formation of the material social production-process, entirely separate from its theoretical constitution, is that which is unresolved, irreconcilable to subjects.

The societal system, particularly the capitalist mode of production, which is pre-formed ("given and transmitted from the past") by people, that is, subjectively---this man-made thing is unreconciled with man, so to speak. In other words, there is an antagonism between what people have unconsciously produced and the people themselves. Society confronts the individual as something alien, hostile, and obscure.

Their own reason which produces identity through exchange, as unconsciously as the transcendental subject, remains incommensurable to the subjects which it reduces to the same common denominator: the subject as the enemy of the subject.

The reduction of things to fungibility, an achievement of human reason, acts unconsciously as if it's the result of transcendental conditions, as if subjectivity is conditioned somewhat in the Kantian manner, by the transcendental ego. This rationality, when applied back to the people who produce and maintain it, does not match up with lived individuality, which means that subject (as reproducer of the reductive rationality of the system) is the enemy of subject (as human being). A secondary meaning of this might be that some people become enemies of others, according to class, race, etc.

The preceding generality is true so much as untrue: true, because it forms that “ether”, which Hegel called the Spirit; untrue, because its reason is nothing of the sort, its generality the product of particular interests.

What does "the preceding generality" refer to? Is it the idea that Spirit = contradiction? The idealist thesis that the whole is the true? That the real is subjectively constituted?

I now think "preceding" means preceding in history, not preceding in this text, and that the generality is the achievement of human reason just discussed, that which is "given and transmitted from the past," specifically the instrumental reason that reduces things to units of exchange.

This instrumental reason is true in that it does actually maintain and reproduce the society that determines subjectivity, but it is false in that its reason is not universal: it claims to be the most general basis for society (as expressed in liberalism, for example) but merely expresses the particular interests of those with power.

That is why the philosophical critique of identity steps beyond philosophy. That it requires, nonetheless, what is not subsumed under identity – in Marxian terminology, use-value – so that life can continue to exist even under the ruling relations of production, is what is ineffable in utopia. It reaches deep into that which secretly forswears its realization. In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition. A true one would be emancipated from it, as little system as contradiction.

Adorno is even more utopian here than previously, and also explicitly equates the concept of the non-identical with the Marxist category of use-value, that which is reduced to exchange-value in a commodity economy.

Negative dialectics, in embracing the particular, goes beyond philosophy into empirical reality---so I suppose this means it has to inform or include sociology.

In our negatively utopian conception of the good life, use-value, or the non-identical, is that which cannot be fully captured in concepts, i.e., is ineffable. Our utopia cannot be positively set out.

Furthermore, a true condition, that of utopia, would no longer need dialectics.

Introduction: The Antagonistic Whole

This section takes its cue from the previous sentence:

The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.

Within this concept of negative dialectics there is a tension:

Such a concept of dialectics casts doubt on its possibility.

This first paragraph begins by conceding that negative dialectics, as a form of dialectics, looks quite idealist; but then emphasizes that it's a materialist philosophy. On the one hand, negative dialectics implies the thesis of idealism; on the other hand ("Against this"), the object of negative dialectics is the real beyond the subject, i.e., society or the antagonistic whole.

In more detail...

The anticipation of universal movement in contradictions seems, however varied, to teach the totality of the Spirit, precisely the identity-thesis just nullified.

The treatment of contradiction as the key to reality in negative dialectics looks a lot like an idealist imposition of a universal structure belonging to Spirit. This is because such a universal structure is a totalizing concept, exactly what ND is trying to avoid.

The Spirit, which would unceasingly reflect on the contradiction in things, ought to be this itself, if it is to be organized according to the form of the contradiction.

The phrase "this itself" refers to "the contradiction in things," so the sentence is saying that Spirit must itself be the contradiction in things if it is to be organized according to the form of the contradiction, as dialectics demands. In other words, if Spirit is to truthfully reflect the contradiction in things then it must itself be---must embody or partake of---contradiction, because otherwise it would be external to what it's interested in; it would be a spectator rather than something dialectically intertwined. But this collapse of the separation of Spirit and the world of course represents a regression into idealism, since it makes the object of Spirit's thought identical with Spirit.

If this isn't entirely convincing, it's best to see Adorno as alerting us to a tendency in dialectical philosophy.

The truth, which in the idealistic dialectic drives past every particularity as something false in its one-sidedness, would be that of the whole; if it were not already thought out, then the dialectical steps would lose their motivation and direction.

This follows logically to show that if the separation of Spirit and the contradictory world collapses, then the truth of the whole is presupposed and the entire thing is circular. Idealist dialectics knows what it's looking for when it begins. The better thing, perhaps, would be not to drive past every particularity, not to presuppose the truth only of the whole.

But the point here is to show how easily dialectics of any kind can regress back to idealism, or, better put, to show how essential an idealist element is even to materialist dialectics.

Next, Adorno shows how negative dialectics is to be rescued from its idealist temptations:

Against this one must counter that the object of intellectual experience would itself be the antagonistic system, something utterly real, and not just by virtue of its mediation to the cognizing subject which rediscovers itself therein. The compulsory constitution of reality which idealism projected into the regions of the subject and Spirit is to be retranslated back out of these.

This seems like just a flat denial of the idealism, saying no: although there seems to be an idealist tendency, in fact the object of this philosophy is the reality beyond the subject. Antagonistic society is real not merely by virtue of the subject's reciprocal relation (mediation) to it. The subjective constitution of reality must be retranslated as belonging to reality itself, which in effect means that contradiction belongs not only to the subject but to the object, i.e., the real world, or society.

We can see why it is so centrally important for Adorno to say that contradictions are real, or objective (in the object, not only the subject): it maintains the importance of dialectics, but in a realist, or materialist, context.

But idealism is not thereby expunged entirely:

What remains of idealism is that society, the objective determinant of the Spirit, is just as much the epitome of subjects as their negation.

Although we have, in something like the Marxian materialist fashion, downgraded Spirit to something determined by objective society, by the mode of production and so on---despite this, society remains a realm of subjects. Thus society has a subjective flavour and this materialism is thereby also somewhat idealist.

But the crucial step is to contrast this perhaps utopian conception of society as a realm of subjectivity with the reality, in which subjects are negated.

In it they are unknowable and disempowered; that is why it is so desperately objective and a concept, which idealism mistakes as something positive.

In real society, subjects are unknowable to themselves and others---because they are alienated from their work, their fellow members of society, and themselves, by the dictates of commodity exchange (including the labour market) and by the distortions of ideology---and they are also disempowered because society acts upon them economically and institutionally without their say-so, rather than being a collective expression of their subjectivity, or a domain in which individual expression and self-actualization might happen.

That's just the first paragraph. I'll try to cover the second one soonish. I've had to slow down because life has been getting in the way.

That works for me :up:

like I did with Jamal the other day, and unwittingly confused him. — Pussycat

Easily done.

Introduction: Interest of Philosophy

We covered a lot of this when we looked at lecture 7. The five paragraphs go something like this:

1. The proper interest of philosophy now is the particular, that which has traditionally been denigrated as contingent and imperfect.

What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.

What the philosophical concept desperately requires is to somehow apply to what it necessarily eliminates.

2. Bergson and Husserl set about this task but failed, the former with dualism and a cult of immediacy, the latter with a system that didn't transcend the concepts he was trying to transcend.

3. Bergson's mistake was to fail to see that all cognition of concrete particulars is conceptual—it requires mediation by concepts and intellectual reflection.

4. Husserl's essences were indistinguishable from the general concepts he rejected, and his intuition of essences ended up as pretty much equivalent to the abstract generalization he aimed to replace. Against both Bergson and Husserl, the task of philosophy is to say what cannot be said.

The former as well as the latter remained frozen in the demesne of subjective immanence. What is to be insisted on against both is what each tries to conjure up in vain; pace Wittgenstein, to say what cannot be said.

Bergson and Husserl remained trapped in the purely subjective, unable to break out and reach what they had set out to reach.

5. The fundamental paradox or contradiction of philosophy: philosophy works with concepts, and yet its proper domain is the non-conceptual. In other words, philosophy must attempt to say what cannot be said.

The way I think about it, there's a more general paradox lying beneath this (or is it just a different way of putting the same one?): philosophy has to find truth in the concrete and particular, but by its very nature philosophy is the most abstract and general of all intellectual disciplines. We see that Adorno is like Nietzsche in insisting on the primacy of life, of lived experience, against the philosophers from Plato to Hegel who regard contingent life as a pale imitation of truth, subordinating it to their abstract systems.

According to Adorno the first step is to see that dialectics is the way to go:

The simple contradiction of this demand is that of philosophy itself: it qualifies the latter as dialectics, before it embroils itself in its specific contradictions.

Philosophy as dialectics is a recognition at the outset that philosophy itself is contradictory, even before it gets involved with the everyday contradictions which are its bread and butter.

The work of philosophical self-reflection consists of working out this paradox. Everything else is signification, post-construction, today as in Hegel’s time pre-philosophical.

With the terms "signification" and "post-construction" Adorno is referring to Bergson, Husserl, and probably every other philosophy except negative dialectics. I take "signification" to mean something like the gesture towards truth using names, without really grasping the things named; and "post-construction" could be a description of how idealism operates, by constructing systems after one has decided how it all works.

A faith, as always subject to question, that philosophy would still be possible; that the concept could leapfrog the concept, the preparatory stages and the final touches, and thereby reach the non-conceptual, is indispensable to philosophy and therein lies something of the naivete, which ails it.

Attempted breakouts like those of Bergson and Husserl had the right motivation, because philosophy is nothing without it—but this motivation is based on a faith which is in a sense essentially naive.

He ends with his "utopia of cognition":

Whatever of the truth can be gleaned through concepts beyond their abstract circumference, can have no other staging-grounds than that which is suppressed, disparaged and thrown away by concepts. The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.

I think it's important to note that Adorno's cognitive utopia remains conceptual, i.e., it is not mystical or intuitive.

QUESTION: This description of philosophy as essentially paradoxical can look rather too irrationalist. Would it be a misrepresentation of Adorno to just say that philosophy seems paradoxical, but there might be a way to do it? I know he wants us to keep contradictions open, but this one to me is a bit on-the-nose.

Something I found interesting in the translator's introduction was that "Bann" can also be translated as "Spell", but the translator chose "bane" because it doesn't have magical connotations like "spell" does. But to say someone is under a spell could also be to say that identity-thinking has a way of becoming so coherent that the difference right before our eyes isn't being seen because we've started keeping track of the concept "reality" rather than what is real. — Moliere

Very nice. It reminds me of what I was saying about magical thinking a couple of years ago.

A bit behind but catching up. — Moliere

Cool. I might be slowing down over the next week or two.

This is why I brought up the phrase "the identity of identity and non-identity". But to be clear, it is Hegel whom Adorno accuses of giving identity to non-identity, in that way, which I claim puts contradiction into the object. This is the means by which Hegel enables substantive thinking: " the determinate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit". The problem being what is indicated by Adorno at the beginning of the section, that the law of non-contradiction applies to objects, not to subjective thought (here as Spirit, which is in essence free). So when the determinate particular is nothing other than a determination of the free Spirit, this effectively avoids that law, allowing contradiction within the determinate particular, as the identity of non-identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, that makes more sense.

Adorno I believe is rejecting Hegelian dialectics, recognizing what is described of Hegel at the end of the section as a mistake. Adorno is looking for a way to give primacy to the object rather than to the subject, but this would be a restriction to Spirit. Primacy of the subject is what I claim leads to contradiction within the object. So for Adorno, the non-identical is not a positively applied category (as you say, and I agree), as it is for Hegel. And, I think he is attempting to avoid any conceptualization of "non-identical", because conceptualization will inevitably be contradictory, as was the case when Aristotle tried to conceptualize "potential", and "matter". Nevertheless, it must be at the base of substantive thinking, as what enables it, the foundation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep, although when it comes to the concrete particulars I think it's important to bear in mind that distinction I made between good and bad identity-thinking, and the fact that Adorno's mission is not to reject conceptualization but to reject a kind of conceptualization that is unaware of its tendency to distort and lead to contradiction.

Here I have to disagree, I know of a few stalinists that certainly don't think that their attempt is futile! :) And also I doubt that Hegel thought that philosophy was futile, quite the opposite. — Pussycat

Yeah fair enough. I never did get to the bottom of that comment of his about futility.

What you say about Hegel's restriction makes sense too.

I'll try to explain to you why I see it that way.
[...]
That's why I said Hegelian dialectics projects contradiction into the object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Thanks. I'm not persuaded but I'm not going to dig any further.

I find your next post a bit closer to my wavelength:

However, this dialectical approach is actually based in an act of categorizing them, as non-identical. So there is an illusion created, that those differences which are impossible to categorize, have actually been categorized. But the category is really 'the contradictory', as the non-identical which have been given that contradictory identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Very meta. I don't know what to say about it, except that I don't think the non-identical is a positively applied category so much as a limit concept, a negative name (a bit like noumena in kant).

I do rather like the following, which seems very dialectical:

So I generally agree with this, but I maybe wouldn't say it is a matter of hiding the non-identical. It's maybe even the opposite to that, as allowing the non-identical (as contradictory) right into the mind as if it has an identity. It hides it by making it so obvious that it's just ignored. — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet, there is more to the history of a concept than etymology.

Yes, I agree.

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

I may return to these fascinating issues later.

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

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

But sure, point taken.

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

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

Does this fit with your interpretation at all?

What do you think? — Pussycat

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disagreement doesn’t disprove objectivity; it presupposes it.

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

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

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

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

:up:

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

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

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

A good novel often has the following:

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

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

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

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

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

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

So even the eternal Tao is not the eternal Tao.

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

I explained what happened in the Shoutbox.

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

The whole story:

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

:up:

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

Nicely put.

Is the Feedback category accessible without signing in? — Amity

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

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

I explained what happened in the Shoutbox.

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

The whole story:

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

Introduction: Reality and Dialectics

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

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

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

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

The next paragraph develops this idea:

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

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

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

The last line of the paragraph is nice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

Trouble is it opens in a new browser tab.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good questions. The idea of constellations will be important.

Your post strikes me as perspicacious.