Introduction: Argument and Experience (iii)

I like this:

There is no lack of related intentions throughout history. The French Enlightenment was endowed by its highest concept, that of reason, with something systematic under the formal aspect; however the constitutive entanglement of its idea of reason with that of an objectively reasonable arrangement of society deprives the system of the pathos, which it only regained when reason renounced the idea of its realization and absolutized itself into the Spirit. Thinking akin to the encyclopedia, as something rationally organized and nevertheless discontinuous, unsystematic and spontaneous, expressed the self-critical Spirit of reason. It represented what was erased from philosophy, as much through its increasing distance from praxis as through its incorporation into the academic bustle: worldly experience, that eye for reality, whose moment is also that of thought.

I was initially surprised by this, because precisely the kind of arbitrary list of facts you find in an encyclopedia is what I would have expected him to point to as evidence of the failure of Enlightenment reason. But on second thought, it makes perfect sense. The encyclopedia is rationally organized but its entries are not forced to fit a conceptual scheme of any kind, as they are in philosophical systems. There is an in-built priority of the object in an encyclopedia, and the non-identical, what is unique and irreducible in things, is able to show itself. The encyclopedia is a model of Adorno's dialectical tightrope between systematicity and a fragmented approach to particulars.

The freedom of the Spirit is nothing else. Thought can no more do without the element of the homme de lettres [French: person of education] which the petit bourgeois scientific ethos maligns, than without what the scientific philosophies misuse, the meditative drawing-together, the argument, which earned so much skepticism. Whenever philosophy was truly substantial, both moments appeared together. From a distance, dialectics could be characterized as the effort raised to self-consciousness of letting itself be permeated by such. Otherwise the specialized argument degenerates into the technics of non-conceptual experts in the midst of the concept, just as nowadays so-called analytic philosophy, memorizable and copyable by robots, is disseminated academically.

What is immanently argumentative is legitimate where it registers the integrated reality become system, in order to oppose it with its own strength. What is on the other hand free in thought represents the authority which is already aware of what is emphatically untrue of that context. Without this knowledge it would not have come to the breakout, without the appropriation of the power of the system it would have failed. That both moments do not seamlessly meld into one another is due to the real power of the system, which includes that which also potentially surpasses it.

This is a different angle on the dialectical interplay expressed above. The man of letters is the essayist who writes about anything that attracts his curiosity, with more cultural commentary and impressionistic insight than formal treatises or rigorous argument---and from a standpoint of wide learning rather than specialist training. But judged by the technical specialist, or the analytic philosopher, who has been trained above all in rigour, this man of letters is a dilettante and an amateur.

Adorno says philosophy needs both. The way I would put it is that it needs both the active engagement or love of the amateur (an amateur is etymologically a lover, someone who pursues an activity for the love of it) and also the rigour of argument under the compulsion of logic. Without the former, thought degenerates into scientism and analytic philosophy (unfair but we know what he means), lacking self-awareness and insight, specifically the insight into what is wrong with whatever logical system is being used. And without the latter ... well, he doesn't really say. Maybe it's obvious. Maybe it's similar to what he said about play and the irrational: too much and you just get ineffectual gestures. I'm tempted to think of the person of letters' engaged insights as primary motivation, and the argument of the logician as the force that carries this through (although this is no doubt too linear a picture for Adorno).

However the untruth of the context of immanence discloses itself in the overwhelming experience that the world, which is as systematically organized as if it were truly that realized reason Hegel so glorified, simultaneously perpetuates the powerlessness of the Spirit, apparently so all-powerful, in its old unreason. The immanent critique of idealism defends idealism, to the extent it shows how far it is defrauded by itself; how much that which is first, which is according to such always the Spirit, stands in complicity with the blind primacy of the merely existent [Seiendes]. The doctrine of the absolute Spirit immediately promotes this latter.

Here he pivots to experience. I'll use the alternative translation to make sense of it, since Redmond seems to have produced an ungrammatical sentence. Here is the Thorne and Menda version:

The untruth of the context disclosed by immanence, however, is also revealed to one’s overwhelming experience of a world that has organized itself so systematically that it might as well be rationality made real, Hegel’s very glory, even as that world, in its irrationality, perpetuates the powerlessness of the omnipotent-seeming mind. — Argument and Experience

He is saying that what is revealed by immanent critique, i.e., the system's untruth, is also revealed by one's overwhelming experience of the world. This is a critique of Hegel's system and idealist systems in general but I'm more interested in this idea of experience. Let's see where he takes it (back in the Redmond translation):

The scientific consensus would probably concede that even experience would imply theory. It is however a “standpoint”, at best hypothetical. Conciliatory representatives of scientivism demand what they call proper or clean science, which is supposed to account for these sorts of presuppositions. Exactly this demand is incompatible with intellectual experience. If a standpoint is demanded of the latter, then it would be that of the diner to the roast. It lives by ingesting such; only when the latter disappears into the former, would there be philosophy. Until this point theory embodies that discipline in intellectual experience which already embarrassed Goethe in relation to Kant. If experience relied solely on its dynamic and good fortune, there would be no stopping.

Ideology lurks in the Spirit which, dazzled with itself like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, irresistibly becomes well-nigh absolute. Theory prevents this. It corrects the naiveté of its self-confidence, without forcing it to sacrifice the spontaneity which theory for its part wishes to get at. By no means does the difference between the so-called subjective share of intellectual experience and its object vanish; the necessary and painful exertion of the cognizing subject testifies to it. In the unreconciled condition, non-identity is experienced as that which is negative. The subject shrinks away from this, back onto itself and the fullness of its modes of reaction. Only critical self-reflection protects it from the limitations of its fullness and from building a wall [Wand: interior wall] between itself and the object, indeed from presupposing its being-for-itself as the in-itself and for-itself. The less the identity between the subject and object can be ascertained, the more contradictory what is presumed to cognize such, the unfettered strength and open-minded self-consciousness. Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such. The ability to move is essential to consciousness, not an accidental characteristic. It signifies a double procedure: that of the inside out, the immanent process, the authentically dialectical, and a free one, something unfettered which steps out of dialectics, as it were. Neither of them are however disparate. The unregimented thought has an elective affinity to dialectics, which as critique of the system recalls to mind what would be outside of the system; and the energy which dialectical movement in cognition unleashes is that which rebels against the system. Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each other’s critique, not through compromise.

Now I can respond to this:

Experience is what is gained from action, and intellectual experience appears to be sort of like knowledge in general. Theory appears to be something which is prior to intellectual experience, as necessary for action, but also a sort of response to it, as a corrective to the consequent self-confidence.

I would say that we could theoretically distinguish two types of theory, that which is prior to action and intellectual experience, and that which is posterior. But, since it's all a reciprocating process, all theory would in reality consist of both types, as prior to this experience, and posterior to that experience. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this is about right. The scientific consensus can or often does concede that there is no raw pre-conceptual experience, no uninterpreted givens: there is no pre-theoretical level as posited in empiricism. This is in line with Kant and a whole host of thinkers up to Sellars and beyond (and what I was talking about in this post in @Moliere's "What is a painting?" discussion).

So theory accompanies and shapes experience from the start, but perhaps what really makes it intellectual experience is when theory is re-applied, that is, knowingly---what you refer to as "posterior" theory. And yes to your last sentence: I don't think we ought to make too much of the prior/posterior binary.

But Adorno's further point is that the scientific consensus, though it concedes all that, reduces the insight to a mere checkbox to add to the methodology of scientific observation, a feature of the observing consciousness, such that the scientific method can, say, control for bias and neutralize it, and carry on behaving like it's perfectly neutral. Adorno offers a better image of intellectual experience, a transforming rather than a spectating one: the diner to the roast. It's about digging in, not merely observing from a distance. In eating, neither the diner nor the roast remain unchanged.

I find this metaphor a bit awkward, coming so soon after the passage in which he says that idealism is the belly turned mind, a rage against the prey projected into reason.

Well, the way out is to take the metaphors seriously. Adorno must have been aware of the tension. I think this means that there are two different modes of eating here: there is idealism's rage-filled and murderous devourment, in which a living victim is torn to pieces; then there is the relaxed and non-violent experience enjoyed by the diner to the roast. It's the difference between forced assimilation and transformative gustation.

And he says that philosophy only really happens when the object disappears into the thinker. He means that philosophy requires that one fully internalize the experience of the object rather than keeping it at arm's length, a specimen to be studied from afar or from the other end of the microscope. Or rather, this internalization of the object is what intellectual experience, and thus philosophy, actually is.

Then the experience-theory dialectic is brought out once again and at length. It turns out that experience lines up with the "man of letters" and theory lines up with logical rigour, and intellectual experience is that which combines experience and theory. And if what he said above about real philosophy requiring total absorption looked a bit too idealist and tyrranical, we needn't worry, because theory/argument/critique can set us right again and bring us back down to earth.

Although the section doesn't quite finish with this, I think it's the culmination:

Theory and intellectual experience require their reciprocal effect. The former does not contain answers for everything, but reacts to a world which is false to its innermost core. Theory would have no jurisdiction over what would be free of the bane of such.

Whether I was wrong to do so, I interpreted @T Clark to be referring to innate racial differences.

I’m not looking for an argument or even an explanation. I’m just curious. Is expressing the opinion that white people are more intelligent as a class than black people cause for immediate banning? — T Clark

Yes.

He wrote an OP expressing his belief that race and aesthetics are connected: Northern European people are better than others at producing beautiful works of art, and Northern European women have a greater range of facial expressions than sub-Saharan African women and are thus more aesthetically inspiring.

And without stating it explicitly he implied that this greater aesthetic ability of whites was connected with higher IQ.

Then he went on to speculate that the hostility to immigration in Northern Europe is partly attributable to these differences and that whites are responding to an aesthetic degradation caused by the influx of non-white people.

He presented all this dishonestly: bigotry masquerading as innocent intellectual enquiry.

@Eros1982 was banned for racism.

Yeah I've been meaning to say something about intellectual experience. The whole introduction is basically a "Theory of Intellectual Experience," as it's referred to in the appendix to the lectures and as ND was originally going to be called.

I'll reply more fully ... in the near future.

Yes, that's the gist of what I'm trying to get at with the idea of an aesthetic attitude -- looking at an artobject is to look at it as something aside from its presence, and aside from whatever role it may play within our own equipmentality. Something along those lines. — Moliere

Totally. And even though Adorno hated Heidegger, I see a lot of common ground between them (and you) on this score.

I don't know, but I betcha I know what color this building is painted: it's goluboy. This is Catherine's Palace in St. Petersburg. — frank

Right. When I asked Google in Russian what colour it was, the A.I. overview said, "Екатерининский дворец в Санкт-Петербурге имеет бело-голубой цвет фасадов," in which it says the facade is byelo-goluboy which means white and light blue (for want of an equivalent colour term).

Kant's pure intuitions of time and space and pure concepts of understanding (the Categories) are not linguistic. The article is about linguistic discrimination. — RussellA

Why did you say this? Because I quoted Kant on intuition and concepts? Then you have misunderstood.

Otherwise, you're failing to understand ... well, everything really. Have fun!

The article "Russian blues reveal effects of language on colour discrimination" is about how people discriminate colours, not about how people perceive colours. — RussellA

It's explicitly about both.

The article makes sense that categories in language do affect a person's performance, but this is not saying that categories in language affect a person's perceptions. — RussellA

That's explicitly what it's saying.

Goats too.

Heidegger's "Origin of the Work of Art" is very relevant:

In immediate perception, we never really perceive a throng of sensations, e.g. tones and noises. Rather, we hear the storm whistling in the chimney, the three-motored plane, the Mercedes which is immediately different from the Adler. Much closer to us than any sensation are the things themselves. In the house we hear the door slam – never acoustic sensations or mere noises. To hear a bare sound we must listen away from the things, direct our ears from them, listen abstractly.

The point he's leading to is that the perception and appreciation of art are not separate, that art is meaningful all the way down. What the eye does with light of varying wavelengths and intensities is none of our business—unless we're doing physiology or optics.

So the reason I brought up Russian blues was to cast doubt on this statement:

I don't approach seeing colours with any preconceptions — RussellA

We now know that how we conceptualize the spectrum does affect how we see colours. But the underlying point has been standard in philosophy for centuries. Intuitions (as in perceptions) without concepts are blind, as Kant said. All seeing is seeing as (see Sellars and the "Myth of the Given") and all perception is targeted, selective, and organized according to the state of the perceiver and its desires—all of which for humans includes preconceptions.

The idea of a pure, preconceptual and uninterpreted perception is widely rejected in philosophy. RussellA was arguing for a primary, universal innocence in the perception and appreciation of a work of art, based on the idea that colours are perceived in a basic way universally. The example of Russian blues is just one among many that show this to be naive.

Yeah, it didn't look like you were attacking him. I just took the opportunity to say something about agenda-driven philosophy, cos it's interesting.

And...far be it from me to defend @Wayfarer

Very interesting. I'm in danger of going down a rabbit hole now.

There's no doubt in my mind that @Wayfarer is driven fundamentally by an agenda, but I'm in two minds about whether that's a bad thing. On the one hand, it leads one to avoid proper engagement with any philosophy that cannot be weaponized; on the other hand, a completely neutral approach to philosophy is really boring.

Don't feel bad.

What is more remarkable is that this confusion is obstinately repeated ad nauseum, making me wonder what the point or motivation for such idiocy could be. — Janus

The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself.

In Russian it's only blue; the other colours correspond. But of all the colours I suspect the green-blue region is particularly variable across languages.

A result of what I just said is that Russians can distinguish shades of blue more accurately than English speakers, showing that perception is to some degree linguistically relative. See this study: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.0701644104

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference). — Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination

1) Russians don't see light blue and dark blue as shades of the colour blue. I would be surprised if Russians saw colours differently to non-Russians. — RussellA

Yes, Синий and голубой are basic colour terms and are thus seen as basic colours, not as shades of the same colour.

2) Russian speakers have Russian words for "light blue" and "dark blue", and these Russian words don't make any reference to being part of the same colour "blue". But this applies to English also, in that neither ultramarine nor cerulean refer to the colour blue. — RussellA

The difference is that we think of ultramarine and cerulean as shades of blue, since in English that's what they are.

Read this, it's short:

https://thecolorlanguageproject.wordpress.com/2016/07/24/linguistic-facts-about-color/

It blows my mind how people don’t get it, and even refuse to accept it. Surely once in my life I’ll get the appropriate reaction: “oh really, that’s cool” (perhaps followed by, “I wonder if that backs up linguistic relativism”)

I've spoken to many Russians about this and they call blue blue — I like sushi

So have I and they don’t. But your comment is meaningless without more information. The colours denoted by “синий” and “blue” are not the same.

You need to do more research. What is shown there is closer to голубой than to синий. синий in English is “dark blue” or maybe “deep blue”.

The word “blue” has no equivalent in Russian; translations are approximate and misleading. If you actually take on board what I said, which is that Russians (Russian speakers) do not see light blue and dark blue as shades of the same colour, then you will understand why this is the case.

Yes. Doesn't everyone. — RussellA

No. Russians don’t.

Some pairs of hues are closer together than others, but the rest is preconceptions.

I don't approach seeing colours with any preconceptions. — RussellA

Do you see light blue and dark blue as shades of the same colour?

Introduction: Argument and Experience (ii)

The demand for committalness [Verbindlichkeit] without system is that for thought-models. These are not of a merely monadological sort. The model strikes the specific and more than the specific, without dissolving it into its more general master-concept. To think philosophically is so much as to think in models; negative dialectics is an ensemble of model-analyses.

This is the distinction I've mentioned before between examples and models (or "thought-models" as he puts it here). Models are better than examples for negative dialectics because they don't dissolve the object into its general master-concept. But more than just being the better choice (say for illustrative purposes), thinking in models is the constitutive activity of negative dialectics. It's its bread and butter.

Here's an updated list of where to find negative dialectics applied in the form of thought-models:

1. In ND itself, in "Part III: Models". However, these are still at a fairly high level of philosophical abstraction, so they're less useful as—for want of a better phrase—practical applications.

2. In Minima Moralia, a treasure trove of "micrology". Topics include marriage, genocide, tactfulness, technology, femininity, and the shortcomings of the American landscape.

3. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, in which Adorno and Horkheimer make some grand claims that seem very far from micrology.

4. In Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, which consists of articles and lectures intended for a general audience, produced at the height of his fame when he was appearing frequently on radio shows (this was the 50s and 60s, when he was back in Germany). Topics include television, sexual taboos, the concept of progress, and free time.

5. In Aesthetic Theory, the only major work of Adorno's written after ND.

But how exactly do models avoid dissolving the object into its master-concept? Primarily, by avoiding the reduction of the object to a mere instance of a universal. For example, a cynical critic of modern life who hadn't learned the art of negative dialectics might say that watching YouTube videos is a mindless compensation for a life of alienated labour. Thus YouTube is a mere instance of alienated escapism. In a thought-model, on the other hand, the complex tensions and textures of the experience of using YouTube are given their due. We could look at YouTube's strange temporality: the way the endless stream of recommended videos collapses time into a perpetual now, in contrast with watching a movie, which is clearly demarcated between a beginning and an end. Or with the variability of its content—educational, shallow, moving, profound—all delivered through a system designed to maximize attention. The viewer is neither simply brainwashed nor fully autonomous; instead, there's both freedom and compulsion, passive enjoyment and active engagement. A thought-model would draw out these tensions rather than simply condemning YouTube. The viewer is not regarded simply as an alienated and passive consumer of ideology, and their pleasure is not dismissed as false consciousness. Instead, the model recognizes and does not reconcile the dialectical interplay.

Crucially, this is not a softening of critique. The condemnation may still be there, and may actually be much stronger; but it would not be the whole point of the exercise. Critique can be sharper when it reveals the complexities, since that's where society's depths of brokenness are.

But I have to disagree with Adorno's insistence (implied in the lectures) that thought-models are not examples. Plainly speaking, thought-models do in fact serve as examples of negative dialectics. It's just that they do not exist merely for illustrative purposes, merely to help you understand the abstract concept—they're negative dialectics in action, in earnest, and they are not arbitrary, as examples sometimes are.

I see a distinction that I hadn't noticed before. There are two kinds of example (there might be others, but these are the relevant ones). One is what Adorno hates, and the other can accommodate his thought-models (otherwise the complete banishment of examples just seems unreasonable). I can best convey the distinction with ... an example.

A jazz teacher, introducing a student to improvisation, could give two kinds of examples. The teacher has already begun describing the way that the lead instrument improvises a melody using notes from the scales associated with the changing chords, so his first example of improvisation is to play notes from the most basic pentatonic scale for each chord. This is in a sense a good example, in that it illustrates a very basic potential strategy for improvisation, suitable for a beginner. But in another sense it's a really bad example, and barely even jazz, since it's likely to be boring and unoriginal. As a different kind of example he could play a 1959 recording of Ornette Coleman, in which there is no following of chord changes and in which there isn't even a chord-playing instrument in the band. This second example is more than a passive illustration; it is jazz, actively contradicting the rules the teacher has so far taught.

I'll call these living and dead examples. Adorno doesn't like calling his thought-models examples at all, but I think we can, so long as we mean living examples.

Philosophy debases itself into apologetic affirmation the moment it deceives itself and others over the fact that whatever sets its objects into motion must also influence these from outside. What awaits within these, requires a foothold in order to speak, with the perspective that the forces mobilized from outside, and in the end every theory applied to the phenomena, would come to rest in those. To this extent, too, philosophical theory means its own end: through its realization.

Philosophy becomes mere ideology when it acts like objects can be studied in isolation, ignoring external influence. This is to say that you can't prioritize particulars without also taking into account the connections, and "affinities" between them. What awaits within the objects, which I take to be the truth about them, requires the foothold of philosophy in order to be revealed. Thus, external forces and philosophical theory itself all have the object as their goal (in negative dialectics). The last sentence is Adorno's utopianism cropping up again: to complete this task of philosophy would be to do away with philosophy, since thought would be properly reconciled with its objects.

But what is the connection between the former passage, about thought-models, with the latter passage, about philosophy more generally. I think it's that the only way of achieving the latter is by the former. The only way of directing the power of system unsystematically to allow objects to speak is using thought-models, which do not reduce objects to instances and specimens.

This would be a subject requiring much discussion and debate. — Metaphysician Undercover

:scream:

Well, I’m willing to postpone it till we have our final showdown. I will say that “he is clear with his choice” is ambiguous. He is clear that particulars must be prioritized so as to let them speak for themselves without being devoured by dominating concepts, but that doesn't mean he can’t oscillate, and obviously he can’t abandon general concepts anyway, as he admits.

As to whether Adorno would (not only) concur to thinking being one of the greatest pleasures of life, I very much doubt that he would: — Pussycat

Excuse me for butting in. That passage does not to me show what you think it shows. At most it shows he condemns thinking when it's a complacent or dominating pleasure. The “resistance of thinking against the merely existent” can be pleasurable, I would think. Why not? Adorno of course likely thought that good thinking was both pleasurable and painful. And since he speaks with such approval of play in philosophy, I reckon we can be confident that Redmond’s assessment is right.

Anyway, I think it jumps off the page. He’s enjoying himself.

I think this relates directly to what he says about system thinking. The idea of negative dialectics is not to reject systems thinking, but to determine its true form. And this displays how Adorno thinks of criticism. To criticize is not to reject, but a way of bettering the thing being criticized.

There's been some back and forth between you and I in this thread, concerning this issue. First there was the question of whether Adorno accepts or rejects Hegelian principles. Also we had the question of whether what Adorno presents is properly called "dialectics" in the context of Hegelian "dialectics". It's becoming apparent to me, that the process is to neither accept nor reject a given principle, but to criticize it. This leaves synthesis as unnecessary, because acceptance of principles, adoption of belief is not the intended end. The process may or may not enable synthesis, and having synthesis as a goal from the outcome would prejudice the procedure. — Metaphysician Undercover

This looks right to me. :up:

I think that this is the real issue with the idea of the concept going beyond, or overshooting the object. Relations between objects "affinity" is something categorically distinct from objects themselves. So conceptualization which focuses on objects, and representing objects (identity thinking), really cannot grasp this very significant aspect of reality which is the affinity between objects.

The issue appears to be the difference between the relations between concept and object, and the relations between object and object. When the concept overshoots the object it may establish a scientific relation of prediction. Notice though that this relation is a subject/object relation because that overshooting is directed by intention toward producing an extended conception of the object. What Adorno is interested in is the true object/object relation. This must take as its primary assumption, a separation which produces a multitude, rather than the primary assumption of unity which conceptualizes "the object". The difference being that the primary postulate is separation rather than unity. — Metaphysician Undercover

A strong statement of the problem, but I think this bit is wrong: 'Relations between objects "affinity" is something categorically distinct from objects themselves.'

And I think that's probably the key to unlocking the puzzle. Even though Adorno wants to focus on particulars, and in a fragmented way, it doesn't mean he thinks these particulars are themselves fragmented or necessarily lie, isolated, within a fragmented world. In other words, he does not want to treat objects as self-contained or atomistic. Rather, objects are always already mediated, connected to other objects in a web of history and society. And this mediation or connectivity is constitutive of the objects. Objects are nodes in networks. I think Adorno thereby avoids your dualism.

But I think things will become clearer when we begin to get a grip on the idea of constellations (which he took from Walter Benjamin).

Introduction: Idealism as Rage

I'm backtracking here. Reading the following from J. M. Bernstein in the Blackwell Companion to Adorno made me realize that I missed some good stuff in the "Idealism as Rage" section, so I'll have a look at it here.

But first, and incidentally, I think this passage from the Bernstein essay goes some way to accounting for Adorno's form of expression and also justifying the statement that "the need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.":

Even if one were to concede that grasping a concept is grasping its inferential commitments – a version of the doctrine that meaning is use – nothing of the value of those inferences would thereby be captured. Although scientific rationality is ideally affect free, if identity thinking is for the sake of controlling nature and a product of the drive for self‐preservation, then even truth‐only cognition is interested and desiring. Adorno offers a hyperbolic genealogy of idealism in this respect, tracing it back to the animal’s rage at its soon‐to‐be victim [...] The rationalist and idealist systems are rigorous sets of inferential relations among foundational premises and remote conclusions about things – matter is nothing but res extensa or atoms or force fields composed of positive and negative forces – that express the concept of a totality in which thought is set in opposition to each content, evaporating the content in the thought of it. What matters in this is Adorno’s contention that inferential relations always express something more and other than their sheer logicality; truth‐only cognition sublimates desire, fear, and rage into chilling indifference, into a coldness that colors rationalized reason’s approach to every living thing. Adorno’s skepticism about the neutrality of truth‐only cognition explains one of the singular ambitions of Negative Dialectics, namely, to find a mode of argument that could achieve bindingness without system, that is, a form of rigor that could be both rationally and cognitively compelling in a manner that while not crossing the limits of logic, derived its authority from a distinct mode of writing and presentation.

[...]

If the satisfaction of truth‐only cognition is not the normative guide for critique, what is? What is the expressive impulse of negative dialectics? Adorno’s answer is direct and blunt: “The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objec- tivity that weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated” (Adorno 1973, 17–18, 1975, 29). If rationalized reason is indifference, it is above all indifferent to suffering, the most deeply subjective experience a living being can undergo since it is the immediate experience of the negation of particular life; giving voice to suffering is providing the vanquished transient dimensions of human life with the conceptual presentation that modern reason has deprived them of. For here and now, this is what being true to human living comes to, hence the condition for all truth. — Bernstein, J. M. Concept and Object: Adorno’s Critique of Kant The Blackwell Companion to Adorno, p. 495

Anyway, on to what Bernstein refers to as Adorno's "hyperbolic genealogy":

The system by which the sovereign Spirit thought to transfigure itself has its Ur-history in that which is pre-intellectual, in the animal life of the species. Predators are hungry; the pounce onto the prey is difficult, often dangerous. The animal needs, as it were, additional impulses in order to dare this. These fuse with the displeasure of hunger into rage at the victim, whose expression is designed to terrify and weaken the latter. During the progression to humanity this is rationalized through projection. The animal rationale [French: rational animal] which is hungry for its opponent, already the fortunate owner of a super-ego, must have a reason. The more completely that what it does follows the law of self-preservation, the less it may confess the primacy of this to itself and others; otherwise its laboriously achieved status as a zoon politikon [Greek: political animal] loses, as modern German puts it, credibility.

The life-form to be devoured must be evil. This anthropological schemata has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. In idealism – most obviously in Fichte – the ideology unconsciously rules that the non-Ego, l’autrui [French: the others], finally everything reminiscent of nature, is inferior, so that the unity of the thought bent on preserving itself may gobble it up, thus consoled. This justifies its principle as much as it increases the desire. The system is the Spirit turned belly, rage the signature of each and every idealism; it distorts even Kant’s humanity, dispelling the nimbus of that which is higher and more noble in which this knew how to clothe itself. The opinion of the 34person in the middle is the sibling of contempt for human beings: to let nothing go undisputed. The sublime inexorability of moral law was of a piece with such rationalized rage at the non-identical, and even the liberal Hegel was no better, when he walled off the superiority of the bad conscience, from those who demurred from the speculative concept, the hypostasis of the Spirit. What was emancipatory in Nietzsche, a true turning-point of Western thinking, which later versions merely usurped, was that he expressed such mysteries. The Spirit, which throws off its rationalization – its bane – ceases by virtue of its own self-reflection to be that which is radically evil, which irritates it in the Other.

I found an online translation of most of the introduction to ND by Christian Thorne and Matthias Menda, available here:

https://sites.williams.edu/cthorne/theodor-adorno-negative-dialectics/

Comparing various sections with the Redmond translation, it mostly seems to convey the same sense but in a more readable form. I don't want to switch, because I am very happy with the clunky-but-accurate Redmond, but sometimes it's good to have a look at an alternative rendering, especially if it's also pretty good. Here's the "Idealism as Rage" section:

Philosophical system, in which the sovereign mind entertains delusions of its majesty, has its earliest history in the pre-intellectual realm, that is, in the animal life of the species. Beasts of prey are hungry; pouncing on a victim is hard, often dangerous. If the animal is to risk it, it will require not just the standard impulses, but an auxiliary set, as well. These fuse together with the un-pleasure of hunger to become a kind of rage against the victim, the expression of which, in turn—and expediently enough—terrifies that victim and stuns it. Along the pathway to humanity, this gets rationalized by means of a projection. The rational animal who develops an appetite for his opponent has to, as happy owner of a super-ego, come up with a reason for attacking. The more completely his actions accord with the law of self-preservation, the less he is able to concede, to himself or others, its primacy; otherwise, the status of what the Germans now call the zoon politikon, achieved after so much effort, would come to seem implausible. Any creature marked out for eating had better be evil. This anthropological scheme has been sublimated all the way into epistemology. Idealism—and Fichte most emphatically—is governed unknowingly by an ideology which says that the not-I, l’autrui, anything, finally, that reminds one of nature, is worth almost nothing, so that the unity of the self-sustaining thought can devour it in good conscience. This vindicates the principle of thought and, equally, whets its appetite. Philosophical system is the belly turned mind, just as rage is the defining mark of idealism in all its forms; it disfigures even Kant’s humanity, confutes the nimbus of elevation and nobility with which Kant’s thinking has a way of investing itself. The view of the man in the center of the world is akin to contempt for humanity: to leave nothing uncontested or unchallenged. The sublime implacability of moral law was of the same cut as such rationalized rage against the non-identical, and even Hegel, liberally inclined, was no better, scolding, with the superiority of bad conscience, anything that rejects the speculative concept or hypostasis of the mind. What was so liberating about Nietzsche, who truly marked an about-face in the history of Western thought, a turn which later figures merely usurped, was that he spoke such mysteries out loud. The mind that breaks the spell of rationalization by dint of such stocktaking stops being the radical evil that, when rationalized, is the mind’s goad and trigger. — Idealism as Rage

So, idealism is the projection into reason of the predator's rage against its prey. It is the demonization of the Other, of nature, of the non-identical, to justify devouring it. This is even more extreme than the geneaology I was looking at before, and again the question is just how to interpret it. But in a way, it feels like that doesn't really matter: the passage is electrifying and scandalous, so it's a lot of fun to read; and it has an intuitively persuasive power, as if I understand it already. It hits in the way that sociobiological just-so stories hit those who are not already sceptical of them, with the shock of recognition. Or conspiracy theories might be another example.

Once again, the true interpretation is somewhere between literal and metaphorical. Or rather, it is both at the same time. Things didn't really happen that way—Adorno is not actually doing evolutionary biology—but he is making truth-claims about the structure of idealism, the way it functions to dominate, and speculating about which antecedent animal passions could have conditioned human beings in such a way as to allow this kind of thinking to develop. The result is a true picture with a speculative, coherent origin story. The origin story is needed to emphasize that reason's tendency to domination is not just an accident along the way. And it is literally true that reason was and still is used to justify domination, so it makes sense to trace this back to the earliest form of domination we can think of.

It operates at the limit between metaphor and material history. Adorno isn't doing evolutionary natural history, but he's doing more than metaphor for rhetorical effect (even though the passage is rhetorically effective). One of the things Adorno wants to convince us of is that there is a space between poetry and hard science.

So the passage makes two central claims: idealism systematically replicates predatory logic (demonization as justification of consumption); and this emerges from real conditions of human animality, not by way of genetic determinism but as sublimated survival strategy, channeled into reason.

I think these are plausible at the very least. The origin story exposes reason's domination as non-accidental while avoiding biological determinism. The speculative prehistory unearths, in a similar way to Nietzsche and Freud, reason's repressed animality through its own contradictions. When Fichte belittles the non-Ego, this really does continue, in infinitely developed form, the predator's rage, because the material needs of self-preservation persist in the structure of thought itself.

Introduction: Argument and Experience (i)

The thought which may positively hypostasize nothing outside of the dialectical consummation overshoots the object with which it no longer has the illusion of being one with; it becomes more independent than in the conception of its absoluteness, in which the sovereign and the provisional shade into one another, each dependent on the other. Perhaps the Kantian exemption of the intelligible sphere from every immanence aimed for this. Immersion into the particular, dialectical immanence raised to an extreme, requires as one of its moments the freedom to also step out of the object, the freedom which the claim of identity cuts off. Hegel would have abjured this; he relied upon the complete mediation in objects. In the praxis of cognition, the resolution of the irresolvable, the moment of such transcendence of thought comes to light in that solely as a micrology does it employ macrological means.

A hell of a passage, ultra-compressed and dialectical. Adorno is criticizing Hegelian dialectics but at the same time showing how its failure can lead to the non-identical. The "thought which may positively hypostasize nothing outside of the dialectical consummation" is the Hegelian thought that insists on systematic comprehensiveness. But why does he seem to imply that hypostasizing something outside of the dialectical consummation is a good thing? He seems to be criticizing Hegelian thought for failing to hypostasize anything except what is immanent to the dialectic and therefore to reason. Well, that's just it: in hypostasizing merely within the system it neglects to posit anything outside it, denying the reality of objects beyond this system, i.e., treating abstract concepts as concrete entities in the system, but failing to see concerete entities precisely where they are, beyond the system.

This thought therefore "overshoots the object" and flies away into abstractions, in its commitment to the system. But the object is "the object with which it no longer has the illusion of being one with." This refers to the identity-thinking of Hegelian idealism, the idea that thought and object coincide without remainder—but how did the Hegelian thought suddenly become so self-aware such that it is no longer under this illusion? The answer is that Adorno is pushing two stages together: represented here is the collapse of Hegelian dialectics into Adornian critique and negative dialectics; the overshoot is the failure that exposes the illusion, and in grasping this the thought has already found its way to negative dialectics (all being well). This part of the sentence is thus a dialectical image of the revealing failure of Hegel's system.

From that point, the thought "becomes more independent than in the conception of its absoluteness, in which the sovereign and the provisional shade into one another, each dependent on the other." (As far as I can tell the interdependence of sovereign and provisional might refer to the simultaneous presence alongside the Absolute—the telos of the dialectic and the final authority to which everything is subject—of a historical contingency that Hegel has, conveniently and retrospectively, made necessary in his system.)

Perhaps the Kantian exemption of the intelligible sphere from every immanence aimed for this.

Perhaps Kant, in putting the thing-in-itself beyond reason, wanted to reserve a space for the non-conceptual, denying reason's ability to capture everything.

Immersion into the particular, dialectical immanence raised to an extreme, requires as one of its moments the freedom to also step out of the object, the freedom which the claim of identity cuts off.

In negative dialectics we focus on concrete particulars, this being the dialectical method of immanent critique that pushes concepts till they fail. Thought here needs to be able to step out of the object and recognize that it has failed (failed because it used a deficient or ideological concept, for example). The claim of identity embedded in Hegel's system denies this freedom to thought since it insists beforehand on an identity between thought and the object. As Adorno says, "Hegel would have abjured this; he relied upon the complete mediation in objects." Negative dialectics is always ready to admit thought's failure; Hegel's dialectics has no such humility.

In the praxis of cognition, the resolution of the irresolvable, the moment of such transcendence of thought comes to light in that solely as a micrology does it employ macrological means.

Micrology is the commitment to concrete particulars, but what about macrology? I think it must be referring to what has gone before, i.e., Hegelian dialectics. But employing "macrological means" does not mean to employ Hegel's system, only its dialectical tools. So the point is that only in a philosophy deeply committed to concrete particulars can a method derived from a totalizing system produce the "transcendence of thought" whereby thought manages to reveal something of the non-conceptual, which was the point of philosophy all along.

QUESTION: I said that the following is a dialectical image of the collapse of Hegelian dialectics: "The thought which may positively hypostasize nothing outside of the dialectical consummation overshoots the object with which it no longer has the illusion of being one with." But since this collapse produces negative dialectics, which is supposedly the better philosophy, how is this dialectical movement not a positive synthesis?

Others are welcome to go over the system sections in more detail, but since we discussed the stuff about system quite a lot when reading the lectures, I'm not inclined to do my usual commentary. As far as I can tell he's saying basically the same thing, though in more glittering and arresting prose. So I'll just skate over the sections here.

In the Relation to System section his view of systems seems entirely negative, and he even calls them insane:

The excrescences of the systems since the Cartesian pineal gland and the axioms and definitions of Spinoza, already filled to the brim with the entire rationalism which he then deductively extracts, proclaim by their untruth that of the systems themselves, their madness.

But the dialectical character of his view comes out two sections later in Double Character of the System, which begins with...

Critique does not simply liquidate the system.

In other words, "I know I said that systems are crazy, but that doesn't mean they can be entirely rejected." And the task is...

... to transpose the energy of thought once unbound from the philosophical systems into the open determination of particular moments.

This "open determination" is what he referred to in the lectures as "blasting open the phenomena with the insistent power of thought." And crucially the focus is on individual phenomena rather than on the whole as it is in systems, which are essentially totalizing.

Then, in an intriguing passage, he gets more specific about what he wants to preserve of systems:

As prejudiced as this postulate is in the presupposition of the identity of everything existent with the cognizing principle, so too does that postulate, once burdened as in the manner of the idealistic speculation, legitimately recall the affinity of objects to each another, which is rendered taboo by the scientific need for order in order to yield to the surrogate of its schemata. What the objects communicate in, instead of each being the atom to which classificatory logic reduces it, is the trace of the determination of objects in themselves, which Kant denied and which Hegel wished to re-establish against Kant through the subject.

Here he explicitly associates the "affinity of objects to each other"—an affinity that escapes scientific and otherwise systematic classification—with things in themselves. This takes me back to my post in which I wondered how close the non-identical was to the in-itself.

But rather than continuing to wonder about that, the main thing to see is that there are relations between things that are not adequately captured, or are obscured, by our concepts and categories, especially the scientific ones. It's about qualitative relationships, those which paradigmatically concern artists, rather than the measurable relationships represented and reified in equations.

In Adorno's hands, Kant's in-itself becomes metaphorical or at least redefined and refunctioned. It is no longer beyond experience, unknowable, unconditioned or mind-independent. But it does represent what is most real in things: their irreducible particularity, the non-identical.

To comprehend a thing itself, not to merely fit it in, to register it in a system of relationships, is nothing other than to become aware of the particular moment in its immanent context with others. Such anti-subjectivism stirs beneath the crackling shell of absolute idealism, in the impulse to open up the thing in question, by recourse to how they became. The concept of a system recalls, in inverted form, the coherence of the non-identical, which is exactly what is damaged by deductive systematics. Critique of the system and asystematic thinking are superficial, so long as they do not make it possible to unbind the power of coherence, which the idealistic systems signed over to the transcendental subject.

This goes back to the earlier discussions about systems. What matters here is the idea of a coherent, meaningful reality, an inheritance of system that's worth hanging on to.

In the System Antinomical section he returns to his genealogical account of systems as products of bourgeois consciousness. This implies that there were no systems prior to the modern era. Indeed he points out that system "could be imputed only retrospectively" to Plato, for instance; and that Kant's criticism of Aristotle's categories (as merely empirical) is a historical product of Kant's epoch, in which the reason of the autonomous individual was to be elevated above everything else, hence the concept of the transcendental.

The crucial call to arms comes at the end of the section:

However the speculative power to blast open that which is irresolvable is that of the negation. Solely in it does the systematic movement live on. The categories of the critique of the system are at the same time those which comprehend the particular. What has once legitimately stepped beyond the particularity in the system has its place outside of the system. The gaze which becomes aware, by interpreting the phenomenon, of more than what it merely is, and solely thereby, what it is, secularizes metaphysics. Only a philosophy in fragment form would give the illusionary monads sketched by idealism what is their due. They would be representations [Vorstellungen] of the totality, which is inconceivable as such, in the particular.

The spirit of system or "systematic movement", and therefore the idea of a coherent, meaningful reality, can now live on only in negativity, i.e. in critique rather than by charting progress, and only by focusing on the particulars.

QUESTION: How does he propose to focus only on particulars, doing philosophy in fragment form, and at the same time uncover a coherent, meaningful reality and the affinity between objects?

@Moliere

I flatter myself that I'm getting a good feel for it. But maybe the best way to understand how to apply it or use it is to read Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as the “Models” section of ND. — Jamal

I feel like I might want to read his Aesthetic Theory after ND. Since it was written after ND, it might actually be a conscious application, whereas MM and DoE are negative dialectics in action before Adorno had formally theorized it. And since the art and aesthetic angle is so important in ND, Aesthetic Theory seems like it might be ideal.

Until now I've been a bit put off by what I expect to be his exclusive avant garde and modernist preoccupations—where Adorno goes for Schoenberg and Berg, I go for Stravinsky and Messiaen, not to mention the dreaded jazz—but I've seen enough interesting quotations from AT recently to catch my attention.

That's an interesting point that I will ponder.

Again, ND is in a sense doing just that, since the idea of immanent critique is to confront ideological concepts on their own terms and push them to breaking point.

someone else's ideology — frank

If it's not obvious, my use of "ideology" is the Marxist one: the ideas that justify the status quo.

Yes, because ND itself tries to see the world without the distortions of ideology (he notes the importance of the appearance/reality discinction). Even so, a pure unideological standpoint is not possible; critical thought is itself produced by the society is critiques.

And so it would seem that the project is severely hampered and severed from the outset. — Pussycat

Since we are not reading the original, I take it you think my recent post about how Adorno performs the content of his philosophy in the form of his writing is completely misguided?

I want to understand how to do "Negative Dialectics" for topics other than negative dialectics itself. — Moliere

I flatter myself that I'm getting a good feel for it. But maybe the best way to understand how to apply it or use it is to read Minima Moralia and Dialectic of Enlightenment, as well as the “Models” section of ND.

As for who could be said to have done ND after Adorno, the closest I think would be Fredric Jameson and Zizek, though the latter is far from explicitly Adornian.

Things like this belong in the Lounge, so put it there yourself next time please.

So if we break down your claim, we could say, "Art's value is not contingent upon [... an] outcome." That's actually sufficient, given that nothing, insofar as it is sought as an end in itself, is valued as contingent upon an outcome — Leontiskos

:up: