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

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

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

Introduction: QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED (ii)

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

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

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

The argument is then fleshed out:

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

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

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

Grounding in the universal <--> Self-objectification

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In Praise of the Work of the Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's the one.

Last year.

On the other hand...

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

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

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

I'm glad we found some agreement MU.

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

Currently:

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

On the list:

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

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

Yep.

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

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

Good summaries! — Moliere

Thanks :smile:

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

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

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

So, yes to this:

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

Introduction: QUALITY AND THE INDIVIDUATED (i)

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

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

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

But this is a puzzler:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nae bother pal. :cool:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Going back to the Solidified section...

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

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

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

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

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

Note what I said before about that section:

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

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

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

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

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

Introduction: Qualitative Moment of Rationality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, ok :up:

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

Exactly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I get it straight from the text.

Something else I meant to say is that Adorno very intentionally avoids defining the non-conceptual, because to do so would be to reify it, to solidify it into a fasifying concept. Of course, it is a concept, but he wants it to remain just a pointer, a bit like the thing in itself, which is a signpost without much positive content.

So in a way I was undermining his intention by trying to pin it down. The solution might be to just talk about what it means, without offering these meanings as definitive and comprehensive.

I've got a heavy arsenal and I'll choose the weapon according to intent and circumstances. Just kidding, we're not doing battle, nor even debating, just trying to assist each other to understand why we each, respectively, interpret the way that we do. You are guided by your principles, and I follow mine, and I think we both claim a better interpretation than the other. I'm willing to adapt if you show me how your principles are better suited for the purpose. — Metaphysician Undercover

Agreed! It seemed to me that rather than trying to understand, you were just automatically gainsaying anything I said, scoring points by fisking. Years of TPF will normalize that kind of behaviour, but it's not the best way. However, if that's your style I can deal with it :cool:

I think @frank is right to notice that you are forgetting the dialectical nature of Adorno's philosophy.

Adorno is arguing in ND, that what you are insisting on here, is a false premise. — Metaphysician Undercover

A principal point is that Identity thinking, identifying concept and object is a false principle. We need to dismiss it as faulty thinking. This means that we cannot refer to this principle in an attempt to understand the principles which Adorno is putting forward, because he has explicitly said that we need to reject this. This implies that we need to look at other principles for understanding the relationship between conceptual and nonconceptual. To fall back onto this identity principle is a mistake. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think what it comes down to—what must always be borne in mind with Adorno—is that concepts, and therefore identity-thinking, are both indispensible and problematic. This might even be the central idea of negative dialectics. He does not say that we should "dismiss" or "reject" concepts or identity-thinking. The difficulty he has been at pains to describe, especially in the lectures, is that negative dialectics seeks to understand the nonconceptual by means of the concept, which is to say, to circumvent the falsifying nature of the concepts, by means of concepts themselves. He is aware that this looks impossible on the surface.

I've found it useful to go back over what we've already read, because a lot of our current questions are, if not answered, at least clarified. In the section entitled "Dialectics not a standpoint," he admits that identity-thinking is fundamental to thought and cannot be completely avoided, only supplemented and corrected as we go.

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

I interpreted this before as follows:

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

In his book Adorno Brian O'Connor makes the distinction between coercive and non-coercive identity-thinking:

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

Identity-thinking is the main villain precisely because it cannot really be dispensed with entirely.

Now that we understand that there is no such thing as an identity relation between concept and object, we can pursue the true nature of the concept. As an alternative, Adorno has proposed a relationship between concept and nonconceptual. — Metaphysician Undercover

According to what I've said so far, this here is a faulty argument. The implied premise, which you state elsewhere, is that if there is no such thing as a 100% successful identity relation, identity-thinking must be rejected. But this is not Adorno's view. So the focus on the relationship between the concept and the conconceptual is not an alternative to identity-thinking, but a way of pushing it through to breaking point, whereupon the nonconceptual might be revealed. But there is a kind of alternative, a supplement to coercive identity-thinking, which is mimesis, the kind of understanding embodied in art.

Incidentally, my impression is that despite appearances I don't think we're too far apart in our interpretations. But you just seem too eager to come down on one side or the other, and to reify and hypostasize and systematize all over the place with the result that the elements of Adorno's thought become frozen and static.

it does not erase the distinction, because many will still utilize it. however it demonstrates the distinction to be unsound, therefore one which we ought to reject. Philosophers like to instil categories, and these may become dogma or ideology, but Adorno is showing that this specific way of categorizing is unacceptable. To have a better understanding we need to reject it and accept a better way. — Metaphysician Undercover

I agree with the part about categories, dogma and ideology. In fact, it's deeper than that. Reification is essential to the genesis of concepts anyway, so from the outset concepts falsify their objects, making them prime material for ideology.

But I disagree with "unacceptable". What he finds unacceptable is not identity-thinking per se, but its dominance and coerciveness in modern thought.

The subject is the object. — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't really understand this part of your post. The subject as object is a moment in the practice of negative dialectics, especially since in the "Privilege" section he emphasizes the importance of the philospher's self-examination—but you seem to want to say more than that.

I recommend you have a look again at the "Disenchantment of the Concept" section. It helped me. It has some relevant nuggets:

The requirement that philosophy must operate with concepts is no more to be made into a virtue of this priority than, conversely, the critique of this virtue is to be the summary verdict over philosophy. Meanwhile, the insight that its conceptual essence would not be its absolute in spite of its inseparability is again mediated through the constitution of the concept; it is no dogmatic or even naively realistic thesis. Concepts such as that of being in the beginning of Hegel’s Logic indicate first of all that which is emphatically non-conceptual; they signify, as per Lask’s expression, beyond themselves. It is in their nature not to be satisfied by their own conceptuality, although to the extent that they include the non-conceptual in their meaning, they tend to make this identical to itself and thereby remain entangled in themselves. Their content is as immanent in the intellectual sense as transcendent in the ontical sense to such. By means of the self- consciousness of this they have the capacity of discarding their fetishism. Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non- conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant’s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void.

Anyway, concept/thing, subject/object, and mediation seem to be covered extensively later, so maybe we should hold off getting too deep into it now.

Please start a new discussion for that, because it doesn’t belong here. This thread is for those who are reading Negative Dialectics to discuss the book.

EDIT: Thanks

So you tried the Kantian angle, and now it's Marxism. What will you be throwing at me next?

The ontological status of concepts is a red herring. It doesn't follow from the fact that concepts are part of the material world that there is no legitimate distinction to be made between concepts and the world. ND is full of the distinction and utterly relies on it. This doesn't imply a mind vs. matter ontology. One can maintain a materialist ontology, where both concepts and objects are part of a single, material world, and still insist on a functional or critical distinction between the act of identifying (the concept) and that which is to be identified (the object).

You draw the wrong conclusion from Adorno's materialism. The point of it isn't to collapse the distinction between a concept and what it represents, but to enable a critique of the relationship between them.

concepts are already a part of the material reality. Therefore your argument is not valid because "the material reality to which concepts are applied" includes concepts themselves, so that if he is talking about material reality, we cannot automatically conclude that he is not talking about concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, concepts are part of the material world. But this does not mean that when we use a concept, we are talking about the concept itself. This is to confuse a tool with the object it is being used on.

When we want to talk about the concept, which is also part of material reality, then we will take care to make that clear. It's the difference between "capitalism goes back to the 16th century" and "capitalism is concept that goes back to Adam Smith". In the former statement, the concept of capitalism is being used as a tool, but the fact that the tool is also material does not magically transform the object of analysis into the tool itself.

If we could not make this distinction, Adorno's whole cricial project would be dead in the water, because he could no longer say that the conventional concept of capitalism fails to capture the reality of the economic system.

The concept is a kind of material object that attempts to subjugate others. The non-conceptual and non-identical are what resists or escapes such domination.

Wow, that's exactly the criticism I've leveled at you above. You are describing Marxist philosophy from fundamental idealist categories, the separation between mind and material reality. So I think it is actually you who is stubbornly upholding the idealist ontological perspective, while trying to understand Marxist materialism. — Metaphysician Undercover

It should now be clear that I'm not promoting any form of idealism. But I've certainly simplified Adorno to make my points. The 16th-century economic system did not have a "capitalism" nametag. Our historical concept of capitalism came later, and was used to organize, understand, and indeed, partly constitute that past as a specific object of analysis. This mediation is where identity thinking happens, e.g., the modern concept can easily impose itself retrospectively, smoothing over the non-conceptual particularity and internal contradictions of that historical reality.

But this mediation, or "partial constitution," does not erase the fundamental distinction. On the contrary. The goal of negative dialectics is to use the concept to push against its own mediating function, to expose the gap between our conceptual "capitalism" and the heterogeneous, non-identical reality of the 16th-century economic life it tries to capture. To say the object is conceptually mediated is not to say it's conceptually created. Conflating the two is what allows the concept to dominate the object apparently without remainder.

So I'm not promoting a simplistic dualist interpretation. I'm basing things on Adorno's underlying dialectical maintenance of subject vs. object, a "separation" (but not an ontological one) which is both true and false:

The separation of subject and object is both real and semblance. True, because in the realm of cognition it lends expression to the real separation, the rivenness of the human condition, the result of a coercive historical process; untrue, because the historical separation must not be hypostatized, not magically transformed into an invariant. This contra- diction in the separation of subject and object is imparted to epistemol- ogy. Although as separated they cannot be thought away, the ψεῦδος [falsity?] of the separation is manifested in their being mutually mediated, object by subject, and even more and differently, subject by object. As soon as it is fixed without mediation, the separation becomes ideology, its normal form. Mind then arrogates to itself the status of being absolutely inde- pendent—which it is not: mind’s claim to independence announces its claim to domination. — On Subject and Object, from Critical Models

Introduction: Privilege of Experience (ii)

When Adorno uses the term "experience" recall that the introduction is meant to be an account of intellectual/spiritual/philosophical experience, the experience necessary to retain critical freedom in a debased society.

In sharp contrast to the usual scientific ideal, the objectivity of dialectical cognition needs more subject, not less. Otherwise philosophical experience shrivels. But the positivistic spirit of the epoch is allergic to this. Not everyone is supposed to be capable of such experience. It is held to be the prerogative of individuals, determined through their natural talents and life-history; to demand this as the condition of cognition, so runs the argument, would be elitist and undemocratic.

The critical theorist is a radical democrat who wants to make the world better for everyone, but at the same time requires a level of philosophical engagement that is highly demanding of individuals; only a privileged few can satisfy these demands. What wants to be democratic is necessarily undemocratic—or so it seems ("so runs the argument").

It is to be conceded that not everyone in fact is capable of the same sort of philosophical experiences, in the way that all human beings of comparable intelligence ought to be able to reproduce experiments in the natural sciences or mathematical proofs, although according to current opinion quite specific talents are necessary for this. In any case the subjective quotient of philosophy, compared with the virtually subjectless rationality of a scientific ideal which posits the substitutability of everyone with everyone else, retains an irrational adjunct. It is no natural quality. While the argument pretends to be democratic, it ignores what the administered world makes of its compulsory members. Only those who are not completely modeled after it can intellectually undertake something against it. The critique of privilege becomes a privilege: so dialectical is the course of the world. It would be fictitious to presume that everyone could understand or even be aware of all things, under historical conditions, especially those of education, which bind, spoon-feed and cripple the intellectual forces of production many times over; under the prevailing image-poverty; and under those pathological processes of early childhood diagnosed but by no means changed by psychoanalysis. If this was expected, then one would arrange cognition according to the pathic features of a humanity, for whom the possibility of experience is driven out through the law of monotony, insofar as they possessed it in the first place. The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

It's true that only a few are able to engage in such experience, but this is not so much an elite privilege born of natural talent or good breeding, but is the tragic result of an administered society that leaves so little room for independent thought that only a few, by chance, make it through with their wits in order. The argument against Adorno's elitism "pretends to be democratic," purportedly arguing on behalf of the people, but what it's really doing is arguing on behalf of the administered society, taking the debased state of intellectual culture as the democratic standard. Thus the democratic objection is quite dangerous, since it attacks the very thing—independent, original critical thought—that might help diagnose society's problems correctly:

The construction of the truth according to the analogy of the volonté de tous [French: popular will] – the most extreme consequence of the subjective concept of reason – would betray everyone of everything which they need, in everyone’s name.

You don't take a vote on what is true. This notion actually stems from the relativism of the subjective concept of reason. The individual is the measure of truth, therefore the collective of all these individuals is the ultimate arbiter. The people themselves are thus betrayed by the idea that the popular will can decide what is and is not so.

So Adorno has redescribed the argument against elitism like this:

The administered society, the capitalist system, and narrow scientific and technical training have together produced stunted minds, conditioned to accept the status quo. But then they say that the statements of the intellectual should be acceptable to these minds, i.e., they should fit with standard lines of thought, must not be erratic and eccentric, etc. These, they say, are all signs of elitism. So critical thinking is automatically disqualified and conformist thinking prevails, seen as true, reasonable, realistic etc.

To those who have had the undeserved good fortune to not be completely adjusted in their inner intellectual composition to the prevailing norms – a stroke of luck, which they often enough have to pay for in terms of their relationship to the immediate environment – it is incumbent to make the moralistic and, as it were, representative effort to express what the majority, for whom they say it, are not capable of seeing or, to do justice to reality, will not allow themselves to see. The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone. The almost universal compulsion to confuse the communication of that which is cognized with this former, all too often ranking the latter as higher, is to be resisted; while at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it. In the meantime, everything to do with language labors under this paradox.

He insists on the necessity for independent critical thinking carried out by a lucky few, but insists that they are just that: lucky. Adorno is, then, elitist in a certain sense, but radically democratic at heart.

Still, it does look pretty elitist: it's incumbent on the intellectuals to think on behalf of the benighted masses, who cannot do it themselves, such are their crippled, pathological minds. On the other hand, this is just an uncharitable description of something that's natural and unavoidable, or perhaps rather morally imperative, in present conditions: insofar as any society-wide social movement needs intellectuals, they will be few in number and must try to focus and distil the thoughts and feeling of the non-intellectuals, and lead the way.

The criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone.

Adorno is facing up to the following problem: given that intellectuals have a responsibility to think for the general population, how will they communicate it to them, especially considering that people are structurally conditioned not to see the truth? Easily digestible, dumbed-down info nuggets are easy to communicate, but not up to the task of conveying difficult truths.

Adorno says there is a tendency to confuse communicability with truth, and this has to be resisted. But he goes further:

at present, every step towards communication sells truth out and falsifies it

This seems hyperbolically pessimistic, but I don't believe he means it quite like that. I think he means to bring out the deep conflict or "paradox" as he puts it: communicative language distorts the truth, but such language is necessary to convey the truth.

Obviously this goes back to what we were saying about his difficult prose style. In this section, he justifies it. (Some might counter that other intellectuals in the Frankfurt School, particularly Horkheimer and Marcuse, were able to write clearly and accessibly while effectively communicating the same or similar truths.).

Later on, after the glimpse of his theory of truth, which I've already covered, he returns to the theme of elitism:

Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience. It must give an account of how much, according to its own possibility in the existent, it is contaminated with the existent, with the class relationship. In it, the chances which the universal desultorily affords to individuals turn against that universal, which sabotages the universality of such experience. If this universality were established, the experience of all particulars would thus be transformed and would cast aside much of the contingency which distorted them until that point, even where it continues to stir. Hegel’s doctrine, that the object would reflect itself in itself, survives its idealistic version, because in a changed dialectics the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

"Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience" because philosophical experience depends on a humility with regard to its own abilities, for example an awareness of the subject's own class interests. More plainly, philosophical experience demands self-reflection: e.g., what social and historical factors have shaped my perspective? Answering questions like these is to reveal how one's philosophical practice is "contaminated with the existent". The intellectuals, while able to see a bit deeper than others to see how the social totality conditions our thoughts, do not float free of the world like all-knowing guiding angels; they are as mediated and conditioned as everyone else.

Put differently, true elitists believe that in their philosophical experience they have a sovereign subjectivity, pure and uncontaminated and above the herd. Adorno, in contrast, says the philosophers must start with the knowledge that they are already contaminated, and work out how. Then, in negative dialectics...

the subject, disrobed of its sovereignty, virtually becomes thereby the reflection-form of objectivity.

Last bit:

The less that theory comes across as something definitive and all-encompassing, the less it concretizes itself, even with regard to thinking. It permits the dissolution of the systemic compulsion, relying more frankly on its own consciousness and its own experience, than the pathetic conception of a subjectivity which pays for its abstract triumph with the renunciation of its specific content would permit. This is congruent with that emancipation of individuality borne out of the period between the great idealisms and the present, and whose achievements, in spite of and because of the contemporary pressure of collective regression, are so little to be remanded in theory as the impulses of the dialectic in 1800. The individualism of the nineteenth century no doubt weakened the objectifying power of the Spirit – that of the insight into objectivity and into its construction – but also endowed it with a sophistication, which strengthens the experience of the object.

Fascinating stuff. It turns out that the privilege of experience is not just a stroke of personal luck but is an achievement of modernity: the possibility of this non-conformist kind of philosophical thought that the world needs was generated by bourgeois individualism, especially the hundred years or so of stability and progress that led up to the First World War (and Adorno's birth a few years before that).

But there are two sides to it, of course.

I interpreted Adorno differently. I don't want to drag the thread through parts of the text that have already been covered, but just to explain, these passages made me think Adorno was using or alluding to the specialized meaning Hegel gave to the word concept: — frank

I think our views can probably be made to come out as consistent. :up:

But I see your description of sense (a) as somewhat confused. Yes, it is what is heterogenous to thought, and what is of interest to ND, but economics systems are not an example, as these are conceptual. The question of "physical objects" is even more difficult, and I'll address this below. — Metaphysician Undercover

We've been here before. Remember that what we're doing is trying to understand what Adorno means. It's clear that he does not think that when we talk about economic systems, we are talking about concepts; he thinks we are talking about a material reality to which concepts are applied (the response of "material reality itself is just a concept!" is equally inappropriate, an intrusion of idealist dogma). You are confusing the map with the territory. It's about economic systems, not "economic systems". Concepts like "economic system" are not just abstract categories; they're crystallizations of real social relations, and the nonconceptual is the lived experience of those relations, including, say, exploitation and homelessness. Or are exploitation and homelessness just concepts too?

I used the concept of the thing-in-itself on the condition that ...

... you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate — Jamal

You were unable to do that, and fell back on rehearsing Kant's formal doctrine.

If Adorno is Kantian — Metaphysician Undercover

I didn't say Adorno is Kantian simpliciter, so your Kantian critique is misguided. But even if we stick with Kant, you are wrong when you say that ...

the thing in itself is only a concept. — Metaphysician Undercover

This is a basic misunderstanding. For Kant, the thing-in-itself is not only a limit concept, but is also a real presupposition, a necessary posit of things. Otherwise, appearances would be mere illusion. Appearances are of something.

Generally you are being pedantic, failing to take my analogy in the spirit it was intended, and stubbornly upholding an idealist viewpoint while trying to understand an anti-idealist philosopher.

The non-conceptual is whatever isn't conceptual, which comes down mainly to two specific overlapping meanings: (a) it's what philosophical thought is properly directed towards, also known in ND as what is heterogeneous to thought—i.e., particular things, like physical objects, economic systems, works of art, etc.; or (b) it's whatever eludes conceptual capture. Sense (b) is equivalent to the meaning of the non-identical.

Adorno also refers to the non-conceptual within the concept. This more obscure aspect of it might be what @frank and @NotAristotle are thinking of. I think it's a way of describing (b) while emphasizing that the inadequacy of the attempted conceptual capture is intrinsic to the concept.

But I see that as a consequence of the basic concept<->(non-conceptual) object relationship. A good way to think about that is to see the non-conceptual as the thing in itself, if you can imagine this to be immanent to experience, decoupled from Kant's formal apparatus, and potentially determinate. In my opinion, Adorno is as Kantian as he is Hegelian, and often more so. You see it especially here.

How are we to define ideology? — NotAristotle

This post from earlier in the discussion might help:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/990809

Introduction: Privilege of Experience

The point of this section is to defend, against charges of elitism, the necessity for a difficult, non-conformist philosophy, as the only route to truth in social philosophy in the context of late capitalism and the administered society. What really stood out to me was not the main argument itself—which I find myself nodding along with in complete agreement—but the short detour that amounts to Adorno's theory of truth:

Truth is objective and not plausible. So little as it immediately falls into anyone’s lap, and so much as it requires subjective mediation, what counts for its imbrication is what Spinoza all too enthusiastically proclaimed for the specific truth: that it would be the index of itself. It loses its privileged character, which rancor holds against it, by not allowing itself to be talked out of the experiences to which it owes itself, but rather allows itself to enter into configurations and explanatory contexts which help make it evident or convict it of its inadequacies.

"Truth is objective and not plausible" is a very Adornian thing to say, but I think the meaning is clear. Truth is not a matter of personal or popular opinion; and at the same time it is not easy, reasonable, intuitive, or immediately acceptable, because it has to break through the ideological shell of common sense. And such difficult truths do not just "fall into anyone's lap."

Rather, they require "subjective mediation," the working through, by means of subjective application, of the material at hand in all its multifarious connectedness. (To this extent Adorno always agreed with Kant that objectivity is found via subjectivity)

what counts for its [i.e., truth's] imbrication is what Spinoza all too enthusiastically proclaimed for the specific truth: that it would be the index of itself

An imbrication is a pattern of overlapping scales, tiles, whatever. Thorne and Menda have "woven mesh". The idea is that truth is a matter of a kind of interweaving, so it's something like the coherence theory of truth. Adorno is saying that the truth is finally revealed through subjective mediation almost like Spinoza's self-evident truths that have no need of an external standard for verification, but in the case of negative dialectics it's more like the way that a certainty, for Wittgenstein, sometimes finds its place by fitting into your picture of the world.

So I see the imbrication like this:

141. When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)

142. It is not single axioms that strike me as obvious, it is a system in which consequences and premises give one another mutual support. — Wittgenstein, On Certainty

Adorno is combining this kind of insight with that of Spinoza:

[...] I know that I understand the true philosophy. If you ask in what way I know it, I answer: In the same way as you know that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles: that this is sufficient, will be denied by no one whose brain is sound, and who does not go dreaming of evil spirits inspiring us with false ideas like the true. For the truth is the index of itself and of what is false. — Spinoza to Albert Burgh

Spinoza was "all too enthusiastic," and yet there's an important insight there, which is basically what Wittgenstein's "On Certainty" is all about.

(It should be added that Wittgenstein and Adorno are far apart here in some ways too: for Adorno, the light dawning over the whole is no peaceful sunrise)

Yes, it definitely cleared up some things for me.

Very nice summary :up:

Seems to me that he explicitly defines the content as the non-conceptual — NotAristotle

Yes, he certainly does think that the non-conceptual is the proper object of study, which is to say content, of philosophy. And the non-conceptual can present itself immediately or at the end of an analysis of the thing's mediations.

What does AP refer to? — NotAristotle

Analytic philosophy.

Oh yeah! That was interesting. I even contributed a few posts myself, so maybe you're right and I heard it there.

I used it in one of my old OP's — Moliere

Interesting. What was that about?

I found the Noto/Sakamoto album because I was having a look through the releases by the Ensemble Modern. Another one I liked:

The central issue seems to be a criticism against Hegel's categories needing to be both emergent and logically invariant. Adorno see these two descriptions as incompatible. So the section tries to untangle becoming, changing, evolving, from the invariant, immutable, eternal concepts of idealism. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right. Hegel can't have it both ways: if we want to do justice to the contingency and emergence, we can't also hold onto the a priori invariants.

He makes the distinction between concept and content. It appears to me, that the concept is always mediated, and content is immediate, also the medium. This puts solidity, being "that which holds together", and the ensuing whole, the concrete, as something mediated, conceptualized, or provided by conception. Content on the other hand is nebulous, and this leaves subjective experience, along with that which is immediate, content, in the strange situation of being unable to understand itself. "That which is most subjective of all, the immediately given, eludes its grasp." — Metaphysician Undercover

Surely the non-immediacy, i.e., the mediatedness, of content is the whole point of this section: the appearance is the bad positive and behind it lies some internally contradictory thing, which I take to be the content. Despite this terminological difference I suspect we agree more than disagree.

What do we even mean by "content"? The content is surely what Adorno is referring to with "the thing" here:

[Explicitly idealistic philosophy] hides in the substruction of something primary, almost indifferent as to which content, in the implicit identity of concept and thing ...

Adorno, being interested in the the non-identity of concept and thing, reveals through the analysis of mediation a different thing (different from the appearance). So the content here is not something like sense-data or the given, i.e., the content of experience in AP terms, but the content of philosophy (philosophy as it should be, i.e., negative dialectics).

It takes the unmediated immediacy, the formations, which society and its development present to thought, tel quel [French: as such], in order to reveal their mediations through analysis, according to the measure of the immanent difference of the phenomena to what they claim, for their own part, to be.

So I think we'd be close to a good interpretation if we either say that the things as revealed in all their mediatedness are the content, or the mediations themselves are the content.

In the final paragraph then, he attempts at an explanation of how the whole, as the concept, and mediated, emerges out of the immediate, the content. The two extremes, the immediate content, and the invariant concept, are described as "moments" rather than as "grounds". The supposed invariance however, is revealed as an artificial, or even false invariance, being "produced", created. We can see that the "immutability is the deception of prima philosophia", and the concepts gain the appearance of invariance when "they pass over into ideology", where they are solidified as part of the whole. — Metaphysician Undercover

Notice the solidity is only an appearance, because if it were true, dialectics could have no effect. So referring back to the beginning of the section, this is why solidity, and even the whole itself, are the bad positive. — Metaphysician Undercover

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