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

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

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

Yes. Doesn't everyone. — RussellA

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Critique does not simply liquidate the system.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

someone else's ideology — frank

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

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

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

The very fact that so many are driven to devote their whole lives to art's creation, and the fact that we are seemingly driven to saturate our environment with art, speaks instead to its deep connection to human purpose, instead of an inexplicable obsession with useless things. — hypericin

It is our job as philosophers to make the implicit explicit, only then can we actually understand what we are investigating. — hypericin

Do you think that in the later passage that you quoted, Adorno is trying to provide an exegesis for exactly that? — Pussycat

Quite literally, I would say. If we take Adorno's "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, remains alive because the moment to realize it was missed", seriously, together with his demand that philosophy becomes conscious as to what it's been doing (to the non-conceptual), then I think we can safely conclude that all philosophies prior to negative dialectics were unconscious reactions to stimuli of their time. — Pussycat

In the history of philosophy the systems of the seventeenth century had an especially compensatory purpose. The same ratio which, in unison with the interests of the bourgeois class, smashed the feudal order of society and its intellectual reflection, scholastic ontology, into rubble, promptly felt the fear of chaos while facing the ruins, their own handiwork. They trembled before what ominously continued under their realm of domination and which waxed in proportion to their own power. This fear shaped the earliest beginnings of the mode of conduct entirely constitutive of bourgeois thought, of hurriedly neutralizing every step towards emancipation through the strengthening of the social order. In the shadows of the incompletion of its emancipation, the bourgeois consciousness had to fear being cashiered by a more progressive class; it suspected that because it was not the entire freedom, it only produced the travesty of such; that is why it expanded its autonomy theoretically into the system, which at the same time took on the likeness of its compulsory mechanisms.

This brings us squarely to the issue of suffering. And, I must admit that I do not really know how Adorno relates these two. So I will speculate. I suppose that this resistance to ideology, this renunciation of the sacrosanct, is itself an expression of suffering, as if that profound, or sacrosanct ideology is oppressive. This is similar to what Plato says in "The Republic" about the relation between the philosopher and the ruler, a relation known as 'the philosopher king'. The philosopher knows that the job of ruling is the worst possible job, and in no wants to do that job. So the philosopher will not move to take that position until the suffering of having to live under the punishment of the prevailing rulers is worse than the pain of having to rule. It is the suffering caused by poor leadership which brings out the good leader.

So to relate this to what Adorno says about "the need to give voice to suffering". Ideology gains its power of authority through the appearance of profundity. But the ideology may itself be a medium of oppression, by which objectivity weighs on the subject as suffering. The facade of profundity is what needs to be broken, through the speculative moment. This is the expression of suffering, profanity. — Metaphysician Undercover

The power of the existent constructs the facades into which the consciousness crashes. It must try to break through them. This alone would snatch away the postulate from the profundity of ideology. The speculative moment survives in such resistance: what does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, transcends them even in the closest contact with objects and in the renunciation of sacrosanct transcendence. What in thought goes beyond that to which it is bound in its resistance is its freedom. It follows the expressive urge of the subject. The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.

I always assumed the original resistance of independent farmers to socialism was that land reform rarely distinguished between large landlords and smaller farms (and that forced collectivization was a disaster, plus the whole kulak designation, or similar schemes in China—both later developments, but foreshadowed early on by some policies). Had land reform been handled better, it might not have shaken out that way. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this section goes deeper than that, since he is talking about his own mode of expression, i.e., it's meta. Expression in language that aims to uncover reality in the way described above should itself enact dialectics in its mode of expression. Thus, we get Adorno's way of writing: style as substance, form as content (I'm glad we've finally got back to this topic, which I think I mentioned on the first page of this thread). Rather than obscurantism, this is the fullest stringency (EDIT: or maybe better put, the best balance between expression and stringency). He does not want to explain and describe, but to performatively expose. The same applies to negative dialectics as applies to screenwriting: show don't tell. — Jamal

The speculative moment survives in such resistance: what does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, transcends them even in the closest contact with objects and in the renunciation of sacrosanct transcendence.

The speculative moment, which does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, survives in such resistance. It goes beyond the facts while remaining in the closest contact with objects. Furthermore, it does so while renouncing the sacrosanct transcendence of dogmatic metaphysics.

EDIT2: Also I'm finding myself scratching my head in the first paragraph of Portrayal (Darstellung) -- Darstellung contrasts with Vorstellung, which is what I'm gathering to be the difference between the importance of Portrayal in philosophy, at the beginning, and how it is not just science at the end.

Vorstellung is usually translated as "Representation", and in Kant is important to scientific knowledge. So I understand that much. Darstellung is the "portrayal" -- expression, language -- of the representation. But I'm struggling to see how Darstellung, in Adorno, differentiates philosophy from science at the end somehow and that's what I'm puzzling over:

"If the moment of expression tries to be anything more, it degenerates into a point of view; were it to relinquish the moment of expression and the obligation of portrayal, it would converge with science." — Moliere

The freedom of philosophy is nothing other than the capacity of giving voice to this unfreedom. If the moment of expression tries to be anything more, it degenerates into a point of view; were it to relinquish the moment of expression and the obligation of portrayal, it would converge with science.

Though Adorno notes that the responses have been obscure, he wants to speak up in favor of this speculative thinking, or a moment within thinking, whereby the facts, on their face or as read, do not determine thought, but rather produce a facade through his thought must push towards and outward from in order to get closer to the things themselves.

Only, without a category that determines the thing -- it's non-conceptual. In a way I think I can see the fantasm as the appearance, whereas negative dialectics wishes to get beyond the appearance of facts (themselves conceptual) to the thing. — Moliere

Abstract (thesis)
        ↓
Negative (antithesis)
        ↓
Speculative/Concrete (synthesis)

Understanding (thesis)
        ↓
Dialectic (antithesis)
        ↓
Speculation (synthesis)

The power of the existent constructs the facades into which the consciousness crashes. It must try to break through them. This alone would snatch away the postulate from the profundity of ideology. The speculative moment survives in such resistance: what does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, transcends them even in the closest contact with objects and in the renunciation of sacrosanct transcendence. What in thought goes beyond that to which it is bound in its resistance is its freedom. It follows the expressive urge of the subject. The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.

The speculative moment survives in such resistance: what does not allow itself to be governed by the given facts, transcends them even in the closest contact with objects and in the renunciation of sacrosanct transcendence.

What in thought goes beyond that to which it is bound in its resistance is its freedom. It follows the expressive urge of the subject.

The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.

I would have thought that the Left, historically being the side for the working class, it would be natural they would be on that side. — unimportant

I'm wondering if anyone has thoughts on what "thingly bad state of affairs" means. I was wondering if it's supposed to say "thinly" just as a first guess? — Moliere

Expression and stringency are not dichotomous possibilities for it. They need each other, neither is without the other. The expression is relieved of its contingency by thought, on which it works just as thought works on it. Thinking becomes, as something which is expressed, conclusive only through linguistic portrayal; what is laxly said, is badly thought. Through expression, stringency is compelled from what is expressed. It is not an end in itself at the latter’s expense, but carries it off out of the thingly bad state of affairs, for its part an object of philosophical critique.

As mediated as being is by the concept and therein by the subject, so mediated is, in the reverse case, the subject by the world in which it lives, so powerless and merely internalized too is its decision. Such powerlessness permits the victory of the thingly bad state of affairs [dinghafte Unwesen] over the subject. — section: Function of the Concept of the Existent

The philosophical concept does not dispense with the longing which animates art as something non-conceptual and whose fulfilment flees from its immediacy as appearance [Schein]. The concept, the organon of thought and nevertheless the wall [Mauer: external wall] between this and what is to be thought through, negates that longing. Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit itself to it. What is incumbent on it, is the effort to go beyond the concept, by means of the concept.