I recommend this podcast episode in which Peter E. Gordon talks about his recent book about Adorno, arguing against the common understanding that his thinking is unremmitingly bleak and hopeless, that he thinks everything is shit, and that he has no conception of the good life.

It's obvious to me, at least, that these are bad interpretations. But they are indeed very common. For example, I listened to the only Adorno episode on the "Partially Examined Life" podcast, which is usually quite good, and it was embarrassing and infuriating. They hated Adorno from the outset and proceeded to misinterpret everything, I think because he dared to criticize American pop culture, which they took to be evidence of an essentially dour intellect.

https://www.intellectualhistory.net/new-work/new-podcast-zeitgeist-und-geschichte

(It only properly gets going around 20 minutes in)

Lupine dialectics

In I used concepts from Wilfrid Sellars to describe geistige Erfahrung as consisting of, or emerging out of, the dialectic between the scientific and manifest images. Now I'm not so sure, because I thought of another example and it doesn't quite fit.

In 2023 I used the example of wolves in my "Magical powers" discussion, in which I was interested in Adorno's ideas before knowing very much about them:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/789898

I think it's an illuminating example to bring into the discussion now, and it has the great benefit of showing how we can avoid interpreting Adorno as simply anti-science, which some of his comments, like the one about Anglo-Saxon positivism, might suggest.

The example in a nutshell is that ethologists used to think about wolves in terms of dominance hierarchies, with alpha and beta males, etc., but this was based on observing captive animals and it turned out that wild animals don't behave like that and don't have such dominance hierarchies. The alpha model was bebunked.

[David] Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.

In contrast, wild wolf packs are usually made up of a breeding male, a breeding female and their offspring from the past two or three years that have not yet set out on their own—perhaps six to 10 individuals. In the late 1980s and 1990s Mech observed a pack every year at Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada. His study, published in 1999 in the Canadian Journal of Zoology, was among the first multiyear research on a single pack over time. It revealed that all members of the pack defer to the breeding male and that, regardless of sex or age, all pack members besides that male defer to the breeding female. The youngest pups also submit to their older siblings, though when food is scarce, parents feed the young first, much as human parents might tend to a fragile infant.

The same is true across gray wolf packs: Infighting for dominance is basically unheard of in a typical pack. When offspring are two to three years old, they leave the pack in search of mates, aiming to start their own pack. The alpha wolf notion of challenging dad for dominance of the existing pack just isn’t in the wolf playbook. — Is the Alpha Wolf Idea a Myth?

I went on to describe how the alpha model, despite being debunked, came to be extended, taken up in the popular conception of dog behaviour, not only by dog owners but also by dog trainers and associated dog behaviour specialists---to the detriment of the relationship between dogs and people. (The key text here is In Defence of Dogs by John Bradshaw, which I recommend even though I've become a total cat person in my middle age).

What I don't think I mentioned in 2023 was the way the alpha model and the concept of the dominance hierarchy entered ideology more widely. These days it's thriving in the culture, from dating advice to comparisons of world leaders.

The original model, based on observations of captive, artificially grouped wolves, projected a rigid dominance hierarchy onto animals whose wild sociality is fundamentally cooperative and familial. This is a paradigm of the violence of identity-thinking. The wolves were caged twice: first literally and then again by the concept of a dominance hierarchy, imported no doubt from ideology.

Maybe the most interesting thing to see is that when wolf ethologists got closer to the truth of wolves---and I do think we can come right out and say they got closer to the non-identical in wolves by rejecting the alpha model---when this happened, science did it itself. Adorno and other Frankfurt School writers complain endlessly about the spirit of positivism, but they are complaining about scientism, not science. Science can benefit from Adorno's intellectual experience just as philosophy itself can; micrology and the priority of the object are not confined to abstract theory. Indeed Adorno practiced what he preached in this regard, getting involved in empirical psychology and sociology.

Furthermore, ideology here is the bad guy, and ideology doesn't emerge out of the scientific image but from the manifest image. So my original attempt to make these concepts fit was not exactly right.

But not exactly wrong either. Adorno is defending the manifest image, but specifically the manifest image as it could or should be, free of reification and ideology. So in the end, intellectual experience might sometimes express the dialectic between manifest and scientific images, but might also sometimes criticize both: in this case, the scientific image was hubristic and tyrranical, and the manifest image was ideological.

@Banno I've noticed you're quite fond of using this example too.

We're both right. In that passage Adorno describes the retreat into the subject as a danger or temptation faced by thinking, one that can be resisted with critical self-reflection, which is characteristic of intellectual experience. Thus in the end intellectual experience is the avoidance of retreating into the subject, even if it has to go through it (or successfully resist the temptation) first.

But he also describes it as a stage that thinking has to go through. This is intellectual experience as a dialectical process, which has as one of its moments a retreat from the non-identical back into itself, step 1 below:

1. Negation: when confronted with the non-identical, the subject negates it by retreating into itself in its "fullness", i.e., its preformed, comprehensive, comfortable systems of concepts, ideologies, etc.
2. Negation of the negation: critical self-reflection says no to this, bringing the subject's thinking back out again.

Neat huh?

In I described the role of intellectual experience, and the motivation behind it, but I didn't define it. I'll attempt that now (with all the relevant caveats about definitions automatically applied as always).

Intellectual or spiritual experience is the mode of thinking which, by immersing itself in particulars with a micrological attention to detail, exposes the non-identical and reveals the affinities between objects and their relationships to the social whole. The purpose is to relate things to the whole without reducing them to specimens of categories, thus without systematizing them. An example of the difference that works for me is an analysis of Kafka's fiction: the reductive way of identity-thinking is to see everything in his fiction as Kafkaesque---and it's actually quite difficult to read Kafka openly and innocently today, such is the ubiquity of the universal we could call Kafkaesqueness---whereas if we follow Adorno we can see the wide variety of absurdity, humour, and satire in his stories. These will surely be seen to reveal things about modern life, alienation, the bourgeoisie, and so on, and yet they will not be reduced to mere signs for them. Kafka is kept alive in intellectual experience, and deadened with the category of Kafkaesque.

For example, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find he's metamorphosed into a giant cockroach or something. Identity-thinking reduces this to a symbol of alienation, a sub-category under the classification "Kafkaesque". But in intellectual experience, the details of the story are kept in play, always ready to be re-interpreted (this is a feature of great art, that it can accommodate and support this). We see how Gregor's situation is reduced to an economic problem and a cause of social embarrassment, and this reveals something of the true nature of the petit-bourgeois household: the family's and the society's inhumanity was there all along, not irrational but rational in a bad way---and Gregor's predicament, i.e., the inhumanity of his appearance, brings it out in specific ways.

Notice how the former, "Kafkaesque", interpretation has little power to shock or reveal, since through this category it has been pre-digested. But the latter can continue to support critique---precisely because it has not already been reduced to critique.

QUESTION: Is Adorno recommending a mode of thinking---he often says so---or is he just describing his way of thinking? Do all philosophers necessarily conflate these?

This I see as self-contradicting. "Correlates" implies a duality, so "the reduction of objects to correlates of thought", is inherently incompatible with "reality is mental". "Reality is mental" implies all objects are thoughts. — Metaphysician Undercover

Not self-contradictory; there's a spectrum in idealism from correlationism to full-blown subjective idealism. My short post was meant to cover all the bases (in modern thought).

problems of ambiguity — Metaphysician Undercover

I don't think so. You show no sign of having read my interpretation of identity-thinking with any level of charity, so basically I can't see what your problem is. But never mind, I'm going to carry on working out what intellectual experience is all about...

Geistige Erfahrung and the Scientific Image of Man

Intellectual experience is the common translation of geistige Erfahrung, but occasionally it's rendered as spiritual experience. I'm going to mostly carry on using intellectual but it's worth keeping in mind the original, since both English terms (and even the third option, mental) are inadequate or misleading.

Here's a way to think about it. A deep motivation of Adorno's, going back earlier than the failures of socialism and the trauma of the Holocaust, was—as I see it—to defend the manifest image against the encroachments of the scientific image (see the SEP on Sellars).

Roger Foster quotes a note of Adorno's:

Since my earliest youth, I knew that everything that I stood for found itself in a hopeless struggle with what I perceived as the anti-spirit incarnate — the spirit of Anglo-Saxon natural-scientific positivism. — Foster, Adorno: The Recovery of Experience

But phenomenology, vitalism, and existentialism did not appeal, since he had become a Marxian materialist. Thus we can see negative dialectics, and especially the idea of intellectual experience, as the philosophical elaboration of this instinct: resisting the reduction of experience to its empiricist concept, while insisting that such resistance is not a retreat into irrationalism, nor even a retreat into the subject, but rather a materialist critique of rationality itself.

So intellectual experience is something like the mode of thinking that attends to the dialectic between manifest and scientific image. And while Sellars probably argued for a synthesis of the two, Adorno wants to reveal how they conflict, and wants to keep the contradiction alive even in his own methodology. As he says, "Both positions of consciousness are connected to one another through each other’s critique, not through compromise." (Incidentally, recalling this line is a good way to expunge the thought of the "middle way" that often crops up when trying to understand Adorno.)

@Metaphysician Undercover

As to what identity-thinking is, I refer back to my post on page 2:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/984552

Identity-thinking is everywhere — indeed it's practically unavoidable — and idealism is its philosophical apotheosis.

Not really, Idealism involves a belief that concepts are objects, but not all objects are concepts. So that is not the identity relation referred to by Adorno. — Metaphysician Undercover

The relevant idealism is the view that reality is mental (in Hegel, rational-spiritual). It's the reduction of objects to correlates of thought.

If you don't mind I'm not going to follow you into the Platonic stuff, because I think it's a distraction. At least, it is for me.

I'm sure you know very well what so and so is. — Outlander

Yeah but I still struggle to get my head around such and such.

Cool video. Probably not very relevant. But then, MU's mention of Platonic objects was not very relevant either, so ... fair enough. In any case, I assume he was referring to the Forms and not just those solids.

where it may be perceived as consisting of Platonic objects — Metaphysician Undercover

What makes you say that?

I don't think anyone believes that objects are identical to concepts. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's idealism.

And didn't you, yourself, say that society was no more than a concept?

Introduction: Argument and Experience (iii)

I like this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now I can respond to this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes.

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

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

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

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

@Eros1982 was banned for racism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's explicitly about both.

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

That's explicitly what it's saying.

Goats too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't feel bad.

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

The urge to devour and assimilate what is not oneself.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read this, it's short:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes. Doesn't everyone. — RussellA

No. Russians don’t.

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

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

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

Introduction: Argument and Experience (ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

:scream:

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

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

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

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