Habermas faulted Adorno for being too negative, but in these lectures we can see him trying to articulate a philosophy that is not only critical but is also speculative, going beyond what we (think we) know.

Instead of saying “what has been thought of as irrational is a basic component of reason,” Adorno will instead say something like “the rational is also irrational”. In doing so he adopts problematic, reified concepts to expose contradictions in ideology—this is the critical part—but at the same time indirectly suggest a more expansive rationality that could do more justice to the potential of reason—and this is the speculative part.

(Incidentally, although in his writing he is performative in the way I just described, in the lectures he drops the act to a degree and says “ok, here’s what I’m doing when I say that,” in relatively plain language. This is why the lectures work as an introduction, and as a “how to read Adorno”.)

It’s tempting to think of this speculative element as positive, and having the character of reconciliation as in the Hegelian sublation or synthesis. Adorno of course would deny this, but how exactly?

And after all, he is negative for a positive reason. He has goals, for philosophy and for society.

I think the answer is, obviously enough, that any positivity in the method is a negative positivity, that is, it emerges as a result of the negative thrust rather than being asserted alone. Adorno is thus always carefully indirect.

The level of abstraction in what I’m saying here produces the suspicion that it’s lacking in substance. I don’t think it is, but maybe there’s a need to bring it down to earth with concrete examples, more concrete than talk of rationality and irrationality. Maybe later.

The move to "modernity," including what MacIntyre looks into in ethics, is defined by the elevation of potency over actuality (often in terms of potency as "freedom"). And if one says: "hey now, my preferred modern area thought doesn't even have a clear conception of actuality or potency," or "but potency is covered differently in each system these days," my response will be "exactly!" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Relatedly, one thing that really crystallized for me when I read AV was the historical contingency of the is-ought gap and the fact-value dichotomy. You can accept that you can’t get an ought from an is but at the same time say that this is not because it violates a universal logic, but rather because they have in fact been divorced in a society lacking a shared telos. The question then is not so much “can you derive an ought from an is” but “why does it seem impossible”.

I think you've committed the motte-and-bailey fallacy, moving from a controversial existential claim to an uncontroversial functional one, from talk of what the self is to talk of what the brain does. I don't think you can support the former with the latter.

But what matters is that we agree (I think) that what has been considered irrational is actually a basic component of the rational, and also that rational, conscious cognition is not as independent and in control as once thought.

But for me you are too close to falling into the kind of pure irrationalism criticized by Adorno, viz., reason cannot grasp the truth, and what is hidden is deeper and truer. As it happens, he has something to say about depth in the next lecture.

After Virtue is brilliant and I keep meaning to read it again and look at his other work. I’m surprised he’s so seldom mentioned on TPF, considering how much people like to talk about ethics.

RIP

How Freudian of you. You go a bit far when you say that the unconscious is the "authentic self," in my opinion. What's missing from your view is the reciprocity between one and the other, which is more the way Freud and Adorno see it. They don't come down only on one side, so to speak.

But yeah, that art experiment is a good way to think about what Adorno says on the parallels between art and philosophy.

So Adorno's critical rationality makes use of play, intuition, mimesis, and the irrational, but channeled and controlled. This got me thinking about Antonio Damasio's Somatic Marker Hypothesis in neuroscience, popularized in Descartes' Error.

The hypothesis is that feelings, associated with emotions, motivate and guide reason in a fundamental way, such that there would be no recognizable rationality without them. If true—and it seems to be significantly backed up by science—then the Cartesian and Kantian dualism of reason and sensibility, which has been reflected in culture for hundreds of years, is wrong. As Adorno says, there is a constitutive element of the irrational in the rational.

There is a lot of overlap with other philosophies here. Nietzsche, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault all in various ways downgraded reason and put it in its bodily (or social and historical) place. For Adorno, the key thinkers were likely Nietzsche and Hegel.

Another connection is the work on metaphor by Mark Johnson and George Lakoff. Metaphor isn't just poetic decoration but is fundamental to the way we think. Perhaps without consciously thinking of it this way, Adorno enacts this in his use of play and mimesis, and in his writing—as if his playful, provocative, and paradoxical analogies are constitutive, rather than standing poetically for something more fundamental.



Creativity is a great way of tying it all together. I had been thinking of it as a kind of openness, but that's too passive, more like Kant's sensible receptiveness than the spontaneity of the understanding. Once again, I want to say, but also hesitate to say, that Adorno is taking the middle path.

LND lecture 9

I really enjoyed this lecture, but there is a lot packed into it.

1. The concept of intellectual experience contains an empiricist element, but it is much more than attending to what is "given" through the sense-data (as certain empiricists have it) (p89)
2. Because of the additional and constitutive intellectual element, such experience goes beyond immediate givens, so intellectual experience contains the danger of spiritualizing the world (p89)
3. There is a temptation "to take intellectual phenomena more seriously than perhaps they deserve in reality" (p90)
4. A way of dealing with this is with play (p90)
5. Playfulness has an honourable history in philosophy, even though many of its exemplars are placed somewhat outside the tradition or stand out as unusual (p90)
6. Play is an expression of philosophy's tragicomic existence (p90-91)
7. Inconsistency in Hegel: philosophy is just one part of human life and shouldn't be absolutized, and yet philosophy is one of the moments (elements or phases) of absolute spirit (p91)
8. What is beyond the a priori is uncontrolled and therefore a suitable domain of play (p91)
9. Philosophy needs both rigour and play, discipline and indiscipline, perhaps even rationality and irrationality (p91)
10. The irrational can take the form of the mimetic element, which is essential to philosophy but dangerous (p91-92)
11. Philosophy should appropriate the mimetic impulse, which is an impulse to identify with things and resonate with them—things different from oneself—but not to assimilate them to oneself (p92)
    [thereby mimesis becomes conceptual]
12. The place to look for this is art, which is where the mimetic impulse survives (p92)
13. Both philosophy that strives to be art and art that strives to be philosophy [e.g., conceptual art?] are bad (p92)
14. From mimesis and art, which are largely intuitive, to intuition itself: it's an element in philosophy but nothing very special (p92-93)
15. But intuition is nevertheless essential: it is a way in which thought sometimes works—underground rivers that suddenly come to the surface, or "crystallizations of an unconscious knowledge" (p93-94)
16. The organ of philosophy remains the concept (p94)
17. Philosophy is using concepts to reach beyond concepts, that is to say, it is inescapably speculative (p95)
18. Speculation in this sense is to think "beyond the point where one's thinking is backed up by facts," but in a consistent way (p95)
19. Some say that speculation is essentially idealist, but this is not so (p95)
20. Marx was a speculative thinker even though his intentions were entirely materialist (although in a sense he was actually quite idealist too—the metaphysics of the forces of production as a continuation of the World Spirit) (p95-96)
21. Speculation cannot be rejected; we need a philosophy that goes the whole hog (p97)

Before I get to the meat, one thing I left out of the list above is what he says in passing about definitions. In introducing his definition of philosophy as the use of the concept to reach beyond the concept, he says:

I am not so malicious as simply to hate all definitions and reject them. I just believe that definitions are far better located in the movement of thought, as its terminus ad quem, than as an introduction to it. — p95

It's not important for understanding this particular lecture but I bring it up because, as we approach ND itself, I am thinking about Adorno's style of presentation. It's a fact that his style is very deliberate, something he was always conscious of, and something he was forever pre-occupied by (because he didn't separate form and content). I think it will help to know how to read him, which is not always a matter of finding an answer to "what is he trying to say?" at the level of a paragraph but of keeping multiple descriptions, analogies, etc. in mind over the course of the work.

One aspect is his attitude to definition. It's a principle of his method that in his writing he avoids definitions of concepts, instead circling around them, or approaching them from different angles. (More than that, I suppose he does not even regard them as fixed points that can be honed in on)

Even though these lectures were recorded, not written, I think we've already seen this principle at work. We've seen him going over similar ground repeatedly, never satisfied with a single metaphor or encapsulation.

But I digress.

This lecture is centrally about speculation. The upshot is that he wants a middle way between speculation as metaphysics or idealism, and a kind of philosophy expunged of speculation entirely, on the model of the natural sciences. What he says parallels what he said in a previous lecture about systems: just as he wants to preserve the spirit of system, he wants to do the same for the spirit of speculation; and just as the spirit of system can be liberated from system, speculation can be liberated from its conventional forms, i.e. metaphysics and idealism. (The difference is that he wants to be able to call his philosophy speculative in some sense, but he doesn't want to call his philosophy a system—and this might indicate that the parallel is not exact).

Adorno compares his own concept of the speculative element to Hegel's, but I prefer to use Kant. My nutshell version is that for Kant, speculation is thinking that attempts to go beyond experience, but for Adorno, it is thinking that attempts to go beyond facts, but without leaving the domain of experience (since the nonidentical is part of experience).

He gets to speculation by way of some thoughts about play. What is the connection? One way to put it is that playing is uncontrolled and thereby open to what hasn't already been planned or established—the new and surprising are where it's at—and this is a way of describing speculation as defined by Adorno.

He seems to say that play is an expression of the knowledge of philosophy's tragicomic existence as the most profound and super-serious discipline of all that's nevertheless just a specialism with little social and cultural significance, just one material activity among others. This somewhat absurd situation demands a somewhat (only somewhat) irrational response: to play, to venture into uncontrolled territory.

Talk of the irrational brings him to mimesis. That's two crucial concepts introduced in this lecture, three if you include play. Compared to previous lectures, that's quite a lot.

The irrational, or at least a-rational, attitude of identifying with something is the "mimetic stance". He does not mean the impulse just to imitate the object, but to either adapt oneself to something, or to assimilate it to oneself. I think when he says that the mimetic element can degenerate into "illusion and lie," he is referring to this latter kind of mimesis, a kind of domination. Adorno is recommending the kind of mimesis we see in art, which can be a disclosure of difference.

... only by registering the non-identity of spirit and world, spirit and reality, can philosophy acquire a share in the truth – and the stance that formerly guaranteed this and continues to do so today in a certain sense is the mimetic stance. However – and I believe that this is an important point, so that you will be able to obtain clarity about the very complex relationship between philoso- phy and art – philosophy must preserve [aufheben] this aesthetic dimension, incorporating it into its binding insights into the real. It is a constitutive element of philosophy that it should speak the truth about the real – and not just function for its own satisfaction. — p92

@Banno @Fire Ologist

Break it up, you two. If you can't be civil, walk away, or I'll have to start deleting your posts.

Keeping us on the main page highlighted the calibre of the brilliant folk on this thread, no doubt leading many casual visitors to become members. — Banno

Sometimes fairness isn’t fair.

We've been moved to the Lounge — Banno

We felt that philosophy was being diluted on the main page so we closed the politics and current affairs category and moved several threads to the Lounge (Trump, Ukraine, maybe others). This one slipped through the net.

Great points.

I suggest that this process involves a sort of process of elimination, of determining false meaning. And that is how the initial infinite meaning is brought into the finite sphere, by determining falsity. This starts with determining impossibility. It is distinctly different from the scientific process which is positive, this is negative. The intellectual experience is contrasted with the pointedly non-intellectual experience of the empirical sciences. — Metaphysician Undercover

That’s quite good. I hadn’t thought about it like that.

LND lecture 8

My lecture breakdown:

1. Infinity came into philosophy from the infinitesimal calculus
2. But in German idealism, the concept of infinity degenerated into "commonplace twaddle"
3. In Kant and Hegel, philosophy shrinks to a finite, complete set of principles or axioms that is supposed to encapsulate the infinite, everything that exists
4. This sentimental vision of philosophy is narrow-minded while trying not to be, and is untenable
5. Mortals must think mortal thoughts, and not immortal ones: if philosophy possesses anything at all, then it can only be finite, and not infinite
6. In a sense, this restriction opens philosophy to the infinite once again (we saw that coming!)
7. So we need an open philosophy, not a systematic one
8. Intellectual experience: such an open philosophy would amount to "full, undiminished experience in the medium of conceptual reflection"
9. This would include a dialecticalized salvaging of empiricism
10. Comparison with art, which does something similar
11. Systematic philosophy, on the other hand, is "merely technology in the broadest sense"—critique of enlightenment rationality
12. Bergson's philosophy was a protest against enlightenment rationality
13. "Knowledge that is not dangerous does not deserve to be thought"
14. A thumbs-up for John Dewey

I think the important step is the part I've bolded. He mentioned it in the last lecture but here he emphasizes that he's talking about intellectual experience; it's not about Bergsonian intuitions or immediate givens.

I also like his reflection on art because I tend to believe that aesthetics is more than directed at art and has greater applicability to things like epistemology and ethics so while a painting is not an act, there's something to the generality of aesthetics that makes these principles applicable to thought. At the very least they're helpful avenues for exploring why we make inferences, from a philosophical rather than psychological perspective. — Moliere

Yeah, and he says a lot more about art and aesthetics in lecture 9. He's really on fire in lecture 9, by the way.

a mortal thinking mortal thoughts, though perhaps the reflection brings one closer to immortal thoughts. — Moliere

Yeah, it was inevitable that Adorno was going to say that confining ourselves to mortal thoughts is the only way we can think immortal thoughts. Just like with Zizek, I do want to roll my eyes sometimes at his dialectical shenanigans.

But that's facile and I'll rein it in, because in the end I very much like this approach.

EDIT: I'll say more tomorrow

I just made a list of the points he covers in lecture 8 and may post it tomorrow. I'm looking forward to what you say because, oddly, I don't really have anything to say about it.

Good summary.

I also found his dismissal of Krug's quill off-putting — Moliere

But maybe there were mitigating circumstances. Imagine, with the horror of the Holocaust, the onward march of dehumanizing social systems, and the failure of socialism all ever-present in your mind, and believing it's the task of philosophy to change the world, and someone starts talking about a quill (or a mug in the cupboard). He probably found it offensive.

Of course, Krug was writing around 150 years earlier, but my armchair psychologizing might help to explain Adorno's brutal attitude to the mundane. And really it's not that a quill or a mug are not grand enough or are too mundane, more that there are everyday, mundane, social issues that demand attention, whereas quills and mugs can be left aside. Which is fair enough.

In the end though, I still side with you.

That made me smile, but his following remarks are actually interesting — Moliere

Yes, I liked that too, especially "if you feel such a need," which is almost an admission that philosophy is just something some people have to do, whether or not there's a good reason for doing it.

Only the subject, by and for his conscious thinking self alone, does the full, strong, transcendental Kant. — Mww

This sentence doesn't make sense. Otherwise :up: :smile:

As an aside, I’d contribute that for mere discussion of presupposed existential reality and experiential shapes thereof, there is no conscious need of transcendental faculties, the discursive empirical cognitive faculties sufficient in themselves for it. Pure a priori, that is to say, transcendental, cognitions being already manifest in a subject’s antecedent construction of conceptual relations contained in his part of the discussion. — Mww

Seems like a weak kind of Kantianism. If you're not reducing the a priori to the empirical, why not go straight for the former?

LND lecture 7 (continued)

On to the critique of Bergson's and Husserl's attempted breakouts:

Both men, incidentally, were acting under the coercion of the same situation; both were resisting the universal dominance of causal, mechanical thinking and reacting to the unsatisfactory implications of cause-and-effect thinking for the desire to comprehend. — p70

He starts by summarizing their views.

Bergson's solution was to come up with a cognitive dualism: at the deep, primary level there is a profound ituitive grasp of the world, and then on top of that is classificatory knowledge arrived at by abstraction. His philosophy meant to locate higher truth in the former, thus resisting the mechanical thinking of science. Against rationalism, intuitive knowledge is superior to conceptual knowledge.

Husserl, while also going for some kind of intuitive grasp, did not go along with Bergson's opposition to rationalism. Instead of downgrading conceptual cognition, Husserl located concepts in objects themselves, which we grasp through "eidetic intuition".


Bergson

I really like Adorno's bit about how Proust implicitly refutes Bergson's dualism. The famous passage about the madeleine, often taken to be Bergsonian, starts with an involuntary memory—and this is the Bergsonian part—but proceeds to conceptual interpretation. There is no attending to images and intuitions without interpretation. Whereas Bergson situates higher truth in a kind of direct grasp, Proust only finds the meaning in the images with difficulty, admitting that he did not understand them at first. He also finds the need for metaphors, which Bergson regards as secondary, belonging to the classifying intellect.

I've read part of In Search of Lost Time and can confirm that it is much more intellectually elaborate than a mere registering of images. And this is inevitable: even a stream-of-consciousness narrative would be interpretative.

So, where Bergson sees a dualism in which the intellect fails to capture the deeper truths, Adorno, and performatively Proust, see a dialectical relation in which there is no truth in images and intuitions at all without intellectual interpretation.


Husserl

I'm not sure what to say about the critique of Husserl, partly because Adorno provides only a few comments. I casually read Logical Investigations years ago and have read some other bits and pieces by him, and I kind of see what Adorno is saying, but I don't think I can look at the matter in detail.

The strange fact in Husserl – and here too astonishingly little has been written about it in the relevant literature – is that what gazes out at us when I extract the pure entities from the individuations or the individual phenomena (instead of appropriating them by a process of comparison) – that what gazes out is at bottom nothing but the good old concepts of classificatory logic. So what we have here is really no more than an attempt at an ontological vindication of the concepts that are supposed not to be concepts established by the cognitive mind, but to belong intrinsically to the things themselves. But if we then look at what individual experience yields up in Husserl, what opens up to individual experience, we simply find abstract categories that are just like the categories of ordinary scientific discourse. And in consequence, in his late phase, when he sought to underpin this entire theory with a transcendental logic, these were categories with which he could effortlessly communicate. — p72

So Husserl's breakout is fake. When he strips away the empirical particulars to find the essences that reside in the objects (and which are not put into them by the mind), what he's left with is actually just the concepts handed down through science, philosophy, and logic.


Wittgenstein

For this reason, I would maintain that Wittgenstein’s statement that ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’ is the anti-philosophical statement par excellence. We should insist instead that philosophy consists in the effort to say what cannot be said, in particular whatever cannot be said directly, in a single sentence or a few sentences, but only in a context. In this sense it has to be said that the concept of philosophy is itself the contradictory effort to say, through mediation and contextualization, what cannot be said hic et nunc; to that extent phi- losophy contains an inner contradiction, that is, it is inwardly dialectical in itself. And this perhaps is the profoundest vindication of the dialectical method, namely, that philosophy in itself – as the attempt to say the unsayable, before it arrives at any particular content or any particular thesis – is dialectically determined. — p74

Incidentally, I think I've seen a few dismissive comments about Wittgenstein scattered through the works of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, and what stands out is that they probably never read late Wittgenstein, and carried on regarding him as a mere logical positivist, one of the bad guys. Sometimes when Adorno and Horkheimer use other philosophers as "occasions" for the development of their own ideas, this results in misrepresentation.

But this particular mention of Wittgenstein is not actually one of the egregious ones, and it highlights important differences between them. Adorno is unwilling to give up on philosophy's great goals (in some strange version anyway), whereas for Wittgenstein philosophy helps to fix bad thinking but the really important stuff is outside of its domain, except to achieve clear description. For Adorno, the meaningful in life remains a matter for theory, but for Wittgenstein it doesn't.


The infinite

To end the lecture he begins talking about philosophy's treatment of the infinite. I think this is continued in the next lecture so I won't say anything about it here, but what I like in this section is his comments about exhaustiveness:

Even when I was still at school, I never understood why teachers would write at the end of an essay that the topic had not been fully ‘exhausted’. This was because even then I was aware that the human mind was concerned with intensity, depth of immersion, and not a sort of quantitative completeness – of the kind, incidentally, that has an honourable pedigree going back to Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, where exhaustiveness according to the criteria of right knowledge has an explicit role to play. — p74

Ha, that's what I thought :grin:

And yet, more often than not you appeal to empirical cognitive faculties rather than transcendental ones.

But I'm being pedantic now. Carry on!

OK, sticking with Kant then. Fair enough. But do you agree it's important to make the distinction I made, or do you stand by the conflation of epistemic and metaphysical idealism? Note that I'm not saying that the conflation is necessarily devastating.

EDIT: In fact, blurring that dichotomy might be the way to go.

mind is foundational to reality—not in the sense that the world is “in” the mind, nor that mind is a kind of substance, but that any claim about reality is necessarily shaped by mental processes of judgment, perception, and understanding. — Wayfarer

The trouble is that the first statement I've bolded is a stronger claim than the second, whereas you're implying that they say the same thing. Is it the claims about reality (our knowledge) that are shaped by the subject, or reality?

It always feels like you want to be a full-on metaphysical idealist but can't quite bring yourself to do it. :wink:

I'm quite lazily picking an easy target here, but I couldn't resist.

Frankopan's The Earth Transformed — Banno

Sounds like a Guns, Germs, and Steel kind of thing. I read his books on the Silk Road. Pretty good.

It is good to know what Banno is reading. — javi2541997

Agreed. Expect some forthcoming Davidson threads, which will no doubt be very interesting.

What you call "a logical something awaiting determination" is actually a material thing, that constitutes what is called by Adorno "a substratum". Notice, "the concept of the indeterminate does not distinguish between concept and thing". This is because "indeterminate" in concept, implies no thing. This allows that the thing which is named as "the indeterminate", is negated by the self-contradicting concept, to leave only the concept. So the concept of "indeterminate" does not differentiate between concept and thing, but since it cannot be a thing, it can only be a concept.

Hegel intended to bypass Aristotle's law of identity, as indicated in my early discussion with Jersey Flight, referenced above. The law of identity puts the identity of the thing in the thing itself, by saying that to be a thing is to have an identity. Now Hegel uses a trick (I'd say sophistry) to replace the thing which has an inherent identity, with "the indeterminate", which Adorno takes to mean a lack of determination. But since to be a thing is to be determinate, and therefore to have an inherent identity, Hegel robs identity from the material world by saying it is not necessary that the material world consists of determinate things. Determinate things, things with identity, can be replaced with "the indeterminate" as the substratum. But the indeterminate is really nothing, no thing, and as such it can only be a concept, it cannot be something material. This actually denies the intelligibility of the substratum, leaving the concept of "indeterminateness", and puts identity into the concept rather than the thing. — Metaphysician Undercover

It looks to me like you're talking about what Hegel does prior to the move from indeterminate to indeterminateness that Adorno examines, because Hegel is talking about pure being from the start (from the start of the passage that Adorno analyzes). I think you've turned a linguistic critique with metaphysical consequences into a metaphysical critique from start to finish. What Adorno identifies as the substratum, the logical something, is definitely not a material thing in this case, but merely a logical subject, that which you predicate things of.

EDIT: The metaphysical consequences flow from Hegel's elimination of the implied referent in the grammar of "indeterminate." So the move to "indeterminateness" ensures that being is then exhaustively conceptual, with no thought of a substrate.

That aside, your position on Hegel's prior move away from objects looks kind of like it might be consistent with Adorno, but I'm not sure.

I find the following passage may possibly be a hint at a solution: — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes! I was going to say something about that. But I think what it means is that the breakout from the conceptual can only happen conceptually, through the perpetual self-criticism of the concepts we're using—not that we can stop thinking in concepts and just attend to images and intuitions as Bergson might be seen to be recommending.

But it goes a bit deeper than that. It is saying something about the self-recognition of the subject as subject, or as one pole of a relation. I don't really understand this bit:

In other words, the subject is shown that it is itself something postulated, or, at any rate, that it is also something postulated, and not simply by demonstrating that the Not-I is itself a postulate. — p73

EDIT: OK, I get it. Rather than thinking of what is outside the subject as constituted by the subject, it should be the other way round: the subject depends on, is in a manner of speaking postulated by, something outside itself. One has take the indirect route, recognizing that the self is not primary and self-sufficient, before one can grasp the nonconceptual. To breakout directly is again to impose one's concepts uncritically on the nonconceptual, which is what Bergson and Husserl did. But it's not enough to just show this, i.e., that one's (direct) assertion of the existence and character of what is outside the subject is a reflection of the subject, which is why he says "not simply by demonstrating that the Not-I is itself a postulate." One has to analyze the subject's role, not just state that it has one.

I think we reached similar understandings @Metaphysician Undercover

No, I'm happy the way it is and I'm in no rush, except that I enjoy the material. :cool:

I don't think this is a necessary conclusion. I think what is implied is that the forces of production overcoming the limits set by society is in some sense inevitable, but revolution is not. So overcoming the limits of society may occur in ways other than revolution. Look at the way modern technology has 'revolutionized' communications for example. The technology has globalized communication capacity to an extent far beyond the laws imposed by some societies. Changes in technology are faster than the capacity of the lawmakers to keep up, so laws are sort of posterior to the changes already brought on, they are reactive. Now, things like genetic manipulation, and AI are just beginning, and they will overcome limits of society which were not designed to reign them. This type of overcoming the limits doesn't necessitate revolution, but it indicates the need for significant, even structural, or radical societal change to keep pace with globalization. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, that's fair. It looked like he was referring only to the revolutionary seizure of the means of production because he was taking on Marx's viewpoint, temporarily setting aside for the sake of argument his very real concerns along the lines you've set out here.

Adorno applies substantial criticism to Hegel at this point. I believe the central issue here is the violence which Hegel does to the traditional "law of identity" derived from Aristotle. — Metaphysician Undercover

Always with the Aristotle, MU. :wink:

I guess you've reached the same conclusion as Adorno's linguistic analysis but from an Aristotelian perspective, which would be perfectly fine with me except that I wonder if it's right. It looks like an accidental alignment.

When Hegel writes about the indeterminate, he is not talking about beings, as in individual objects, but about what is indeterminate. In using the adjective indeterminate one grammatically points to a substantive, a logical something awaiting determination—but this is lost when he moves to indeterminateness, because the latter is a free-standing abstract quality, a universal. It's a subtle shift from a realist grammar to an idealist grammar, even though the whole time he's just talking about being. It's more a linguistic point than one about identity.

So he proceeds to criticize formalism, and the way that it attempts to remove content from philosophy. Heidegger is the chosen example. He explains that Heidegger does this to avoid vagueness, randomness and arbitrariness, and he advises that this is the other extreme to be avoided. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes. Expect more of this in lecture 7, which has a brief critique of Heidegger's recourse to agrarian motifs, which I looked at here.

But this is a demand that the higher order be explained in terms of, and ordered to, the lower, i.e. a cat is already assumed to be a mere concatenation lower constituents, as opposed to the higher, unifying principle itself.

Whereas, the focus on the principle of unity would seem to be a focus on "yes-saying," on actuality and form. An idealism? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, I think this is the tension that Adorno is dealing with. I think it's fair to say he is often arguing for a bottom-up approach against the higher idealist unity, but he would not regard scientific reductionism as an example of proper bottom-up reasoning, because it tends to view the lower as mere instances of laws which I think he views as idealistic impositions. So when Adorno advocates the "priority of the object" he is against both reductionism and the higher unity—or maybe I should say that in viewing this as dialectical, we might be able to reach some better unity?

LND lecture 7

(Should I wait and allow people to catch up? Should we set a schedule from now on?)

In lecture 6 Adorno spoke of the big challenge facing philosophy post-Hegel:

In other words, can the self-reflection of the concept succeed in breaking through the wall that the concept erects around itself and its concerns by virtue of its own conceptual nature. — p63

And he identified two bad options remaining if philosophy fails to face this challenge of breaking out of the conceptual: the formal or the arbitrary.

Lecture 7, containing criticisms of a few notable philosophies that attempt a breakout, is very much a prelude to the following lectures, in which he discusses intellectual experience. So everything in lecture 7 leads to this:

[Philosophy's] task is not to reduce the entire world to a prefabricated system of categories, but rather the opposite, viz. to hold itself open to whatever experience presents itself to the mind

On the way there he criticizes Bergson, Husserl, and as always Heidegger. The criticisms are interesting and it’s worth trying to understand them, because (a) we haven’t read his extended critique of Husserl in Against Epistemology—so these lectures fill a gap—and (b) there’s an extended critique of Heidegger in ND, so this is good preparation.

Philosophical systems, particularly Hegel's, have a big advantage in that they assume...

that spirit is the sole reality and that all reality is reducible to spirit. — p66

Without this, we're in the realm of arbitrary material experience. Adorno then explains how this problem plays out in Heidegger:

Heidegger’s philosophy, which claims not to be formal and which nevertheless needs to draw itself together into supreme, abstract categories, this philosophy, when it then enters into the material side of things, has every interest in making sure that the transition into materiality does not appear to be as haphazard as it must be in reality, given the vagueness of the concept of existence. In consequence, it almost inevitably has recourse in its material propositions to the past, to conditions that have become historical and that have acquired a kind of aura through that historicity; the aura that events have developed in this way and no other, and which in addition, if we may put it like this, are in a sense pre-ordained. — p67

So Heidegger borrows a sentimental attachment to pre-modern ways as the way things are meant to be, i.e., their "aura," to compensate for the lack of a system to give material life meaning in his philosophy. But which "material propositions" is Adorno referring to? Well, some examples are in Heidegger's description of agrarian life in a Black Forest farmhouse, presented as a paradigm of authenticity:

Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and sky, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope, looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. It gave it the wide overhanging shingle roof whose proper slope bears up under the burden of snow, and that, reaching deep down, shields the chambers against the storms of the long winter nights. It did not forget the altar corner behind the community table; it made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the “tree of the dead” — for that is what they call a coffin there; the Totenbaum — and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. — Heidegger, Being Dwelling Thinking

According to Adorno, such archaic ways thus become "hypostases of the transitory belonging to the realm of being," meaning that transitory historical ways of life are turned into something timeless with a special relation to being itself. It's easy to see how Adorno views this as fundamentally reactionary.

Then he repeats his characterization of where philosophy stands, or what he thinks the task of philosophy is:

I believe that this allows us to distinguish quite precisely between the programme I am trying to expound to you and Hegel’s philosophy, to which it is so closely related. The distinction I would make is to say that the interest of philosophy can be found to lie at the precise point where he and the entire philosophical tradition have no interest, namely, in the non-conceptual. — p68

Next he looks at an early criticism of Hegel by Krug, who "objected that if he really wished to do justice to Hegel’s philosophy he would have to be able to deduce the quill with which he had been writing."

Incidentally, something that annoys me about Adorno—and I say that as someone who finds his personality mostly very likeable—is that he regards such examples as "idiotic," as far too trivial for philosophy. Philosophy should concern itself only with essential matters, not the everyday. Me, I prefer his idea, presented in a later lecture (I've been reading ahead), that philosophy has to involve play, where he seems to be arguing along the lines of the Zen saying that in great matters, we should act as if they are small; and in small matters, act as if they are great.

But here, with the quill example, Adorno seems to reveal his elitist over-seriousness. Thus he says he disagrees with Plato, who in the Theaetetus said that...

if investigations of great matters are to be properly worked out we ought to practise them on small and easier matters before attacking the very greatest. — Plato

It's clear that Adorno would not be sympathetic to talk of tables or mugs in cupboards. Thus I see a tension in Adorno's philosophical temperament—and it might be philosophically significant, because isn't negative dialects supposed to "micrologically" open itself up to reality?

His antipathy to Krug's quill might also be an example of something else he shares with Hegel, namely an avoidance of and suspicion of concrete examples. I imagine this will continue to annoy me, since I'm a great believer in the power of such examples. On the other hand, in the lectures at least, he does provide a lot of good examples (though often with some embarrassed apology) so it's not as if he doesn't understand their use in conveying ideas.

Anyway, despite his sympathy with Hegel's dismissive attitude he agrees that Krug's criticism gets to the heart of the problem: in this system which is supposed to encompass everything, where have the real things gone? How do you get from these highfalutin concepts down to the stuff of life?

Then he says that philosophy ought to follow Freud's example and "concentrate on matters that have not been pre-digested by the pre-existing concepts of the prevailing philosophy and science." I can definitely go along with this, and believe it's fundamental to good philosophy.

He goes on to criticize two attempted breakouts: Bergson and Husserl. I'll save that for another post.

A friend's sister was a jazz singer here in Australia. One Christmas, about twenty years ago, we were listening to some of her recordings. My friend said to me, "You realize if it wasn't for the microphone she wouldn't have a career. It helped create an art form." I’d never thought about it until then. — Tom Storm

Exactly. You're way ahead of me because I hadn't really thought about it till quite recently.

I have some difficulty with Adorno's view that the kind of singing I've been celebrating here---the close microphone technique enabled by recording technology---is a domestication and commodification of the voice, such that operatic singing, even though it was as historical as popular music, at least strove for truth, whereas the latter strives to please the masses. I'm wondering how I can do more to argue against this than assert my personal taste.

One angle: if we agree that truth is in self-expression, then the singing in popular music is, or can be, much more truthful, because it is not at the whim of a composer and doesn't have to satisfy the particular requirements forced upon it by large concert halls and huge orchestras; thus there is greater vocal individuality and directness of expression enabled by a technology which, nevertheless, is used to produce commodities.

Cool. I just wanted to emphasize the objective element of technological affordance (I won't say determinism) and the co-evolution of technology and music. Not everyone goes along with it!

To put personal taste in perspective we could (a) identify the equivalent changes---less obviously technological, perhaps more social---that led to operatic singing, demonstrating that no type of music is orginary; and (b) at the same time notice that in all styles and eras of music there are gradients of subtlety. A personal preference for one style might tempt one to claim that its gradients of subtlety are finer than those of others.

On the other hand, the microphone could be seen to have allowed music to return to a time before concert halls. It allowed singers to sing like they used to sing in taverns and forest glades (in my imagination).

But there's a danger of seeing a linear progression here. People still sing in taverns.

You're right, it is subjective, my father enjoyed opera and thought the range and texture of singing was so much more refined and relatable than the 'screaming banalities' of rock music. I guess it's what we're used to. It's certainly the case that more people can participate in rock, no matter how idiosyncratic and odd their voice might be. — Tom Storm

Rock music does have a lot of screaming banality, but I wouldn't say that exemplifies microphone singing. Think instead of Billie Holiday (soft and emotionally expressive), Bing Crosby (relaxed, conversational), Leonard Cohen (you get the idea).

The differences are real, not merely in the ear of the beholder.

Is there an aesthetical link between the sounds of the industrial era and the sounds of Rock music? Can Rock only work in an industrial environment? Or is that pure coincidence?

Does our contemporary music automatically imitate the sound of our contemporary environment? When we live in forests, will our music always sound like a forest? — Quk

The crucial technological changes took place in jazz shortly before rock n roll: amplification to allow guitars to be heard over the other instruments, and microphones for recording, which had the effect of changing the way singers sang.

But does this result in sounds that are reminiscent of the technology itself? With amplification, sort of sometimes, particularly when rock n roll developed into rock in the mid to late 60s (with lots of distortion and feedback). With singing, not really. To my ears, the softer, more subtle, more intimate singing of the era of recording, with all the timbral complexity and diversity, is a lot less ugly than operatic singing, which is relatively one-dimensional and usually quite offensive (again, to my ears).

So with singing at least, the technology actually emphasized the humanity of the voice.

Not much there I disagree with. But...

However, the creative aspect, something completely new for the future, is a requirement to keep the forces of production on the good instead of the bad (the bad being essentially a lack of unity, aimless anarchy). — Metaphysician Undercover

I'm not quite sure what you mean here. When he says that "the forces of production, in other words human energies and their extension in technology, have a tendency of their own to overcome the limits that have been set by society," and that we must not think of this as a natural law, he seems to be unambiguously equating such an overcoming with revolutionary emancipation.

On the other hand, it is the forces of production applied instrumentally that he objects to, i.e., rational means to sometimes irrational ends (destruction of nature, nuclear weapons). So yes, you’re right to emphasize the importance of the goal for Adorno, since the big problem is the tendency in modern rationality to establish means without asking what the goal should be.

I think what I secretly want is to read it again and have my previous opinion confirmed, but this time backed up by greater knowledge and penetrating analysis.

The answer is simple: I read it years ago and my taste has changed, so instead of continuing to say I don't like it I ought to see if maybe I do like it, because Tom is wise.

I think it's my favourite novel, and every time I read it, it's a different, richer, more elegiac book. For me, the story's enchantment lies in how it's told; the characters and the plot are secondary. Nevertheless, I totally understand the man-child James Gatz, putting on wealth and class in order to catch his girl. FSF's writing for me is a blissful aesthetic experience. I sometimes just read a few paragraphs at random and marvel. Now, I find myself often doing the same with other writers like Bellow, Nabokov , Barth and TC Boyle. — Tom Storm

Quite persuasive. I might try it again. I don’t feel comfortable on this “Great Gatsby is overrated” bandwagon. Although, even if it’s great, naming it as the greatest novel of all time has got to be an overrating. (I’m referring to the list mentioned by @Baden)

I do like Nabokov and Barth very much.