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.

To this extent the aesthetic moment is, albeit for totally different reasons than in Schelling, not accidental to philosophy. Not the least of its tasks is to sublate this in the committalness [Verbindlichkeit] of its insights into what is real. This latter and play are its poles. The affinity of philosophy to art does not justify the borrowing of this by the former, least of all by virtue of the intuitions which barbarians consider the prerogative of art. Even in aesthetic labor they hardly ever strike in isolation, as lightning-bolts from above. They grow out of the formal law of the construction; if one wished to titrate them out, they would melt away. Thinking by no means protects sources, whose freshness would emancipate it from thought; no type of cognition is at our disposal, which would be absolutely divergent from that which disposes over things, before which intuitionism flees panic-stricken and in vain.

The philosophy which imitated art, which wanted to become a work of art, would cancel itself out. It would postulate the identity-claim: that its objects vanish into it, indeed that they grant their mode of procedure a supremacy which disposes over the heterogenous as a priori material, while the relationship of philosophy to the heterogenous is virtually thematic. What art and philosophy have in common is not form or patterning procedures, but a mode of conduct which forbids pseudo-morphosis. Both keep faith with their own content through their opposition; art, by making itself obdurate against its meaning; philosophy, by not clinging to anything immediate. The philosophical concept does not dispense with the longing which animates art as something non-conceptual and whose fulfillment 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.

That would explain the part about canceling itself out, and "pseudo-morphosis". A quick Google search tells me that this is a concept proposed by Oswald Spengler in "The Decline of the West". — Metaphysician Undercover

To me, Adorno misrepresents the concept of "infinity", and misrepresents philosophy, in general — Metaphysician Undercover

On the difficulty of the text — Baden

The illusion that it [philosophy] could captivate the essence in the finitude of its determinations must be given up.

... would have its content in the polyvalence of objects not organized into a scheme, which impinge on it or which it seeks out; it would truly deliver itself over to them, would not employ them as a mirror, out of which it rereads itself, confusing its mirror-image with the concretion. It would be nothing other than the full, unreduced experience in the medium of conceptual reflection; even the “science of the experience of consciousness” would degrade the content of such experiences to examples of categories.

What spurs philosophy to the risky exertion of its own infinity is the unwarranted expectation that every individual and particular which it decodes would represent, as in Leibniz’s monad, that whole in itself, which as such always and again eludes it

Cognition holds none of its objects completely.

It is not supposed to prepare the fantasm of a whole.

Thus it cannot be the task of a philosophical interpretation of works of art to establish their identity with the concept, to gobble them up in this; the work however develops itself through this in its truth.

What may be glimpsed in this, be it the formal process of abstraction, be it the application of concepts to what is grasped under their definitions, may be of use as technics in the broadest sense: for philosophy, which refuses to suborn itself, it is irrelevant. In principle it can always go astray; solely for that reason, achieve something. Skepticism and pragmatism, latest of all Dewey’s strikingly humane version of the latter, recognized this; this is however to be added into the ferment of an emphatic philosophy, not renounced in advance for the sake of its test of validity.

Against the total domination of method, philosophy retains, correctively, the moment of play, which the tradition of its scientifization would like to drive out of it.

The non-naïve thought knows how little it encompasses what is thought, and yet must always hold forth as if it had such completely in hand. It thereby approximates clowning.

What aims for what is not already a priori and what it would have no statutory power over, belongs, according to its own concept, simultaneously to a sphere of the unconstrained, which was rendered taboo by the conceptual essence.

The concept cannot otherwise represent the thing which it repressed, namely mimesis, than by appropriating something of this latter in its own mode of conduct, without losing itself to it.

So I figured I would post these thoughts to the community, as it would know best what to do with them. — Pussycat

Philosophy, Hegel’s included, invites the general objection that insofar as it would have compulsory concepts as its material, it already characterizes itself in advance as idealistic.

As a matter of fact none of them, not even extreme empiricism, can haul off the facta bruta [Latin: brute facts] and present them like anatomical cases or physics experiments; none, as so many paintings tempt one to believe, glue specific things onto the text.

But the argument in its formal generality grasps the concept as fetishistically as the manner in which it naively explicates itself within its domain, as a self-sufficient totality, which philosophical thinking cannot do anything about. In truth all concepts, even philosophical ones, move towards what is non-conceptual, because they are for their part moments of the reality, which necessitated – primarily for the purpose of controlling nature – their formation.

That which appears as the conceptual mediation from the inside, the pre-eminence of its sphere, without which nothing could be known, may not be confused with what it is in itself. Such an appearance [Schein] of the existent-in-itself lends it the movement which exempts it from the reality, within which it is for its part harnessed.

The requirement that philosophy must operate with concepts is no more to be made into a virtue of this priority than, conversely, the critique of this virtue is to be the summary verdict over philosophy.

Meanwhile, the insight that its conceptual essence would not be its absolute in spite of its inseparability is again mediated through the constitution of the concept; it is no dogmatic or even naively realistic thesis.

Concepts such as that of being in the beginning of Hegel’s Logic indicate first of all that which is emphatically non-conceptual; they signify, as per Lask’s expression, beyond themselves.

It is in their nature not to be satisfied by their own conceptuality, although to the extent that they include the non-conceptual in their meaning, they tend to make this identical to itself and thereby remain entangled in
themselves.

Their content is as immanent in the intellectual sense as transcendent in the ontical sense to such. By means of the self-consciousness of this they have the capacity of discarding their fetishism.

Philosophical self-reflection assures itself of the non-conceptual in the concept. Otherwise this latter would be, after Kant’s dictum, null, ultimately no longer the concept of something and thereby void.

The philosophy which recognizes this, which cancels out the autarky of the concept, strikes the blinders from the eyes. That the concept is a concept even when it deals with the existent, hardly changes the fact that it is for its part enmeshed in a non-conceptual whole against which it seals itself off solely through its reification, which indeed created it as a concept.

The concept is a moment like any other in dialectical logic. Its mediated nature through the non conceptual survives in it by means of its significance, which for its part founds its conceptual nature.

It is characterized as much by its relation to the non-conceptual – as in keeping with traditional epistemology, where every definition of concepts ultimately requires non-conceptual, deictic moments – as the contrary, that the abstract unity of the onta subsumed under it are to be separated from the ontical.

To change this direction of conceptuality, to turn it towards the non-identical, is the hinge of negative dialectics. Before the insight into the constitutive character of the non-conceptual in the concept, the compulsion of identity, which carries along the concept without the delay of such a reflection, dissolves. Its self-determination leads away from the appearance [Schein] of the concept’s being-in-itself as a unity of meaning, out towards its own meaning.

That is the representation derived from the dialectical approach, it is a false condition. It is a faulty ontology, the manifestation of an idealism which holds as a primary principle, a faulty generalization "Spirit". Notice what is said after that phrase, "a true one [ontology] would be emancipated from it [dialectics]". — Metaphysician Undercover

Having something at your disposal is the opposite of being dominated by it — Metaphysician Undercover

The self-valorization of capital – the creation of surplus-value – is therefore the determining, dominating and overriding purpose of the capitalist; it is the absolute motive and content of his activity. And in fact it is no more than the rationalized motive and aim of the hoarder – a highly impoverished and abstract content which makes it plain that the capitalist is just as enslaved by the relationships of capitalism as is his opposite pole, the worker, albeit in a quite different manner. — Capital vol.1, p.990

Clearly he is noy referring to those dominated by it — Metaphysician Undercover

Notice at the end of my quoted passage, the generality which Hegel called "the Spirit" is "the product of particular interests". — Metaphysician Undercover

If that is not the point we disagree on then what do you think we disagree on? — Metaphysician Undercover

Therefore, if we have any desire to resolve this disagreement between you and I, we need to pay very close attention to how Adorno describes subject-to-subject relations, and how he concludes the section. — Metaphysician Undercover

Notice, the system is not absolute Spirit, but it is the property of an elite few who cannot even know to what extent it is their own. — Metaphysician Undercover

There, in theory, each subject is reduced to the same common denominator, — Metaphysician Undercover

The point where we disagree is concerning Adorno's attitude toward contradiction within particular objects. I think he rejects this, and all the examples he gives of such, are examples of mistakes induced by Hegelian dialectics which he is rejecting as the wrong approach. — Metaphysician Undercover

The system is not that of the absolute Spirit, but of the most conditioned of those who have it at their disposal, and cannot even know how much it is their own.

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. — Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The subjective pre-formation of the material social production-process, entirely separate from its theoretical constitution, is that which is unresolved, irreconcilable to subjects.

Their own reason which produces identity through exchange, as unconsciously as the transcendental subject, remains incommensurable to the subjects which it reduces to the same common denominator: the subject as the enemy of the subject.

The preceding generality is true so much as untrue: true, because it forms that “ether”, which Hegel called the Spirit; untrue, because its reason is nothing of the sort, its generality the product of particular interests.

That is why the philosophical critique of identity steps beyond philosophy. That it requires, nonetheless, what is not subsumed under identity – in Marxian terminology, use-value – so that life can continue to exist even under the ruling relations of production, is what is ineffable in utopia. It reaches deep into that which secretly forswears its realization. In view of the concrete possibility of utopia, dialectics is the ontology of the false condition. A true one would be emancipated from it, as little system as contradiction.

The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.

Such a concept of dialectics casts doubt on its possibility.

The anticipation of universal movement in contradictions seems, however varied, to teach the totality of the Spirit, precisely the identity-thesis just nullified.

The Spirit, which would unceasingly reflect on the contradiction in things, ought to be this itself, if it is to be organized according to the form of the contradiction.

The truth, which in the idealistic dialectic drives past every particularity as something false in its one-sidedness, would be that of the whole; if it were not already thought out, then the dialectical steps would lose their motivation and direction.

Against this one must counter that the object of intellectual experience would itself be the antagonistic system, something utterly real, and not just by virtue of its mediation to the cognizing subject which rediscovers itself therein. The compulsory constitution of reality which idealism projected into the regions of the subject and Spirit is to be retranslated back out of these.

What remains of idealism is that society, the objective determinant of the Spirit, is just as much the epitome of subjects as their negation.

In it they are unknowable and disempowered; that is why it is so desperately objective and a concept, which idealism mistakes as something positive.