Just to add: for Hegel, the experience of freedom can only happen in a social situation. We give one another freedom — frank

Yes, Adorno makes that point explicitly in the lecture. Maybe I wasn't clear.

That article also notes that there are some who read Hegel and ditch the mysticism that it's couched in. — frank

Surely that describes all Hegelians these days?

LND, Lecture 2

At the end of the first lecture Adorno distinguishes negative dialectics from idealist dialectics (exemplified by Hegel) and also from dialectical materialism, the official philosophy of the Soviet Union and its friends. But he anticipates an objection: what justifies the label "negative" to this distinct strand of dialectics, since all dialectical philosophy is importantly negative anyway, in that it proceeds by contradiction and critique:

thought itself – and thought is tied to subjectivity – is negativity, and to that extent negativity, and especially dialectical thinking, is negative dialectics from the outset. — p.11

The second lecture aims to answer this objection by explaining the unique way in which negative dialectics is negative. Adorno does this by (a) comparing his philosophy to Hegel's, showing how it negates the latter's positivity, and (b) describing some of the other relevant meanings of negativity.

The editors have given this lecture the title "The negation of negation," which is the Hegelian move that Adorno is criticizing in (a). I got a bit lost in Adorno's Hegelian excursions but I get it now.


The negation of the negation is positive (Hegel)

Adorno puts it like this:

You must be mindful of the fact that you once learnt in arithmetic that a minus number times a minus number yields a plus, or, in other words, that the negation of negation is the positive, the affirmative. This is in fact one of the general assumptions underlying the Hegelian philosophy. — p.14

Personally I don't really see the need for this analogy, since the idea of double negation in logic and ordinary language is simple enough: "It's not the case that I am not wearing a hat" (negation of negation) means that I am wearing a hat (positive).

Anyway, negative dialectics is different from Hegelian dialectics in that the negation of the negation does not result in a positive. It is not an "affirmation," as it is in Hegel's synthesis or sublation, where contradictions are reconciled and there is progress to a higher stage.

Adorno goes on to describe how the negation of the negation works in Hegel. I'll quote him and then put it into my own words:

The idea that he develops repeatedly as early as the Phenomenology, admittedly with a somewhat different emphasis, and then above all in the Philosophy of Right, in the very crude form in which I have explained it to you – this idea is that the subject, which as thinking subject criticizes given institutions, represents in the first instance the emancipation of the spirit. And, as the emancipation of the spirit, it rep- resents the decisive transition from its mere being-in-itself to a being-for-itself. In other words, the stage that has been reached here is one in which spirit confronts objective realities, social realities, as an autonomous, critical thing, and this stage is recognized as being necessary. But Hegel goes on to reproach spirit for restricting itself in the process, for being itself narrow-minded. This is because it elevates one aspect of spirit in its abstractness to the status of sole truth. It fails to recognize that this abstract subjectivity, which is itself based on the model of Kant’s practical reason and, to a certain extent, on Fichte’s subjective concept of free action – that this subjectivity is a mere aspect that has turned itself into an absolute; it overlooks the fact that it owes its own substance, its forms, its very existence to the objective forms and existence of society; and that it actually only becomes conscious of itself by conceiving of the seemingly alien and even repressive institutions as being like itself, by comprehending them as subjective and perceiving them in their necessity. Here we see one of the crucial turning points of Hegel’s philosophy, not to say one of its decisive tricks. It consists in the idea that subjectivity which merely exists for itself, in other words, a critical, abstract, negative subjectivity – and here we see the entrance of an essential notion of negativity – that this subjectivity must negate itself, that it must become conscious of its own limitations in order to be able to transcend itself and enter into the positive side of its negation, namely into the institutions of society, the state, the objective and, ultimately, absolute spirit. — p.14

In other words, the progressive thinker as subject stands against their social context, criticizing the institutions of the status quo, and in such a negative stance represents the emancipation of the spirit (think of Enlightenment thinkers criticizing monarchy). But this negation of institutions, this so-called abstract freedom or abstract subjectivity, is one-sided and unbalanced: it forgets that the ability to critique institutions is itself a product of institutions (like universities). Therefore another negation is required, the negation of the original critical stance, leading to a reconciliation in which the subject's freedom is no longer abstract but is mediated by institutions (parliament limits the power of the monarchy). This last stage is the positive outcome of the process.

In Hegel's philosophy, being-in-itself is unreflective existence, whereas being-for-itself is subjectivity that is self-aware and asserting its independence.

So the Hegelian scheme looks like this:

1. Being-in-itself: Monarchy as historically necessary

2. Being-for-itself: Critique arises from monarchy's contradictions

3. Sublation (Aufhebung): Institutions are reformed through their own negation (e.g., constitutionalism, preserving monarchy while taking on Enlightenment criticism)

I think this is the basic form of the dialectic, and it involves determinate negation (which might just refer to stage 2, I'm not sure). The process can also be represented with thesis-antithesis-synthesis, but the risk of that model is that it suggests external conflict, where in fact Hegel's emphasis is on internal antagonism, unravelling from within.


Adorno's critique

Adorno congratulates Hegel for pointing out that stage 2 is one of self-deception: no man is an island, the subject is a product of "the institution" (which here can refer to any identifiable social structure, like a social class, and not just official ones). The critical subject is not independent of what they are criticizing.

Human beings are in fact ζωον πολιτικóν, ‘political animals’, in the sense that they can only survive by virtue of society and social institutions to which, as autonomous and critical subjectivity, they stand opposed. And with his criticism of the illusion that what is closest to us, namely our own self and its consciousness, is in fact the first and fundamental reality, Hegel has – and this is something we must emphasize – made a decisive contribution to our understanding of society and the relationship of individual to society. Without this Hegelian insight, a theory of society as we understand it today would not really have been possible. – So what I am saying is that he destroyed the illusion of the subject's being-in-itself and showed that the subject is itself an aspect of social objectivity. — p.16

Adorno, who studied the Critique of Pure Reason with a private tutor around the age of 16 or 17, had taken on board Kant's "Refutation of Idealism"—which says that the existence of the external world is a necessary condition for self-awareness over time—and he identifies a similar thrust in Hegel, who advances beyond Kant by socializing and historicizing that subjectivity.

Adorno thinks this is great, but the problem is that Hegel is too uncritical of the reformed institutions. The dialectical movement resolves in the institutions, giving them the upper hand, as if the self-asserting subjectivity, so-called abstract freedom, represented a wayward child who had to be brought to heel.

Adorno sees this as oppressive or at the very least potentially and actually so, because it can result not in a properly mediated freedom but a regression of the subject back to the state of unfreedom:

However – and this is precisely the point at which criticism of Hegel has to begin if we are to justify the formulation of a negative dialectics – we must ask this question: is this objectivity which we have shown to be a necessary condition and which subsumes abstract subjectivity in fact the higher factor? Does it not rather remain precisely what Hegel reproached it with being in his youth, namely pure externality, the coercive collective? Does not the retreat to this supposedly higher authority signify the regression of the subject, which had earlier won its freedom only with great efforts, with infinite pains? — p.16

He gives the sad example of Lukacs, one of Adorno's intellectual heroes, who, in a feat of doublethink, denied the correctness of his own position in criticizing the institution of the Communist Party, of which he was a member—while at the same time knowing that his position was better than theirs. Thus he sided with objectivity against his own subjectivity. This was the "coercive collective" in action.

I believe that I do not have to spell out for you the implications of such a statement. It would imply simply that, with the assistance of the dialectic, whatever has greater success, whatever comes to prevail, to be generally accepted, has a higher degree of truth than the consciousness that can see through its fraudulent nature. In actual fact, ideology in the Eastern bloc is largely determined by this idea. A further implication is that mind would amputate itself, that it would abdicate its own freedom and simply adapt to the needs of the big battalions. To accept such a course of action does not appear possible to me. — p.17

So this is why, for Adorno, the negation of the negation does not automatically result in a positive, in an affirmation, in anything we ought to be affirming.

In the rest of the lecture, he leaves behind the Hegelian stuff and defines negativity in other, more intuitive, ways, most notably the idea of "abstract positivity," which I believe can be related to the contemporary concepts of toxic positivity and cruel optimism. I may cover that in another post.

As far as I can tell, the OP is asking if Tarski's T-Schemas can be used to develop better LLMs, ones that do not come out with false statements, since they are constrained to produce statements that are actually true.

How does that work?

I'm used to thinking it was just the Frankfurt School who reacted like that so it's interesting to learn there were many others. On the other hand, Adorno seemed to be thinking along those lines pretty early, before fascism got into power in Germany.

I will go read the first lecture before trying to say anything more substantial. — Leontiskos

The more the merrier.

I see. Well, if the belief that any philosophy loses its legitimacy when it oversteps the boundaries of material experience and claims metaphysical knowledge makes you an ontological antirealist, then I guess you're right. He is against ontology insofar as it aims for an ultimate answer, an unhistorical, un-socially-mediated truth about what the world is made of at bottom, which is a project doomed to failure.

On the other hand, he does aim to "prioritize the object" and he is a kind of materialist. The world of experience is not entirely amenable to concepts, and it's unpredictable, because there is more to it than the subject puts into it, even though there's a subject-object reciprocity.

I think it’s precisely because they had ceased to believe the proletariat was the revolutionary class that they — Marcuse, most notably — had such hope in the students. But Adorno didn’t share that hope.

Otherwise yeah.

LND, Lecture 1 (continued)

I'll briefly look at one more thing in lecture 1. It's the passage where he puts his cards on the table:

But I have the best of intentions about showing you that the factors that define reality as antagonistic are the same factors as those which constrain mind, i.e. the concept, and force it into its intrinsic contradictions. To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. — p.9

In other words, both in thought (the concept) and in society (the object), contradiction stems from or reveals the drive to master nature, which becomes also the drive to master people. This is because mastery as enacted in the world is reflected mentally in the principle of identity, which is the drive to make everything like oneself or subject to oneself.

So in ND he is reiterating and generalizing what he and Horkheimer were saying almost twenty years before in Dialectic of Enlightenment:

It is the identity of mind and its correlative, the unity of nature, which subdues the abundance of qualities.

The generality of the ideas developed by discursive logic, power in the sphere of the concept, is built on the foundation of power in reality. — Dialectic of Enlightenment, The Concept of Enlightenment

In that earlier work, the target is enlightenment, but in ND he is looking deeper, so as so find a method or model of thinking. I won't say more about it at this stage but it's good to keep in mind.

This little quote clears a couple of things up for me. It explains why Adorno backed away from supporting any sort of political activism. It affirms that he was an ontological anti-realist, and he would have sympathized with surrealism. — frank

I don't think the quotation explains his reluctance to support political activism, I don't think it affirms that he was an ontological antirealist, and I don't think he was an antirealist.

EDIT: Actually I suppose the idea that theory ought to be independent of praxis was at the root of his scepticism towards activism — but it doesn't explain his opposition to the concrete form that activism took in the sixties, i.e., why exactly he did not think much of the student protesters around 1968.

I don't know what to say about all that MU. Your notion of concepts and objects seems incommensurable with mine, such that we're talking past each other. I'm ready to move past it, but I'll be interested to see if your questions are answered later on.

Looks good.

So making it analytic basically involves saying the same thing but without the rhetorical flourishes and excessive Latinate verbiage? :wink:

So that leads me to frame Adorno's project in the following way. Real things don't quite fit our mental categories, but we cannot just deal with this using different categories, because all conceptualization involves abstraction, generalization, and exclusion, so different concepts will just obscure resistant particularity in different ways. Thus the problem is deep in conceptualization itself, and only a new way of thinking, amounting to a new way of using concepts — one that is always negative, that is, declining to shout "YES" and sit back with satisfaction at having matched reality or reached a synthesis — can give space to particularity and to the richness and messiness of the real world.

Without knowing much about the method of constellations that he will introduce later, from what I can glean it's something like very deliberately using clusters of partially successful concepts, no doubt always flexible and shifting. Is that along the lines of Zizek's use of parallax, I wonder?

But wouldn't that count as a positive answer to the problem of identity thinking? :chin:

That you, Adorno, and others believe that "society" refers to an object, rather than to a concept, because it is something real with "an objective structure", does not really prove that this is the truth. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, I just took a first stab at making it apparent. But if you're looking for a refutation of idealism in Adorno you might be disappointed.

But consider: it is the case that I live in an organized group of people, and that the way this group is organized has effects on me, providing opportunities for and imposing limits on my actions. Since it is so important, it is one of the things I think about, one of the things I reason about with concepts.

Some philosophers might say that money, government, and society are not things, even are not real, variously because those purported objects do not have physical properties, are socially constructed, are unstable chunks of discourse, are secretly the names of mental constructs, and so on. Mereological nihilists will even say there are no composite objects at all.

I don't intend to refute those philosophers — some of those positions are probably consistent with mine anyway. The point is that individual human beings live in the context of groups that have effects on those individuals and which are also affected by them — and which those individuals can think about, making society an object of thought experienced as something beyond their thoughts, and thus an object.

Most importantly for Adorno, what we think about does not become thereby exhausted by our thought, i.e., it is more than conceptual. It's true that he hasn't refuted idealism, and he won't try. He will try to give you his picture of the world. This will happen through a kind of persuasion.

Insisting that society is not an object seems to miss the point — but it's possible I did not understand you.

EDIT: Important to note though that while we are treating society as an object in this bare, abstract fashion, Adorno is very much against reification and hypostatization, so there is some interesting complexity here.



:cool:

:up:

But I'm giving Adorno the benefit of the doubt at this stage.

It's brilliant, but I definitely wouldn't call it an introduction. It traces Adorno's thinking through his interactions with Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, etc.

I did the version at anesi.com:

Your Overall F Score is: 2.23
You are a liberal airhead.

Scores for Personality Variables:
Conventionalism: 1.75
Authoritarian Submission: 2.29
Authoritarian Aggression: 1.88
Anti-intraception: 2.25
Superstition and Stereotypy: 2.33
Power and "Toughness": 1.88
Destructiveness and Cynicism: 2.50
Projectivity: 2.60
Sex: 1.67

Apparently when it gets above 4.5 is when you begin to give off authoritarian vibes, above 5.5 and you’re pretty much fascist.

Very dated.

In my opinion, "society" refers to a concept rather than an object. — Metaphysician Undercover

In my opinion, which I believe I share with Adorno, when we talk about society we are not talking about a concept, therefore “society” doesn’t refer to a concept. Sure, it’s not a bundle of moderately sized dry goods (paraphrasing Austin), but it’s something real with an objective structure all the same. What matters to Adorno is the subject-object polarity, with the philosopher or whoever as the subject and, most relevantly, society or a part or aspect of society as the object.

Otherwise…

I agree with this — Metaphysician Undercover

I just want to point out that what you’re agreeing with here is not my own position but is my rewording of Espen Hammer’s position.

(I agree it’s best to revisit this topic down the line; I’m not sure what else to say about it)

This I believe could constitute a challenge to the law of identity itself. If contradiction inheres within the object itself, this would seem to imply that the object could have no identity. But he does not clarify what he means in this statement, and the ancients allowed contradictory predications so long as they are not at the same time. This is how change was understood, a negation of the property, a property come form its contrary. That requires temporal extension. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well, he does immediately give the prime example he has in mind of what "the object" is: antagonistic society. And despite our worries about formal logic and predication vs identity (and your concern about identity vs equality), it doesn't seem far-fetched to say that society is contradictory at least in some sense (and he gives examples).

Although it's tempting to say no, it's just that the concepts we apply to society contradict with it (like the freedom example), he wants to say that the contradiction is actually in the object, society itself, because, I think, for material reasons there are immanent social antagonisms and they cannot be dissolved by reframing. The logical move to dissolve the contradiction (like I did here) obscures the antagonism and does violence to what's really going on.

But the fact that I used "antagonisms" a couple of times there, instead of "contradictions", gets to the root of the problem. And indeed, I think some modern Hegelians prefer to use that kind of language (antagonisms, tensions, conflicts), abandoning the idea that logical contradictions reside in the object. I expect we can come back to this issue after we've seen him operate, and after he addresses it in ND itself.

There's a useful section in Espen Hammer's book, Adorno's Modernism (the section "Predication, identification, and truth" in chapter 4, which can be read online here), which concludes with Hammer's own assessment:

Although no a priori “logics” dictates that such a tendency should emerge, modern agents are prone to use concepts in overly subsumptive ways, focusing on universality and generality while downplaying, and in some cases bracketing, the conceptualized particular. They do this not because the nature of language forces them to do so, but, rather, because social and economic pressures are such that quantification, orientation towards exchange value, commodification, calculation, and so forth, are being privileged (both epistemically and in cruder social and everyday terms) over attention to the particular (at least for its own sake).

In other words, Adorno is wrong to claim that logic and language themselves are responsible for the coerciveness of identity thinking. He is right that thinking in modernity leads to the extinguishing of valuable particularity, but he is wrong about the ultimate cause; the cause is not an inherent tendency in logic and language, but is something to do with social and economic pressures.

That strikes me immediately as eminently reasonable and common-sensical — but Adorno would say we should be on guard against common sense. It has to be said that Hammer seems generally a lot less sympathetic to Adorno than other commentators, so I'm not taking his as the final word on the topic — after all, we want to apply the principle of hermeneutic charity at all times in this reading.

EDIT: So what I'm thinking now is that I'm quite happy to accept a twofold structure of contradiction, with the caveat that the contradictions in the object are more like antagonisms than true contradictions. And that raises the question as to whether it really matters, as Adorno seems to say it does, if we drop the idea of logical contradiction when talking about the object (reality, society).

Could you provide the exact quote from Negative Dialectics? — Number2018

We're reading the lectures at the moment, haven't got to ND itself. In lecture 1:

I believe that these considerations will suffice for the moment to show you how we are compelled from the vantage point of objective reality to apply the concept of contradiction, not simply as the contradiction between two unrelated objects, but as an immanent contradiction, a contradiction in the object itself. — p.9

In the notes for the lecture it's laid out like this:

Basic conception: structure of contradiction, in a twofold sense:

(1) the contradictory nature of the concept, i.e. the concept in contradiction to the thing to which it refers

[...]

(2) the contradictory character of reality: model: antagonistic society. — p.1

Adorno explicitly points out the existence of a gap between 'a part of the object' and 'the definitions imposed on it by thinking.' — Number2018

On the face of it, that's consistent with the claim that reality is contradictory.

Even them, I think. I don’t know off the top of my head.

:up: :strong:

I love them! Since this is new material for me I don't feel able to put my thoughts into structures or find relevant resources to bounce off of so it's very helpful. — Moliere

Thank you, I’m glad to hear it. I just hope I can maintain the energy.

I suppose you’re right. But then, Adorno was pretty much saying that every philosopher had imposed their concepts extinguishingly on the world.

what I'd say is one can use contradiction in interesting ways without at the same time undermining your philosophy. The "formal" concerns arise, but may not be interesting or relevant. — Moliere

Yes indeed. The issue for me has always been to decide whether, when Adorno and Zizek and Marx come out with their arresting paradoxes, it’s just the dialectical style, as in a form of rhetoric, or if it’s just a great way of thinking, as in a method — or if they’re saying the world is really paradoxical and contradictory.

Adorno's "non-identity" appears to be a rejection of the form of identity employed by logicians, the one which is really equality, being a specified similarity. We see that a multitude of objects subsumed under the same concept are deemed as the same by virtue of that concept, and Adorno denies this sameness with the term "non-identity". However, he has not, at this point, denied that distinct things have a true identity within themselves, as dictated by the law of identity. So "non-identity" does not negate the law of identity in its traditional form, it negates identity in the logical form, as equality. — Metaphysician Undercover

I think this fits with my understanding. And it’s not a rejection of identity as used by logicians so much as an accusation that predication is tantamount to such identity. I was reading about this difficult issue earlier today. How do we interpret Adorno’s insistence that predicative judgments imply identities, i.e., that bringing two things under the same concept amounts to equating them? So far I’ve had to settle with the view that there is such a tendency — but Adorno’s claim is stronger.

If I understand this quote correctly, the domain of non-identity refers to a complex sphere of (non)relations between our conceptual schemes and the world. The vast complexity of reality eludes our intellectual efforts. — Number2018

Yes, but note that Adorno thinks the role of philosophy is to make that intellectual effort after all, only without extinguishing the complexity, difference, uniqueness, etc.

However, what is contradictory is not reality itself, but the ongoing disarray and imbalance between our actual experience, our sense of things, and the totality of our intellectual apparatus. — Number2018

Makes sense, but I'm still confused about it. Certainly, Adorno is explicit that contradicitons are in reality itself.

The meaning of "non-identity", and the importance of "contradiction" is presented on page 8. Simply put, "A=B" seems to imply that A is identical with B, as an identity statement. However, evidence indicates that B is not A. This demonstrates that identity in this form is actually a "coercion" of logic, where we are coerced to accept A=B as identity. If we do not accept this coercion, then A=B as identity, is viewed as self-contradictory itself. Such resistance to this coercion is also characterized as contradiction, allowing the law of non-contradiction to be applied in support of the coercion. Therefore, we accept one or the other, and deny the one not accepted, as contradictory. But either way, contradiction is the base of our thinking. One concept of "contradiction" contradicts the other so that the two oppose each other. The view of "non-identity", I conclude, is the view that sees the identity claim of "A=B" as self-contradicting. — Metaphysician Undercover

Nicely put!

I'm wondering to what extent Adorno is distinguishing himself from Hegel and Kant's conception of logic, and whether or not his negative dialectics would be read in a sort of the logic of objects sense, or propositional logic, or what-have-you. — Moliere

This will be a crazy simplification, but I always find within myself an impatient desire to deal with this topic once and for all, as if I have a sense that it's not that important (I'm not for a moment questioning your interest in it, btw). My intuition is that it's kind of a red herring. I think that for all three of these philosophers, formal logic, which Kant called general logic, is basic, uninteresting, and mostly uncontroversial. But when they talk about logic they use the term more expansively. When K and H in particular talk about it they're talking about how reason actually operates within their systems, and H in particular pushes against general logic by refusing to go along with Kant's identification of the antinomies in the transcendental dialectic as logical failures, but rather regarding them as examples of some higher kind of "logic" (dialectics)

Adorno does something similar: he is looking for a logic, or better put, a rationality, that is better than mere formal logic. I mean, not as a replacement but as an essential supplement. (I think he also wants to just ignore the developments of logic from Frege onwards, probably thinking of them as either irrelevant or else as examples of instrumental rationality).

I tend to think the concerns about Hegel's violations of formal logic are exaggerated or misguided, but I'm sure there is a lot more to say about it.

LND, Lecture 1 (continued)

I hope nobody minds these mini-essays; they help me to get to grips with the reading, and I hope to respond to others later.

I want to look at identity and nonidentity. They're so central to Adorno's philosophy, and he starts using the terms at the very beginning of the lecture course, but as far as I can see he never really defines them.

Negative dialectics...

sets out to be a dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. We are concerned here with a philosophical project that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity. Instead it will attempt to articulate the very opposite, namely the divergence of concept and thing, subject and object, and their unreconciled state. — p.6

I think of identity in two ways:

(a) Subject-object identity: identity between the concept and the thing, the prioritization of the subject and the loss of aspects of reality in the act of conceptualization. This is what Adorno is referring to as the identity of being and thought, but there's another side to it...

(b) Object-object identity: identity between the objects brought under the concept, the flattening out of difference, the loss of thisness.

Different commentators vary in their focus. Brian O'Connor goes for subject-object:

identity: A misunderstanding of the relationship between subject and object in which the concepts or systems of concepts of a subject (person, philosopher, scientist, etc.) are taken to be identical with the object. This misunderstanding is not primarily philosophical: it is determined by the prevailing form of social reason (instrumental reason) which is geared towards ‘the domination of nature’. — Brian O'Connor, Adorno, p.200

Alison Stone goes for object-object first and then links it back to subject-object:

When I conceptualize something as an instance of a kind, I see it as identical to all other instances of the same kind. This means that conceptual thinking gives me no knowledge about what is unique in a thing, for example, about what is special about this dog as distinct from all other dogs. Having no access to what is unique, conceptual thinking sees it only as an instance of a kind. In that sense, one “identifies” things with the universal kinds under which one takes them to fall. — Alison Stone, Adorno and Logic

(Incidentally @Moliere, that essay by Alison Stone is quite interesting for placing Adorno in the context of logic in connection with Kant and Hegel)

It probably works like this: subject-object identity is the primary source of the problem, and object-object identity is a consequence. In other words, our cognitive hubris leads to the erasure of difference among things in the world.

When Adorno makes a distinction between presupposition and culmination in saying that negative dialects is "a philosophical project that does not presuppose the identity of being and thought, nor does it culminate in that identity," there is more to it than meets the eye. I think it presumes the following breakdown of subject-object identity:

1. Epistemological identity: thought can fully capture what it is that the thought is about. The idea behind this is an expected identity, an expectation that reality can be reduced to a concept.

2. Ontological identity: if being is no more than thought then reality is made of thought and we have metaphysical idealism, and that's where Hegel goes. If one cannot think the object, know it, attain objectivity concerning it, without concepts, and concepts capture being completely, according to (1), then objectivity and truth are conceptual through and through. It's a short step from there to the claim that thought is not just a medium but is rather the unfolding of reality itself. Reality is itself entirely conceptual, the real is the rational.

(BTW, my very un-Adornian architectonic, with breakdowns, numbered lists, bullet-points etc., is just an aid to thinking rather than an attempt to uncover the secret structure of Adorno's philosophy, so don't take it too seriously)

But what about that "short step"? On reflection, it's not really such a short a step from conceptual mediation to full-on idealism. Is it important to understand Hegel's justification? I'm thinking not, but in any case we know that Adorno is against it.

But that's not all he's against: he's against (1) as well. In some ways he prefers to stick with Kant, to keep in mind the limits of thought; after all, I've said a few times recently that Adorno's philosophy demonstrates humility in the face of reality. But where he differs from Kant, I'm thinking, is that he believes it's possible, not to bridge the phenomena-noumena gap like Hegel, but to stand by the edge, gazing across in wonder to the other side — and to stay there, not walk away as Kant does. This is sounding mystical, but I think Adorno will deny it is, since what it will amount to is a way of making space for the nonidentical in conceptual reflection after all.

So, going back to his statement that negative dialectics neither presupposes not culminates in identity, we can see that he is not just against the metaphysical idealist conclusion (the culmination) but is also against the epistemological premise (presupposition). The problem of identity thinking starts early, and is a problem even when it doesn't lead to full-on metaphysical idealism (especially when, as it turns out).

In what I've been saying, I seem to be equating the nonidentical with things in themselves. Is that right, I wonder?

Well, not exactly, because the nonidentical is present in experience, featuring importantly in our lives; the nonidentical comes along with the objects of experience rather than being left behind in the noumenal realm, even if it remains unshaped by the understanding (an impossible situation for Kant). Another way of saying this is that unlike things in themselves, the nonidentical does not remain unavoidably indeterminate. I guess this casts some doubt on my metaphor of gazing across the gap.

Anyway, what's so bad about identity?

• The administered society: Bureaucratic systems reduce individuals to case files and numbers. Individuals are treated according to general rules or categories, regardless of their unique characteristics and situations.
  
• Mass culture: Entertainment is formulaic rather than allowing for genuine artistic novelty. Sameness under the guise of variety and freedom of choice.
  
• Enlightenment and scientific rationality: Science often treats the world as fully intelligible through quantification and classification. What cannot be measured or conceptualized is dismissed as irrelevant or even non-existent. This is the expectation I was talking about, the confidence that the concept can exhaust the object. I wrote something about that in reference to wolf-packs in the "Magical powers" thread a couple of years ago.
  
• Stereotyping and prejudice: Individuals are treated merely as representatives of group identities — race, nationality, religion, sexual orientation — and their unique features are ignored. Individuals are collapsed into presumed essences. Note that as a critique this works against aspects of Left-wing thought as well as Right.
  
• Philosophical systems: Hegel, despite the dialectical subtlety that impresses Adorno so much, finally prioritizes his totalizing system, in which contradictions are ultimately resolved on the side of the subject.
  
• The economy: This is especially significant for Adorno and from what I've read he uses it as a model of identity thinking quite often. In capitalist exchange, unique objects are reduced to abstract equivalents, i.e., money. The particular is subsumed under the general category of commodity, erasing qualitative differences for the sake of exchangeability. Everything becomes fungible and is otherwise devalued.

So identity thinking is everywhere.

According to Adorno, the most fundamental form of ideology, serving perhaps as a kind of meta‐theory of ideology, is identity itself — Blackwell Companion to Adorno, p.470

So identity thinking for Adorno is the basic template for ideology. Identity is the primitive or underlying form of these variously bad ways of thinking (and of treating people).

With all of that, we can see why nonidentity is at the centre of Adorno's philosophy. It is what resists all that identity thinking that produces suffering, oppression, and the flattening of life.

Well, I've spent a lot of time looking at identity, and that pretty much works as a negative definition of nonidentity.

But here's another couple of useful definitions:

nonidentity: What concepts or systems of concepts do not capture in an object is its irreducible particularity. In any act of conceptualization, therefore, there will be nonidentity because there can be no final identity between concepts and the object. The nonidentical properties of an object are not indeterminate (in the manner of Kant’s thing-in-itself ). They are what actually constitute the object’s ‘own identity’ though they are elusive to concepts. — Brian O'Connor, Adorno

The nonidentical are dissonant particular qualities of our material and ideological world that resist categories, push against containers, and rebel against smooth logics and harmonious equations. — Blackwell Companion to Adorno, p.145

However, it is possible in principle to recognize that things are never simply identical to these kinds (or to the other instances of a given kind) but always have a unique side as well. Adorno does not assert that things are wholly unique. He believes that things can be brought under concepts. But falling under concepts is not all there is to things. Each thing is also unique; this aspect of things is the “nonidentical” element in them – that element by virtue of which things are identical neither to the kinds they embody nor to other instances of those kinds. — Alison Stone, Adorno and Logic

One minor puzzle: what about the nonconceptual? Nonidentical and nonconceptual point in the same general direction, and they overlap, but to what degree do they have the same extension? The nonidentical is specifically whatever resists and eludes conceptual capture, whereas the nonconceptual seems to be a more neutral term, pointing to a posited (for methodological or linguistic convenience) mind-independent reality, or the objective pole of the subject-object opposition, treated as if prior to conceptualization (there is an uninterpreted reality, at least notionally).

There must be a pretty close parallel: to identify, to make identical in thought — this is a way of describing conceptualization. So what escapes this, the nonidentical, is at the same time the nonconceptual.

That'll do.

That might be a big topic! I might say something about it tomorrow.

I see what you mean, good point :up:

I’m just going to have to remember to compare translations or check the original when we get stuck.

Do you speak German? — frank

No, and please, no more of these frankisms (random questions with mysterious hidden motivations).

I’m still a bit confused about that too. I think it’s because he kind of rushes through it impatiently. But maybe we are just getting hung up on something minor.

Otherwise :cool:

I wonder if it's because synthesis seems to offer a final answer: as if we've arrived at the Real out of the darkness of shifting meaning. But even the idea of synthesis has an opposite. And the Absolute, which represents final unity, also has to be conceived against a backdrop of disunity. The method never ends. — frank

Yes, and some would accuse Adorno of misinterpreting Hegel at this juncture.

If that's true, we aren't really talking about Hegel. Hegel's logic isn't about contradiction per se. It's about oppositions. — frank

Yes, point taken, but we’re talking about lecture 1, where he makes out like it’s more about contradiction than anything else.

I'm not sure that everything must be contradiction — Moliere

But contradictions are absolutely central, and he emphasizes that he doesn’t just mean discrepancies (nor, we can assume, does he just mean tensions, antagonisms, or inextricably bound oppositions (in @frank’s words), so that’s why I’ve been trying to get to the bottom of the contradiction concept.

So, going back to a question of mine...

Is it the case that Hegel and Adorno are saying, generally, that a predicative judgment is actually an identity statement in disguise? — Jamal

Adorno does seem to say that logic treats predicative judgments as if they were extensions of the law of identity, as if we could go straight from ∀x, x = x to A = B, and formal logic couldn’t tell the difference. But we know that formal logic does not in fact allow this, so what's going on?

The answer has to be that he's not claiming that this confusion occurs within formal logic itself. What he's saying is that in philosophical and scientific thought — and perhaps also in, say, law, military strategy, and business administration — insofar as they lay claim to logical rigour, there is a tendency to collapse the distinction. So predicative judgments come to be treated as if they were identity statements, and whatever resists full identity is experienced as contradiction. We saw this with his freedom example.

This leads back to the questions: (1) Are dialectical contradictions actual contradictions? (2) Are the contradictions in concepts only or both in concepts and also in the reality that the concepts are about? At least it’s clear what Adorno believes (yes and both).

What I'm latching onto at the moment is the bit where Adorno says he is de-emphasizing the role of synthesis in the dialectical process, and..."one motif of such a negative dialectics is to try to find out why I resist the concept of synthesis so strongly" — Moliere

Yeah it’s interestingly odd that he openly states that a motif — maybe we can say a theme — of his philosophy is working out why he hates synthesis so much, as if it's a journey of self-discovery. As if his personal antipathy to synthesis is a clue to what's bad about it.

So the way I see it, synthesis represents the positive, hence Adorno's negative dialectics — though he has other reasons for opposing positivity too, with different senses of positivity in mind. In one of the lectures, as I recall (I read bits a couple of years ago) he seems to criticize the ordinary everyday sort of annoying attitude that today is called "toxic positivity". He's not above an opposition to that sort of popular cultural phenomenon, and I've been thinking about that part of his critique in the context of my interest in optimism vs hope, etc.

The capitalist example rings true to me -- people who don't own property and have to sell their labor to live don't have the same material interests as those who own property and hire people in order to direct their labor for exploitation. Master and Slave from Hegel is another example that makes sense to me of the dialectical relationship -- both defining and being in conflict with one another. — Moliere

I also really liked Adorno's example of nuclear weapons:

the ability of our society to withstand crises, an ability that is generally held to be one of its finest achievements, is directly linked to the growth in its potential for technological self-destruction.

Your interpretations look good to me MU.

It's interesting that he positions Hegel as the founder of dialectics rather than Plato. It appears to me, like what Adorno is offering is a dialectics more closely related to Plato's than Hegel's. He dismisses "synthesis" completely, and focuses on a deconstruction of the concept. It may be characterized as deconstructionist. This is very similar to the Platonic dialectical method. Plato took varying definitions of the same term to break down the assumed concept, and expose contradiction within the supposed "concept", demonstrating its weaknesses. it is a skeptical method. — Metaphysician Undercover

That's quite interesting. I forgot to go back to Plato when I was describing dialectics. When I last read the Republic, last year, it actually helped to think of it in more Hegelian terms, along the lines of this:

It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. — Hegel, Science of Logic

Applied to up and down, light and shadow, knowledge and opinion, to name a few of Plato's polarities, we're able to see that Plato is not often simply saying one is bad and the other is good, or similar.

Anyway, your idea that Adorno is more Platonic in his dialectics than he is Hegelian is interesting. I guess you're referring to the Socratic method in the more dialectical of the dialogues, i.e., the earlier ones that end in aporia. Yeah, that's a good observation I think. Just as Adorno aims to preserve the contradictions, Socrates exposes the contradictions in his interlocutors' opinions, and just leaves it there, without a synthesis.

So maybe we can say, not that Adorno was a Platonic post-Hegelian, but that he was a Socratic one.

Thank you for your contribution, Number. I'm not sure how to answer until I know more, and I'm not familiar with Žižek's critique. My suspicion is that either Žižek is wrong, or you are wrong in using Žižek to critique Adorno. It remains to be demonstrated that Adorno does what you or Žižek says he does rather than doing the cool radical thing that Žižek thinks he is doing himself. On the face of it, what Žižek seeks to do doesn't seem far from what I see as Adorno's goal, though one can seriously doubt that the latter's thinking leads anywhere good, politically. But the idea that Adorno ends up on neutral ground doesn't really fit with how I read his Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, where (arguably) we see negative dialectics in action.

But basically it's too early for me to get into those debates, and maybe you're right.

It is precisely the implicit neutral position that creates a blind spot, enabling the return of identity and sustaining an ideological function. Žižek’s solution is to relate the mediating process to a different form of Otherness, one that cannot serve as an anchoring point for defining the subject’s identity. Regarding your example of the market situation, it suggests that the same people could simultaneously exercise their freedom in some respects while being affected by coercion in others." — Number2018

Interestingly, I think this part of your Žižekian critique of Adorno is actually a pretty good defence of Adorno, because it goes some way to answering my sceptical doubt about Adorno's position (which I imagine is shared by Žižek) that reality itself is contradictory, that the contradictions are not just in and between the concepts that are applied to it. My reframing, to remove the contradiction, was hasty and thoughtless; as you point out, things are more complex, and (I want to put it stronger than this but I'm not sure how) we need to keep ourselves open to the existence of contradictions. Because that is how we actually experience the world. (that's a bit better)

That’s suitably dialectical, and agreeable.

I think I see what you mean. Adorno doesn’t like idealism because it’s too arrogant, presuming an identity between subject and object, not because he denies a subject-object intertwinement (which, however, is non-totalizing).

I'd be interested to see others' thoughts on the objection that Adorno attempts to respond to: Why must everything be a matter of contradictions? In my example of market freedom quoted below — the market is a domain of freedom and the market is a domain of coercion — the contradiction can be dissolved by a re-framing that contains qualifications, and in a Left-wing manner too:

The market is a domain of freedom for these people and a domain of coercion for those people. No contradiction.

(Like, a zoo is not necessarily contradictory just because it allows people to walk in and out of its territory at will but doesn't allow the penguins to do the same)

I'll attempt my own answer. What has often mattered for Marxian dialectical thinkers (I'd hope there are non-Marxian examples too) is the critique of ideology, i.e., of the set of ideas that dominate in society. Like liberalism. Liberalism, roughly speaking, maintains that the market just is a domain of freedom simpliciter, since legally it is equally free to anyone, and how you make use of that freedom to secure your income is up to you, and wage-work is a contractual arrangement made between two free and equal parties, everyone is equal before the law, and so on. Liberalism has to do this because, roughly speaking, it denies that liberal-democratic capitalist society is essentially class-based or structured according to the relations of production.

So what's happening here is that you refuse to allow the contradiction to be dissolved because you are taking the liberals at their word to expose their contradictory ideology. However, I guess this suggests that the contradiciton is only in the ideas, not in capitalist reality itself, and it occurs to me that this is an old debate in Marxism that I wouldn't want to get bogged down in — though I would like to see what people think about the status of contradictions. It's important for the reading because Adorno maintains that the contradicitons are indeed in reality, not only in concepts.

A couple of examples: the drive for profit has created the unprecedented means to meet human needs on a massive scale, but precisely that drive prevents production from being directed to satisfying those human needs; the freedom of the market, i.e., freedom of choice and the freedom to trade, is based on compulsion: most people have no choice but to sell their labour to survive.

Note the way that this account emphasizes mutual and immanent dependency: it is not that capitalism has created the means to meet human needs on a massive scale despite the profit motive; and it is not that the market is a domain of freedom despite compulsion. — Jamal