Pretty much. I'm just saying I might skim read the rest in one go and write a post collecting a few thoughts about what's there, just before starting ND.

LND lecture 10

In this lecture he talks about essence vs. appearance, philosophical depth, and reaffirms the importance of negation. He's circling around concepts already introduced, trying new ones, especially to elaborate on his version of speculation.

The basic thrust of the lecture is to argue for a philosophy that smashes through the facade of appearances.

He clears the ground by rejecting the traditional quest for absolute certainty. Oddly, he seems to associate this with positivism. I think he does this because he thinks the latter, in condemning thought that goes beyond facts, functions in the same way as the demand for certain foundations. In both cases, one supposedly needs an established ground before one can philosophize legitimately.

This brings him to appearance vs. essence, which we can think of as appearance vs. reality so as to remove any hints of essentialism: the essence behind the appearance is not anything transcendent, but rather the form of something which is specific to the conditions—usually, of course, social and historical conditions.

He is committed to maintaining the centrality of this distinction, because of ideology. In case there's any confusion, Adorno always uses this term in the Marxian sense:

Ideology is a system of concepts and views which serves to make sense of the world while obscuring the social interests that are expressed therein, and by its completeness and relative internal consistency tends to form a closed system and maintain itself in the face of contradictory or inconsistent experience.

The word is used with a wide variety of connotations, even among Marxists; Terry Eagleton, in his Ideologies, lists a range of meanings:

[*] the process of production of meanings, signs and values in social life;
[*] a body of ideas characteristic of a particular social group or class;
[*] ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] false ideas which help to legitimate a dominant political power;
[*] systematically distorted communication;
[*] that which offers a position for a subject;
[*] forms of thought motivated by social interest;
[*] identity thinking;
[*] socially necessary illusion; the conjecture of discourse and power;
[*] the medium in which conscious social actors make sense of their world;
[*] action-oriented sets of beliefs;
[*] the confusion of linguistic and phenomenal reality;
[*] semiotic closure;
[*] the indispensable medium in which individuals live out their relations to a social structure;
[*] the process whereby social life is converted to a natural reality;

Marxists seek to subject all ideology to critique, uncovering the internal contradictions in an ideology and exposing the social interests expressed by it. — marxists.org

"Smashing through the facade" and "blasting open the phenomena" are ways of describing philosophy's attempt to uncover the social reality behind appearances, and the method is the critique of ideology in the context of a new epistemology, i.e., negative dialectics.

Then he says something strange: human beings are becoming ideology, and in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings. (p.100-101)

I think what he means is that in modern industrial capitalism, supported as it is by a culture industry, ideology is now all-pervading and there is little space left for independence of thought and action. Human beings have the potential to be spontaneous, to be free, to question prevailing beliefs, and to resist compulsion—and to some extent they have at times realized these potentials. But now, subjectivity is a standardized construct of ideology rather than the source of freedom and independence as it was in the Enlightenment era.

I think this is even easier to see now than it was in the sixties. Individualism seems to remain strong, and the need to form an identity that expresses one's "true self" is widely felt, and yet the resulting identities are standardized, not unique, and even nonconformity is comformist. In consumer capitalism, individuality is reduced to one's choice of car. And now, what is persistently framed as self-actualization is in fact the curation of a public profile whose features and limits are determined by social media trends and expectations, and algorithmic validation.

For some, the figure of the entrepreneur is the paradigm of individuality, but as such a paradigm it is just a standard template, produced as a by-product of the market. The meaning of autonomy shrinks within the bounds of capital, in which entrepreneurship seems to be the only road to self-actualization and autonomous engagement with the world.

Resistance seems pointless, because resistance itself is branded. The film Barbie was hailed all over the place as "subversive" and yet its feminist and anti-corporate critiques functioned, very deliberately, as marketing for Mattel. But the people who said it was subversive knew all that, so what were they thinking? Similar to autonomy, the meaning of "subversive" has shrunk to a signal.

But what about the "abolition" of human beings? He did say "in a sense," and the sense I think he intended was that there is a qualitative change in the concept and experience of being human. If the human being had once been the authentic, autonomous individual of the Enlightenment and the classic era of the bourgeoisie (which despite everything was a promising avenue for human development), then such a creature was going extinct, replaced by administered puppets with manufactured desires, their resistance pre-emptively co-opted.

On the surface this might seem to rely on a transcendent essentialism of the human, but it's not that. It's a response to specific conditions rather than an appeal to an essential purity. Adorno thought the very ability to think critically was actually in danger, and that what had been the dominant conception of human beings, which was in itself a product of specific historical conditions but at the same time provided space for resistance, was losing its anchor in reality.

Incidentally, philosopher Hans-Georg Moeller, who has a pretty good Youtube channel, has an interesting theory about all this called Profilicity. He sees Adorno as stuck in the age of authenticity and doesn't seem to think the new age of profile-based identity is all that bad.

In profilicity, the old Nietzschean motto of authenticity is modified to “become who you wish to be seen as.” Applying the terminology of Niklas Luhmann’s social systems theory, the shift from authenticity to profilicity can be described as a shift towards thoroughgoing “second-order observation.”

While in authenticity recognition, including self-recognition, is supposed to emanate from authentic selves who see what they see in the mode of individual first-order observation, in profilicity observation is more complex and is fascinated by observing how and what others observe. — Hans-Georg Moeller

Well, that was a lengthy digression. I'll probably post something else about this lecture soon.

NOTE: After I'm done with this lecture I'm going to skim over Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25 and bring things up here if I find them interesting. What I won't be doing do is reading "The Theory of Intellectual Experience," which is printed first alongside the notes to lectures 11-25, and then in full in an Appendix, because this is just the introduction to ND, and we'll be coming to that very soon.

An explanation is unhelpfully buried in the notes to lecture 10:

Since these notes [Adorno's notes for lectures 11-25] for the most part refer to specific pages of the ‘Introduction’ to Negative Dialectics, they are printed on the right-hand side of the page and juxtaposed to the related passage from the Introduction on the left-hand side. The Introduction is given in extenso in the Appendix of the present volume.

Don't be a bore. All I did was mock your post for its excessive length, and implied that reading Marx instead of reading your posts is a better use of time. I felt justified in doing so because of your pompous rudeness in response to a post rightfully criticizing your verbosity.

You got the wrong end of the stick.

A beginner won’t have the time to get through Marx if they feel obliged to read your rambling mega-posts.

However, both thinkers seem to be pointing to the same thing or structure, each from their own perspective, and each demand that it is recognized as the most important. — Pussycat

I used to think so too, but now I’m not so sure. Is one pointing at the same thing when one says it's unsayable as when one says that concepts are distorting it by the exclusion of particularity? One is pointing at the unrepresentable, while the other is pointing at the misrepresented. The former is transcendental, the latter is immanent. So their differing views on what to do about it can be seen as presuming different ontologies, i.e., a different "it".

Take the example of pain. Adorno would say that the pain scale does conceptual violence to pain by reducing particular suffering to numbers—the pain as experienced is nonidentical with pain as measured (this is not to say he was against its use in medicine). But Wittgenstein would not say that pain is unsayable or mystical; that one cannot “say” one's private experience is unproblematic, because that's not what language does.

I’ve alluded in this post to both early and late Wittgenstein without distinguishing them. It might matter but I’m not sure.

I'm wondering why anarchism is often placed closer to the far left than anywhere else. It's rather its own direction, a dismissal of all government. — Christoffer

I treat anarchism as left libertarianism unless it's otherwise qualified. Even though the word 'anarchy' literally just means without a leader or without government, the historical actuality is that anarchism as a political tradition is left-wing.

Welcome to the forum! Your post isn't low quality. It's honest and curious and serves as a great starting point to discuss a topic that is hotly contested.

I don't have much to offer in reply right now, so I'll leave that to others. I'll just say one thing: it's probably important to see that the differences between these two traditions of political thought are about both means and ends. That is, Marxists and anarchists disagree not only about the end goal (although quite often they agree about that, and call it communism), but also, I'd say primarily, about how to get there: can we overthrow the rulers and transition to a communistic society by taking control of the state, using the institutions, hierarchies, and powers of government, police, education, the legal system, etc.—as Marxists usually believe—or does it have to be a ground-up, grassroots revolution, as the anarchists believe.

A good place to start with anarchism is Kropotkin's The Conquest of Bread. For a modern overview, I can recommend Ruth Kinna's Anarchism: A Beginner's Guide.

The reason I mention the above is while I get the sense that Adorno is hounded, I also get the sense that the positivists are wrong about science too :D -- science is a speculative endeavor. It doesn't just give you a list of facts, but explains the facts, orders them, predicts them and so forth. — Moliere

This is a very good point. It's too easy when reading Adorno (and Horkheimer) to interpret them as always viewing science as the enemy, but that's likely not the case, and what you say here is a bridge to a better way of thinking about it.

I don't think he mentions anyone, but examples of philosophy that tries to be art might be the novels of Sartre and Camus, late Heidegger, and maybe some of the more poetic Nietzsche like TSZ—Adorno was heavily influenced by Nietzsche but he might have been less keen on the arty stuff, but I'm not sure.

I wonder to what extent he means the bad kinds of philosophy and art that try to do what the other is doing -- does he have particular examples? — Moliere

As I recall (I don't have the lectures to hand right now) he mentions a few examples of art that tries to be philosophical. Mystical French and German painters whose work had self-consciously metaphysical themes (it's possible that's in lecture 10, not sure). But these days we can think of better examples, since the rise of conceptual art. It's in the name after all.

I went to a gallery once and in one room there was a bunch of bananas on the window sill. The label had the title "bananas, urine injected". Another, much earlier example is Duchamp's "Fountain". The artists are provoking philosophical questions.

EDIT: I posted that by mistake and I hadn't even got to philosophy that tries to be art. I'll put that in another post.

Isn't Adorno's non-identical similar to Wittgenstein's mystical, in that both resist conceptualization?

Wittgenstein, early at least, suggests quietism, while Adorno believes it will be revealed via negative dialectics. — Pussycat

That's roughly right as far as it goes, but I think it probably minimizes vast differences, between (a) the nonidentical and the mystical, and of course (b) what to do about it.

You seem to be both more radical and also more conservative than Adorno. You go further than him in your rejection of Enlightenment reason, but defang this critique in your appeal to the pre-modern and anti-rational. Adorno, modernist through and through, would say you are regressive, retreating from reason's critique of itself to irrational comforts.

So your defanged critique floats above history and flattens it, failing to perceive historical specificity while claiming to properly historicize events:

The common appeals to the Holocaust in these discussions, now the better part of a century later, start to strike one as properly historical in particular. If reason must lose its luster, or even its authority after the Holocaust, then it should have already shed these in the wake of the Thirty Years War, the conquistador conquests, the Mongol sweep across Asia, the aftermath of the sack that gave us the Book of Lamentations, etc. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Adorno addresses this in Minima Moralia (maybe you're alluding to that, I'm not sure):

[...] neither Timur nor Genghis Khan nor the British colonial administration of India deliberately burst the lungs of millions of human beings with poison gas ...

One cannot bring Auschwitz into analogy with the destruction of the Greek city-states in terms of a mere gradual increase of horror, regarding which one preserves one’s peace of mind.

I think this Holocaust exceptionalism is justified. It was an industrialized, bureaucratic genocide, unimaginable without the means. Not impracticable without the means but literally unimaginable for pre-industrial people. It's not that Germans had always been wanting to exterminate the Jews but just didn't have the ability; it's that the shape, scale, and goal of the Holocaust was engendered by the means of its execution (bureaucratic classification and calculation, mass production, racial science, and instrumental rationality itself). This was unprecedented in both scale and character, I believe.

So the materialist critique that characterizes the Holocaust specifically as capitalism's collapse into barbarism seems a stronger one, and thus in a sense more radical, than a theological or existential critique; whereas you, I suppose, see the materialist critique as also implicated in reason-gone-wrong. The thing is, only reason can critique reason.

Well, this is not really the place for a more thorough debate about it, but it's given me a lot of food for thought. :up:

Right, and if you combine this with something like MacIntyre's view of traditions it could be the traditions themselves that are "rigid frameworks," but not necessarily! Calcified historical frameworks can also be the "matter" of such traditions, perhaps even a sort of material sickness frustrating the actualization of form (i.e. the tradition's attainment of rationality), sort of in the way that all animals are different and yet they all strive for life and form, and yet can be frustrated in this by material deficits. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Nice. But...

One would be led to this view though only if one actually accepted the adage in PR that "the actual is the rational and the rational is the actual" (Hegel at his more Aristotlelian). — Count Timothy von Icarus

That’s precisely what Adorno will not accept. For him, the actual is the site of reason's failure, not its fulfillment.

You continue to resist the reciprocity, then. For Adorno, it's not a dualism between separate forces so much as a dialectical entanglement between reason and that which is in reason but often excluded by it to its detriment.

I think Adorno would agree that reason needs to broken free of rigid frameworks, but this is reason's way of correcting itself, not an irrationalist rebellion.

His view of utopia might shed some light on this. He thinks the utopian impulse, the sense that there is a way we could live that would be much better than the way we live now, is vitally important. But he also thinks that making it explicit can be bad: we should not turn it into a more concrete vision or programme.

Here's the point. Utopia as merely implicit or semi-secretly motivating can be characterized as negative, opposed to utopia as an explicitly asserted, positive vision. But utopia as such is also fairly characterized as positive, in that it is in opposition to total hopelessness, cynicism, and the bad society itself, whether or not it is implicit or explicit. It depends how you look at it.

EDIT: Adorno would prefer dystopian science fiction like Nineteen Eighty-Four to the utopian variety like Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the former is in a sense also utopian in that it shows us the opposite of what we want to happen, bringing to consciousness the latter. 1984 is negative (utopia negatively defined) and TNG is positive (utopia positively defined) but the utopia implied or negatively defined in 1984 is, as a utopia, itself positive, thus 1984 is in a sense positive too.

EDIT2: Question: would negative form, positive function be too reductive?

Now, Adorno proposes a rational/irrational relationship, and these two seem to be codependent. Of course the rational can be associated with the consciousness, but where does the irrational fit? My first inclination was to place it in the unconscious, as the source, or category, of the emotions, or something like that, a property of the body in a traditional Platonic dualism sense. But now I think what he means is that the irrational is right in consciousness, as a part of the intellect itself, the irrational part. This would describe this feature, what I called the artistic aspect, which manifests as the intuitive, the speculative, as a sort of irrational part of the intellect. It's irrational in the sense that it doesn't follow the habits and rules of rationality, yet it is still intellectual. It's creative, and creativity defies rationality. The rational part would get lost in itself without the irrational part to throw it a bone to sniff at, and the irrational part would make totally arbitrary decisions without the influence of the rational part. So the two are codependent. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno problematizes the binary while also talking in terms of that binary. The first view of the irrational as associated only with the unconscious is the common view, in philosophy and in culture. The second view, that the irrational is part of consciousness, is (a) what Adorno is advocating as a deliberate philosophical practice, and (b) actually how reason works without our necessarily being aware of it. What Adorno thus advocates under the name of speculation is a self-aware use of the irrational within reason.

I think by the interpretation I gave above, we'd have to say that the speculative is negative, in the sense of being irrational. The speculative part is what negates the existing, the status quo, to get beyond it, then the rational reestablishes itself through some sort of synthesis. — Metaphysician Undercover

So according to the way I've put it above, the speculative is the intentional appropriation of the irrational by reason. Now, whether this is positive or negative is the issue that I feared was lapsing into insubstantial nonsense. Depending on how you look at it, each can be characterized as either positive or negative relative to the other, since each is such at all only relative to the other.

So I see what you mean, and you are right. And as I noted, Adorno would (might?) deny that speculation in this context is positive—he would deny the synthesis. But I still want to say that my framing is crucial (and this is my "how you look at it"): speculation in Adorno is positive or quasi-positive in that it aims to realize the potential of reason to get beyond facts and existing concepts. It's the positive bounce-back of reason's (negative) critique of existing concepts.

I'm not saying this way of looking at it ought to be privileged, only that it is crucial to see things in this way sometimes, so that we can see that there is more than negativity to critique—there is also an emergent reach for truth, or perhaps just, it is also the reach for truth.

And this aligns well with the traditional conception of speculative philosophy, which is characterized as dogmatic as opposed to sceptical/critical/pragmatic/etc—in the sense that it offers postive doctrines (but Adorno doesn't go that far, so his speculation remains also negative, and this is why I said it was a negative positivity).

The assignment of positive and negative is somewhat arbitrary, but only somewhat. There is a range of important historically sedimented meanings for these words that can be made use of or called into question deliberately, and that's what I take Adorno to be doing.

Whether or not it's unnecessarily confusing, I couldn't possibly comment (Adorno's reply: "No, it is necessarily confusing).

EDIT: Coming up for air now, the general point here is that without the positivity I've identified, Adorno is merely nihilistic or self-defeating.

I don't think it's lacking in substance. — Moliere

:smile:

Btw, Tuesday is when I'm catching up on 9 — Moliere

:cool:

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.