Frankopan's The Earth Transformed — Banno

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think we reached similar understandings @Metaphysician Undercover

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

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

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

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

Always with the Aristotle, MU. :wink:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LND lecture 7

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not much there I disagree with. But...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I do like Nabokov and Barth very much.

Yes, certainly with Adorno there is always a goal into which everything has to fit, namely…

… to follow up this idea that the forces of production could satisfy human needs and enable mankind to enter into a condition worthy of human beings — p48

But a goal of earlier socialists was to dominate nature:

The present distribution of mountains and rivers, of fields, of meadows, of steppes, of forests, and of seashores, cannot be considered final. Man has already made changes in the map of nature that are not few nor insignificant. But they are mere pupils’ practice in comparison with what is coming. Faith merely promises to move mountains; but technology, which takes nothing “on faith”, is actually able to cut down mountains and move them. Up to now this was done for industrial purposes (mines) or for railways (tunnels); in the future this will be done on an immeasurably larger scale, according to a general industrial and artistic plan. Man will occupy himself with re-registering mountains and rivers, and will earnestly and repeatedly make improvements in nature. In the end, he will have rebuilt the earth, if not in his own image, at least according to his own taste. We have not the slightest fear that this taste will be bad. — Trotsky, Literature and Revolution

For Adorno, this goal is wrong (deeply bad in fact), even though it was arguably essential to the revolutionary project—and this is because he put that goal into the context of his assessment of the situation and of history.

So we could say that some goals should be steadfastly held to, while others shouldn’t. Or, the first, minimal goal takes priority, and the latter goal is tested in thought against the first.

Following the river of death downstream...

I did not enjoy The Great Gatsby.

LND lecture 6 (continued)

I'll take a look at the linguistic analysis. Referring back to my previous post...

5. Illustration of the problem with Hegel by a linguistic analysis of Hegel's move from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness" (p61)

6. General points about Hegel just demonstrated: Hegel "conjures away" exactly what philosophy sets out to understand (p62) — Jamal

Dare I say that the linguistic analysis is not as difficult as it looks? In the Science of Logic Hegel goes from this:

They [i.e. the thoughts of pure space, pure time, pure consciousness, or pure being] are the results of abstraction; they are expressly determined as indeterminate and this – to go back to its simplest form – is being.

To this:

But it is this very indeterminateness which constitutes its determinateness; for indeterminateness is opposed to determinateness; hence, as so opposed, it is itself determinate or the negative, and the pure, quite abstract negative. It is this indeterminateness or abstract negation which thus has being present within it, which reflection, both outer and inner, enunciates when it equates it’ – that is, being – ‘with nothing, declares it to be an empty product of thought, to be nothing.

Hegel goes from indeterminate to indeterminateness.

Indeterminate: As used by Hegel it's a substantive term referring to a something not yet determined, a kind of "substratum" that might later be specified (though it covers the concept as well). Even if this substratum is a logical placeholder, the grammar maintains an object.

Indeterminateness: The absence of determination as such; the concept only, a universal or abstract quality.

So Hegel starts with the something but drops it in favour of the concept. And this is how Hegel manages to equate being with nothing. It's fair enough to do that with the indeterminateness, but when we talk of being we're not just referring to the abstract concept of indeterminacy.

My initial thought was, doesn't this analysis assume that Hegel starts out by talking about beings, as in individual concrete entities? If so, Adorno is wrong because that's obviously not what Hegel is doing.

But the point Adorno is making is not that Hegel starts out talking about beings but that there is a minimal ontological commitment in the indeterminate as used in the first passage. It points to a logical something, not only to the abstract concept.

This feels right, but I'm not sure if I've wrapped my head around it fully. But it's a really neat way of showing where Hegel has gone wrong. It's where Hegel's idealism takes over, where the thing itself gets lost—right at the start of his system too.

EDIT: It’s like going from “the unknown” to “unknownness”.

It appears like the forces of production might lead us toward suffering and destruction, or else toward happiness and paradise. This emphasizes the need for theory, and the idea that we cannot allow theory to be shackled by practice. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yes, along with the stuff about the domination of nature, this helps to answer a question that always haunts me, which is, what is theory for anyway?

Also, the idea that thinking is part of practice helps. Practice, in new and changing contexts, always involves decisions about what to do. What to do depends on an assessment of the situation. Hence the need for theory, as a part of practice.

The danger with that, though, is that it might imply that theory ought to be immediately applicable. So Adorno has to simultaneously say that theory is practice and that it has to be decoupled from practice.

I suspect I could find a point of disagreement along the way — Moliere

That's what we're here for! But yeah, I'm going to stop taking this thread any further off-topic. :up:

I sort of get the feeling sometimes people don't take him as seriously as they should because he couldn't make up his mind, but of course, that willingness to rethink is commendable. Adorno said that whatever concepts Husserl came up with, from start to finish it was all so much idealist and reified paraphernalia (he took him seriously though, so I don't want to suggest a dismissive attitude on Adorno's part).

So later phenomenology decided to be right rather than wrong, got it. — Moliere

Transcendental idealism seemed like a good idea at the time. :grin:

Perhaps your point parallels my "what counts as a hinge proposition is not dependent on the structure of the proposition but is a role it takes on in the task at hand". Its not that "What is true for me might not be true for you" but that "if we are going to do this together, we need to act in this way..." — Banno

:up:

And what it gets us, to use Moyal-Sharrock's words, is "objectivity without absolutism." (But maybe you prefer not to bring in objective/subjective)

The position of phenomenology is interesting because it seems to overlap on all sides. Husserl said logic was grounded in the completely non-arbitrary and non-contingent intuition of the transcendental (the transcendental ego and all that) but later went towards intersubjective validation (like constitutive restraint) but never dropped the former. Later phenomenology did drop the former and went with the latter, along with sociality and embodiment.

Well, these are just rambling thoughts.

The Art of Experience by John Dewey. A pragmatist"s essays on aesthetics to provide fodder in the Shoutbox. A bit boring. — Hanover

Yeah, I read some Dewey once and found it incredibly boring and didn't finish it. It's a shame because some of his ideas seem very congenial to me.

Yes, practice changes, but there is the Davidsonian limitation that if it were to change to much it would cease to be recognisable as a practice. One supposes that in order to count as a practice it must be recognisable as such.

Then there's the difference between psychology and sociology. Treating logic as the result of psychological preference fails in much the same way as does grounding it in intuition - it doesn't take shared action into account. And then there's the further step of accounting for the normatively of logic, which might be doable if it is treated as a community activity. Logic is a shared, not a private, practice. ↪Tim
seems to miss this point.

That's the classic Wittgensteinian response to accusations of psychologism or even behaviourism.

Then there's the problem that the conclusion - that logic is contingent - doesn't follow directly form the premise - that logic is relative. So taking the extreme, it doesn't follow, from logic being associated with practice, that logic is random.

So from Wittgenstein we might see logic as a practice, and from Davidson we might see it as a constitutive restraint. But you have drawn my attention to is that these views may not be mutually exclusive. — Banno

I agree, although it seems to me that a critic would say that relativism does straightforwardly entail contingency. But I suppose there are shades of contingency; logic as relative to practice is certainly not arbitrary or random.

Anyway, it parallels my own criticism of Grayling's critique of On Certainty, though it's about knowledge rather than the ground of logic. Grayling thinks the relativism in OC implies that "What is true for me might not be true for you," and thus has no power against scepticism, but this is to miss the point that the activities in which we know things are shared and non-arbitrary. Grayling is looking for absolute certainty, where certainty should be enough. Similarly, Husserl wanted logic to be pure, absolute, and timeless.

As for Adorno, I won't torture you with him any more, not right now anyway.

Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut. A war fucks everything and everyone sort of story. Point made. — Hanover

Plus aliens.

LND lecture 6

This was a fun one. I had to do a breakdown to make sense of it. For now, I'll just post it and leave it at that, before coming back to look at things in more detail.

So the lecture goes something like this:

1. How philosophy can proceed, picking up the problem in lecture 5 (p56)
2. One reason the world wasn't changed is that it wasn't interpreted sufficiently: Marx and Marxism failed to critique the domination of nature, and in fact celebrated it, and this is a major failure; there is more philosophizing to do (p58)
3. That the world has a meaning can't now be maintained, and this means Hegel is beyond redemption, and so is all identity thinking (p59)
4. Hegel's Logic (p60)
5. Illustration of the problem with Hegel by a linguistic analysis of Hegel's move from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness" (p61)
6. General points about Hegel just demonstrated: Hegel "conjures away" exactly what philosophy sets out to understand (p62)
7. The paradox of philosophy: can philosophy succeed using concepts to reach the nonconceptual? (p.62)
8. Two bad options remaining if philosophy fails to face this challenge: the formal or the arbitrary (p63)
9. Heidegger and being (p64)

Generally, 2 is a really interesting critique of Marx, 3 is a fundamental tenet of Adorno's connected to his deepest motivations, and 4/5 is a fiendish puzzle.

The paragraph which talks about Hegel's move I don't think I'm fully following. Hegel makes an inference , or an equivocation, in moving from "the indeterminate" to "indeterminateness": — Moliere

Yeah, I haven't got to the bottom of it yet. What's cool about it though is that it looks a lot like the linguistic analysis I've seen in ordinary language philosophy, like that of Austin and Ryle.

It seems that even in communist society there's a time for those who wish to critique, but one need not become a philosopher. — Moliere

Suits me :smile:



Good stuff, thank you for filling in the Hegelian background. I noticed in one of Adorno's essays on Hegel (Hegel: Three Studies) that he identifies Spirit with "social labour", which sounds like a crude sociologization. It's like he was saying here's what Hegel was talking about without realizing it.

LND Lecture 5

I might not say much about this lecture, because it feels like a digression in which Adorno is answering the letter he received about Marx's Theses on Feuerbach. It's all very Marxist and practical—and not just because it concerns the relationship of theory to practice but because he seems genuinely concerned about what is to be done, and surprisingly even seems quite optimistic when he says that now is a good time to develop a philosophy fit for purpose, because "We find ourselves in a kind of historical breathing space." [EDIT: actually that's in lecture 6]

11. Philosophers have hitherto only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it. — Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

There's a striking tension in what Adorno says. His interpretation has it that Marx in thesis 11 did not just mean that the time for philosophy is over and we have to just "wade in with our fists and there will be no more need for thought"—because it's the task of philosophy to change the world, philosophically. And yet...

That aside, I believe that Marx really did believe – and we have to think back to the period in which the writings we are considering here were written, that is to say, around the year 1848 – that philosophers would in fact be best advised to pack it in and become revolutionaries, in other words, man the barricades – which, as is well known, cannot be found anywhere nowadays, and if they were to be erected in any advanced society today they would be quickly eliminated by police or security guards. But he probably did mean something of the sort. — p.51

So this is close to contradiction, unless we say that around 1848, a few years after the Theses on Feuerbach, Marx changed his mind, or at least his emphasis. For Marx, there has to come a point when it's time for revolution.

That aside, Marx's metaphilosophical position seems to be assumed in a lot of what Adorno says. Marx thought that philosophy would eventually be overcome, negated or as I like to put it, solved, in an emancipated post-revolutionary society. In this way, philosophy would lead to practice and this practice would be the culmination of philosophy. Thus it's a teleological view, even if Marx did not always see a necessity in the process.

Adorno is asking what philosophy should do in the situation in which that culmination didn't happen, since the expected revolutions either failed or led to bad outcomes like the bureaucratic and totalitarian systems of the Eastern Bloc (it's interesting that he mentions "Those of you who have escaped from the East").

For Adorno, philosophy must remain autonomous, and only in that way, decoupled from practice, can it be of any use to practice. A familiarly dialectical view.

Note that to say philosophy must remain autonomous is not to imply that it can go on as if it can float freely, unmediated, above society and history—this is as much anathema to Adorno as it was to Marx. It just means it cannot be expected to justify its every move according to either the contemporary situation or to Marxist orthodoxy. This would amount to a "shackling" of philosophy.

One question: if emancipation is the realization of philosophy, does that mean there will be no more philosophy?

:up:

is this 'emancipation' to be understood primarily in political terms? — Wayfarer

I now see you might have a contrast in mind between political and spiritual. I think Adorno would say the latter follows.

Would you say that Adorno holds that theory itself can be a form of resistance? — Tom Storm

Yes indeed, and I've just read a lecture of his in which he makes this point: theory and practice are not mutually exclusive, and thought is practical, even when it is not about the practical or directed towards it.

EDIT: It even extends into his writing style, in which he enacts the resistance to what he sees as the neat packaging of "clarity".

It's a weird thing to me still, because I used to always separate the two in my mind, and it's amazing to see how Adorno, for example, connects the most abstract theories about epistemology and metaphysics with practical concerns. This is challenging but in the end I think the right way to go, the way I see it.

Pretty much, but there's a sense---and this is probably a gross caricature---in which he retained the Marxian view that philosophy will be solved in a world free of domination. Also, he's definitely against praxis at the expense of theory.

So when Marx says the philosophers have only interpreted the world and the point, however, is to change it, Adorno interprets this as meaning that the point of philosophy is to change it, not that we should stop philosophizing, man the barricades, and roll our sleeves up. I think this is a correct interpretation.

You almost remind me of Adorno himself, in that you see everything as ideological :wink:

But the answer is: not quite. There is room for social sciences like sociology and anthropology, which are empirical sciences which are not reducible to biology and physics. There is also room for philosophy. This is where W and A differ: for the former it's therapy, for the latter it's because emancipating human beings hasn't happened yet.

The trouble is that even when the philosophy is about the big picture, the concepts and arguments being used have to be analyzed in detail. What exactly does concept X presuppose, is it consistent with concept Y in its aspect Z, and so on.

Philosophy involves ultimate generality, but that generality doesn't imply vagueness. So we can make a distinction between two dimensions: general-particular, and vague-detailed. We can address the general in a detailed way.

EDIT: Oh, and welcome :smile: