@Moliere I intend to respond in a few days. Just so you know I’m not ignoring you.

You know it's a good band when the live version is better than the recorded one.

I’ll say something about the last two paragraphs of the “Infinity” section.

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

In a nutshell, art is something to emulate, but carefully: not to imitate its reliance on intuition, but to learn from its non-coercive engagement with the non-conceptual.

The philosophy which imitated art, which wanted to become a work of art, would cancel itself out. It would postulate the identity-claim: that its objects vanish into it, indeed that they grant their mode of procedure a supremacy which disposes over the heterogenous as a priori material, while the relationship of philosophy to the heterogenous is virtually thematic. What art and philosophy have in common is not form or patterning procedures, but a mode of conduct which forbids pseudo-morphosis. Both keep faith with their own content through their opposition; art, by making itself obdurate against its meaning; philosophy, by not clinging to anything immediate. The philosophical concept does not dispense with the longing which animates art as something non-conceptual and whose fulfillment flees from its immediacy as appearance [Schein]. The concept, the organon of thought and nevertheless the wall [Mauer: external wall] between this and what is to be thought through, negates that longing. Philosophy can neither circumvent such negation nor submit itself to it. What is incumbent on it, is the effort to go beyond the concept, by means of the concept.

If philosophy were to attempt to be art, it would turn the non-conceptual into mere cognitive material, in which its mode of procedure (its form) had supremacy over the non-conceptual content. But we must engage things on their own terms. This is like the difference between, e.g., viewing the mechanics and acoustics of the saxophone as a neutral medium, the material, for musical expression, and viewing them rather as themselves shaping what is being expressed through their limits and resistances.

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

The original geological concept makes more sense to me: it’s when a mineral replaces another mineral but takes the first one’s shape. Adorno is saying that art and philosophy (at their best, I assume) do not allow this, i.e., they do not allow their content to be replaced, leaving only form. It’s the content that matters most. What they have in common is what ensures that one cannot become the other: to each its own proper content.

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

I suggest not making too much of his thoughts on infinity, because they're not necessary for an understanding of negative dialectics. It's just an angle, one that's only really significant in opposition to German idealism.

He's not really interested in how philosophy in general has treated infinity; he just wants to take it from Hegel and refunction it, as a way of pointing at what negative dialectics is doing. The point is just that the infinite can play a role suggestively, referring to philosophy's inconclusiveness and the endless variety of experience.

It's best just to think of it [EDIT: I mean this part of his thinking] in terms of speculation and the irrational.

The author put a lot of work into the essay. It deserves readers who are willing to do their own work to understand it.

It’s perhaps telling that whenever I criticize people for anti-intellectualism or laziness they pretend I’ve implied they’re not intellectual enough. That is obviously not the case. It is fine to be flummoxed; what is not fine is to immediately complain about it to the author. Be flummoxed, and if you’re genuinely interested, de-flummox yourself, perhaps with the help of some polite questions.

On the difficulty of the text — Baden

There is nothing wrong with how it’s written. The problem is that several of the readers seem to have expected something dumbed down or put in language they’re already familiar with. As far as I’m aware this was not in the rules of the event, was it? So the complaints are just anti-intellectualism, or laziness, or both. It’s a shame that people who apparently want to be part of a philosophy discussion forum are not willing to grapple with philosophy, or perhaps do not even realize that philosophy is difficult and sometimes technical.

Yes, I also find it quite intuitive and enjoy the tension between the rational and irrational.

Well, I agree with what you managed to write :grin:

:cool:

Introduction: "Infinity"

In my notes on the previous section I described the disenchantment of the concept as "bringing the concept down to Earth." In this section, Adorno begins by saying that this prevents the concept getting too big for its boots, "becoming the absolute itself". The prime example, or model, of this is the concept of infinity. We covered this when we looked at lecture 8 (here). In negative dialectics, the concept of infinity "is to be refunctioned".

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

Adorno's idea here is that if a philosophy can do justice to infinity at all, it is not by reducing it to its finite systems, or by presuming to be complete ("conclusive") in its grasp of the infinite and becoming thereby finite---but rather by a radical openness. Philosophy, in the form of negative dialectics, aims to "literally immerse itself into that which is heterogenous to it, without reducing it to prefabricated categories." That which is heterogeneous to it is of course the non-conceptual.

The only way that philosophy can in some sense lay claim to the infinite is by giving up the belief "that it has the infinite at its disposal." It's quite easy to understand what Adorno is getting at if we look at his recommendation of a philosophy that is "infinite to the extent that it refuses to define itself as a corpus of enumerable theorems." In other words, since there is no closure, completion, or conclusiveness in negative dialectics, it is never finished and so is in a sense infinite, precisely without claiming to capture the infinite as the philosophers of German idealism did.

This philosophy ...

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

Then Adorno describes what spurs philosophy in the direction of infinity in the first place:

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

I take this to mean that all philosophy, including both German idealism and negative dialectics (the two philosophies that are being opposed in this section), are motivated by the "unwarranted expectation" that particulars can reveal the whole, or put differently, that the infinite can be reached via particulars. But the whole "always and again eludes" philosophy---the difference is that negative dialectics recognizes this.

The "unwarranted expectation" is thus dialectical: Adorno seems to retain it for negative dialectics, while admitting that it will never be satisfied.

Cognition holds none of its objects completely.

Although this statement seems unremarkable now, and might even stand as a shared axiom of modernity, historically speaking it's an important break from the philosophical past.

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

Constructing a comprehensive representation of reality is not the proper task of thinking. Such a representation is always an illusion or "fantasm".

Then he uses art as a model to show what this means:

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

A typical Adornian dyad. On the one hand, we should not seek to gobble up works of art in the concepts of our interpretations (art interpretation as identity-thinking); on the other hand, it is the failure of the concepts to succeed in this gobbling up that reveals the truth-content of the artworks. It follows that philosophy ought to critically engage with interpretations that attempt this gobbling up, so that their failure becomes manifest.

It also follows that formal methods of interpretation, in terms of genre, definitions, and so on, must always fail:

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

Techniques for the classification and ranking of artworks are not enough to reveal the truth-content in art, and in fact obscure it, therefore they are not philosophical. Philosophy, properly conceived, does not stick to such techniques, to formal methodologies, therefore it can go astray---and here is the reason it can make some headway. The strength of philosophy lies in its fallibility: in attempting an analysis of an object such an artwork, it might miss the mark but at the same time reveal something.

I take the last sentence to be saying that scepticism and pragmatism are pretty good, but to really get at the truth we need to go beyond the safety of what can be validly ascertained into "the ferment of an emphatic philosophy". This reminds us of what he said in the lectures about speculation, and indeed the next section is entitled "The Speculative Moment".

And the next paragraph introduces play, which Adorno associated with the speculative moment in lecture 9 (see here). Since the introduction seems to mirror the lectures, we might suspect that the concept of mimesis is going to come up here too.

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

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

I like this thought very much. He said almost the same thing in the lectures, but here it's more elegantly put. Philosophy is ridiculous. But one can be intentionally ridiculous: a clown knows what he is doing. One would rather be a clown than a fool (if we define a fool as one who is unknowingly ridiculous). This is to say that we should go ahead and be playful; in so doing we recognize philosophy's absurdity.

This is not as irrational as it seems, since Adorno does believe philosophy can reveal truths. Perhaps we should extend the metaphor and think of the well-attested function of the jester as speaking truth to power, as a form of critique. The questions that seem most ridiculous might be the right ones to ask.

Incidentally, this is of course the point in the lectures (lecture 9) in which the irrational comes up, hence the impression of irrationalism here. Again and again Adorno wants to say we ought to try to do what cannot be done.

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

Negative dialectics aims for the non-conceptual, that which (a) is not already a priori; and (b) eludes capture with philosophy's laws or methodical application of concepts. As such a philosophy, it belongs to a "sphere of the unconstrained," a realm where philosophy's laws don't apply. This realm beyond the concept was made taboo by philosophy, according to its essentially conceptual nature.

He brings up mimesis next, from which we can see that his genealogy of philosophy is mirrored by the genealogy described in The Dialectic of Enlightenment:

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

Mimesis is the pre-rational imitation of the object, or act of adapting oneself to the object, something inherent in primitive magic but repressed---made taboo---by the conceptualization that came with myth, religion, and finally the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment.

So, as I briefly mentioned in my notes on the lecture, Adorno's idea here is that philosophy has to imitate mimesis while not going so far as to abandon concepts. The model is art, which is constitutively open to the new and the different.

Okay, I've run out of steam tonight. The last two paragraphs of this section elaborate on how the "aesthetic moment is ... not accidental to philosophy." I may say something about that in another post.

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

Since it's not directly engaged in the reading it might be better in its own thread. But to get any responses I think you’d have to do more to explain the analogy (I for one do not understand it).

Introduction: Disenchantment of the Concept

The first paragraph in this section has the same form as the first paragraph of the previous section:

1. This thing we're doing can look a lot like idealism
2. Here is why it actually isn't

The earlier paragraph was about negative dialectics; this one is about philosophy in general. Adorno is tackling a common argument that accuses pretty much all philosophy of being idealist, at least all philosophy that strives to be more than clarification and therapy. So he might have in mind logical positivists, as well as any anti-philosophical empiricists who suppose that immediate access to reality is possible, that is, bypassing concepts. Ordinary language philosophy might fit the bill too. Of course, these philosophies are quite different, but what they have in common is the idea that philosophy's reliance on concepts is a self-imposed and self-reflecting confusion.

The critique that Adorno criticizes is referred to as "the general objection":

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

His first response is to say that of course philosophy cannot just deal directly with the facts themselves, without going through concepts:

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

Then comes his primary rejoinder:

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

"The argument" refers to the general objection introduced in the first sentence. Adorno accuses it of treating concepts (he says "the concept," meaning concepts in general) precisely how idealism does, namely by fetishizing them as static, standalone objects, as totalities, i.e., as complete without any object beyond them (and exhausting the object without remainder). He counters that "in truth," all concepts are produced by and point back to material reality (whether they do the latter well or badly is a different matter). That is part of what a concept is. This flat assertion of materialism is similar to that in the earlier paragraph.

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

A very slippery couple of sentences. Does the "appearance of the existent-in-itself" in the second sentence refer to the "conceptual mediation" of the first sentence? If so, I think Adorno is saying that once this conceptual mediation is properly apprehended as an appearance, rather than as the very thing it points to in the real world, it gains the freedom of movement necessary for the dialectic, despite having material roots and connections.

Or, the acknowledgement of the material origin and non-conceptual goal of concepts frees philosophy from accusations of idealism, since its necessarily mediational nature just is how we access reality in thought.

With both of these interpretations together---because they're complementary---I think maybe I'm close to what Adorno is saying.

The next paragraph elaborates on the first.

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

Neither philosophy's conceptual essence nor the above critique of this essence should have the last word. Instead...

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

The crucial insight is that philosophy's conceptual essence is not absolute, i.e., it does not entail that it depends on nothing outside itself. And this insight is "mediated through the constitution of the concept," meaning that it arises organically from what we understand concepts to do, rather than being a bare assertion of dogmatic metaphysics or naive realism. And what we understand concepts to do is reach towards the non-conceptual:

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

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

Here he brings up identity-thinking again. When concepts explicitly refer to the non-conceptual, they attempt to make it identical with themselves and thereby forget about the non-conceptual they had been trying to reach in the first place.

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

The content of concepts is both immanent and transcendent. It is immanent because whatever is included in the concept is thereby conceptualized---it remains within the sphere of the intellect so long as it is a concept at all; and it is transcendent because it still points outside itself---although it is intellectually immanent, by its nature it transcends its own intellectuality, or seeks to.

And once we have a concept which takes this dual nature into account, the fetishism that usually characterizes both philosophy and the critique of philosophy (the fetishism of the concept as standalone object) can be discarded.

Negative dialectics is supposed to consist of the philosophical self-reflection that achieves this.

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

Kant's dictum is "Thoughts without content are empty". Concepts must be of something.

The next paragraph makes the case somewhat polemically:

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

The interesting thing here is the mention of reification. It is through the reification of concepts that they lose touch with what is outside of themselves. But more than that: it is actually through reification that a concept becomes a distinct individual intellectual item in the first place. This reminds us how deep Adorno's scepticism of concepts runs, and shows us that we can never expect final, satisfactory concepts in philosophy.

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

So far, so good. The concept's very conceptuality is founded on its signification beyond itself. He goes on to say pretty much the same thing in a different way:

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

On the one hand the concept is characterized by its separation---as the abstract unity that unifies existing things ("onta")---from the things themselves in their concrete reality (the "ontical"). But equally it can be characterized by its relation to the non-conceptual. In other words, it is just as much related to as separated from the non-conceptual.

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

The insight described above, that the concept is constitutively concerned with the non-conceptual, allows us to resist the compulsion of identity thinking and orient our concepts towards that which escapes them or is distorted by them.

Now we can see what the section title means. The disenchantment of the concept intentionally mirrors Weber's disenchantment of the world. Where the latter described the demystification of the world through the erosion of religious worldviews and sacred hierarchical bonds, the disenchantment of the concept means to erode its sacred power, to root it in material reality without casting it aside completely---bringing the concept down to Earth.

All right. I think you got carried away in your previous post, when you said that the meaning of "negative dialectics" was "against dialectics", when obviously it just means dialectics of the negative variety.

Of course he criticizes Hegel a lot, since his (Adorno's) version of dialectics is meant to be a superior replacement for Hegel's. But he is still quite a lot closer to Hegel in method than he is to Plato, even using Hegel's terms and categories, e.g., mediation, determinate negation, moment, etc.

And I think it's crucial to keep in mind the fundamentally dialectical nature of Adorno's philosophy, in the Hegelian sense, otherwise we risk solidifying the concepts he uses along the way.

Anyway, as you say, I think we can sort of agree on this particular issue.

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

When "dialectics is the ontology of the false condition" is immediately followed by "A true one would be emancipated from it," we can be confident that "a true one" refers to the condition and the "it" refers to dialectics.

I had not realized until now that you actually believe Adorno is arguing against dialectics as such. That's an eccentric interpretation, to say the least.

EDIT: I suggest you have a look at lecture 1 again. Now that you have some Adorno under your belt, it'll make more sense, and you'll get a better idea of his intentions.

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

May I remind you that Adorno is a dialectical thinker who relishes counterintuitive paradoxes?

As he says, "dialectics is the ontology of the false condition." The false condition is wrong society, and it is not (only) wrong because a nefarious group of gangsters and psychos is oppressing and impoverishing everyone else, but (also) because all people, from top to bottom, are under the spell of ideology and coerced by the system, their individuality stunted. This is true even of those who do not suffer direct oppression and poverty.

Adorno inherits his position on this matter from Marx:

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

No vaguely Marxian thinker believes that the material privilege of the ruling class confers a state of true freedom, of flourishing subjectivity and spiritual satisfaction. They are as conditioned by the system as anyone else, probably more so—and one of Adorno's points about late capitalism, made elsewhere (but probably in ND too, somewhere), is that the bourgeoisie managed to absorb large sections of the proletariat, in effect turning workers into bourgeois (with rights, comforts, and leisure unheard of in the Victorian factories of Marx's day). In this way, liberal capitalism becomes more ideological than is required by the naked domination of monarchy or dictatorship, since everyone begins to buy into the illusions that justify the system—including those at the top, who "cannot even know how much it is their own."

And yet, the capitalists buy into them most of all, and behave according to the delimitations of the system's logic. In this way, their subjectivity is captured and directed. This conditioning is a form of domination, plainly.

But I've gone back to thinking he's not just talking about capitalists. I think he thinks the very idea of a ruling class is outdated in late capitalism, so what he means is those not only at the top but also in the machine of capitalist administration—the managers, bureaucrats, lawyers, advertising executives, accountants, financial consultants, etc., whose "own reason ... produces identity through exchange", i.e., who understand their participation in the economy according to instrumental rationality, and reproduce and reinforce that understanding.

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

I think it's clear that he is, and that you're reading it wrong. It's a dialectical point: those most determined by the system also produce it, and those dominated by the system do not know how much they themselves constitute and maintain it. But in the context in which he discusses the status of subjects and subjectivity in general, he would not suddenly restrict his referent to a particular class, so that's why I'm inclined to think he meant anyone of whatever class.

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

Yes, he is referring to instrumental reason in the service of capital, in the guise of universal reason. In other words, ideology. But ideology bewitches and is reproduced by everyone, not only by a conspiratorial elite.

So even if the particular interests are the interests of the bourgeoisie, it doesn't mean he was referring to the bourgeoisie when he mentioned those most conditioned by the system.

I'm not sure it's crucial though.

EDIT: I asked ChatGPT and Deepseek and they agreed with you that the "most conditioned" refers to the ruling class, so I'm definitely doubting myself now. On the other hand, the ruling class are also dominated by the system, so…either way, I win :grin:

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

Sorry, I meant I disagree with your interpretation of Adorno's attitude to contradiction in the object. I agree that we disagree on that point.

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

We have both paid very close attention to the text, but we continue to have very different interpretations.

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

He is referring not to an elite but to any and all members of society, particularly those dominated by it.

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

It is the logic of exchange, and therefore the actual economy, that reduces subjects to a common denominator. That's what Adorno means.

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

I disagree.

One more tonight, a big hit across Eurasia...

:pray:

I don't know anything about negative theology but yeah, it looks like it. As I understand it, how close negative dialectics is to negative theology—to what extent it's more than an analogy—would depend on how ineffable the non-identical is meant to be. Adorno appears to say it is and also is not ineffable, which is a reflection of philosophy's essentially paradoxical nature.

Introduction: The Antagonistic Whole (continued)

Sooner than I thought.

Despite the idealist tendencies of dialectics, the contradictory system does not in fact equate to Spirit:

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

Society is a system of human beings whose roles, behaviour, and thoughts are to a great extent determined by forces that seem out of their control but which are actually entirely made up of them, i.e., capitalism looms over and dominates the individuals who constitute it.

Or perhaps it's not just capitalism that does this, but all societies, and history in general? As Marx wrote:

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

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

The societal system, particularly the capitalist mode of production, which is pre-formed ("given and transmitted from the past") by people, that is, subjectively---this man-made thing is unreconciled with man, so to speak. In other words, there is an antagonism between what people have unconsciously produced and the people themselves. Society confronts the individual as something alien, hostile, and obscure.

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

The reduction of things to fungibility, an achievement of human reason, acts unconsciously as if it's the result of transcendental conditions, as if subjectivity is conditioned somewhat in the Kantian manner, by the transcendental ego. This rationality, when applied back to the people who produce and maintain it, does not match up with lived individuality, which means that subject (as reproducer of the reductive rationality of the system) is the enemy of subject (as human being). A secondary meaning of this might be that some people become enemies of others, according to class, race, etc.

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

What does "the preceding generality" refer to? Is it the idea that Spirit = contradiction? The idealist thesis that the whole is the true? That the real is subjectively constituted?

I now think "preceding" means preceding in history, not preceding in this text, and that the generality is the achievement of human reason just discussed, that which is "given and transmitted from the past," specifically the instrumental reason that reduces things to units of exchange.

This instrumental reason is true in that it does actually maintain and reproduce the society that determines subjectivity, but it is false in that its reason is not universal: it claims to be the most general basis for society (as expressed in liberalism, for example) but merely expresses the particular interests of those with power.

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

Adorno is even more utopian here than previously, and also explicitly equates the concept of the non-identical with the Marxist category of use-value, that which is reduced to exchange-value in a commodity economy.

Negative dialectics, in embracing the particular, goes beyond philosophy into empirical reality---so I suppose this means it has to inform or include sociology.

In our negatively utopian conception of the good life, use-value, or the non-identical, is that which cannot be fully captured in concepts, i.e., is ineffable. Our utopia cannot be positively set out.

Furthermore, a true condition, that of utopia, would no longer need dialectics.

Introduction: The Antagonistic Whole

This section takes its cue from the previous sentence:

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

Within this concept of negative dialectics there is a tension:

Such a concept of dialectics casts doubt on its possibility.

This first paragraph begins by conceding that negative dialectics, as a form of dialectics, looks quite idealist; but then emphasizes that it's a materialist philosophy. On the one hand, negative dialectics implies the thesis of idealism; on the other hand ("Against this"), the object of negative dialectics is the real beyond the subject, i.e., society or the antagonistic whole.

In more detail...

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

The treatment of contradiction as the key to reality in negative dialectics looks a lot like an idealist imposition of a universal structure belonging to Spirit. This is because such a universal structure is a totalizing concept, exactly what ND is trying to avoid.

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

The phrase "this itself" refers to "the contradiction in things," so the sentence is saying that Spirit must itself be the contradiction in things if it is to be organized according to the form of the contradiction, as dialectics demands. In other words, if Spirit is to truthfully reflect the contradiction in things then it must itself be---must embody or partake of---contradiction, because otherwise it would be external to what it's interested in; it would be a spectator rather than something dialectically intertwined. But this collapse of the separation of Spirit and the world of course represents a regression into idealism, since it makes the object of Spirit's thought identical with Spirit.

If this isn't entirely convincing, it's best to see Adorno as alerting us to a tendency in dialectical philosophy.

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

This follows logically to show that if the separation of Spirit and the contradictory world collapses, then the truth of the whole is presupposed and the entire thing is circular. Idealist dialectics knows what it's looking for when it begins. The better thing, perhaps, would be not to drive past every particularity, not to presuppose the truth only of the whole.

But the point here is to show how easily dialectics of any kind can regress back to idealism, or, better put, to show how essential an idealist element is even to materialist dialectics.

Next, Adorno shows how negative dialectics is to be rescued from its idealist temptations:

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

This seems like just a flat denial of the idealism, saying no: although there seems to be an idealist tendency, in fact the object of this philosophy is the reality beyond the subject. Antagonistic society is real not merely by virtue of the subject's reciprocal relation (mediation) to it. The subjective constitution of reality must be retranslated as belonging to reality itself, which in effect means that contradiction belongs not only to the subject but to the object, i.e., the real world, or society.

We can see why it is so centrally important for Adorno to say that contradictions are real, or objective (in the object, not only the subject): it maintains the importance of dialectics, but in a realist, or materialist, context.

But idealism is not thereby expunged entirely:

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

Although we have, in something like the Marxian materialist fashion, downgraded Spirit to something determined by objective society, by the mode of production and so on---despite this, society remains a realm of subjects. Thus society has a subjective flavour and this materialism is thereby also somewhat idealist.

But the crucial step is to contrast this perhaps utopian conception of society as a realm of subjectivity with the reality, in which subjects are negated.

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

In real society, subjects are unknowable to themselves and others---because they are alienated from their work, their fellow members of society, and themselves, by the dictates of commodity exchange (including the labour market) and by the distortions of ideology---and they are also disempowered because society acts upon them economically and institutionally without their say-so, rather than being a collective expression of their subjectivity, or a domain in which individual expression and self-actualization might happen.

That's just the first paragraph. I'll try to cover the second one soonish. I've had to slow down because life has been getting in the way.

That works for me :up:

like I did with Jamal the other day, and unwittingly confused him. — Pussycat

Easily done.

Introduction: Interest of Philosophy

We covered a lot of this when we looked at lecture 7. The five paragraphs go something like this:

1. The proper interest of philosophy now is the particular, that which has traditionally been denigrated as contingent and imperfect.

What is urgent for the concept is what it does not encompass, what its abstraction-mechanism eliminates, what is not already an exemplar of the concept.

What the philosophical concept desperately requires is to somehow apply to what it necessarily eliminates.

2. Bergson and Husserl set about this task but failed, the former with dualism and a cult of immediacy, the latter with a system that didn't transcend the concepts he was trying to transcend.

3. Bergson's mistake was to fail to see that all cognition of concrete particulars is conceptual—it requires mediation by concepts and intellectual reflection.

4. Husserl's essences were indistinguishable from the general concepts he rejected, and his intuition of essences ended up as pretty much equivalent to the abstract generalization he aimed to replace. Against both Bergson and Husserl, the task of philosophy is to say what cannot be said.

The former as well as the latter remained frozen in the demesne of subjective immanence. What is to be insisted on against both is what each tries to conjure up in vain; pace Wittgenstein, to say what cannot be said.

Bergson and Husserl remained trapped in the purely subjective, unable to break out and reach what they had set out to reach.

5. The fundamental paradox or contradiction of philosophy: philosophy works with concepts, and yet its proper domain is the non-conceptual. In other words, philosophy must attempt to say what cannot be said.

The way I think about it, there's a more general paradox lying beneath this (or is it just a different way of putting the same one?): philosophy has to find truth in the concrete and particular, but by its very nature philosophy is the most abstract and general of all intellectual disciplines. We see that Adorno is like Nietzsche in insisting on the primacy of life, of lived experience, against the philosophers from Plato to Hegel who regard contingent life as a pale imitation of truth, subordinating it to their abstract systems.

According to Adorno the first step is to see that dialectics is the way to go:

The simple contradiction of this demand is that of philosophy itself: it qualifies the latter as dialectics, before it embroils itself in its specific contradictions.

Philosophy as dialectics is a recognition at the outset that philosophy itself is contradictory, even before it gets involved with the everyday contradictions which are its bread and butter.

The work of philosophical self-reflection consists of working out this paradox. Everything else is signification, post-construction, today as in Hegel’s time pre-philosophical.

With the terms "signification" and "post-construction" Adorno is referring to Bergson, Husserl, and probably every other philosophy except negative dialectics. I take "signification" to mean something like the gesture towards truth using names, without really grasping the things named; and "post-construction" could be a description of how idealism operates, by constructing systems after one has decided how it all works.

A faith, as always subject to question, that philosophy would still be possible; that the concept could leapfrog the concept, the preparatory stages and the final touches, and thereby reach the non-conceptual, is indispensable to philosophy and therein lies something of the naivete, which ails it.

Attempted breakouts like those of Bergson and Husserl had the right motivation, because philosophy is nothing without it—but this motivation is based on a faith which is in a sense essentially naive.

He ends with his "utopia of cognition":

Whatever of the truth can be gleaned through concepts beyond their abstract circumference, can have no other staging-grounds than that which is suppressed, disparaged and thrown away by concepts. The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.

I think it's important to note that Adorno's cognitive utopia remains conceptual, i.e., it is not mystical or intuitive.

QUESTION: This description of philosophy as essentially paradoxical can look rather too irrationalist. Would it be a misrepresentation of Adorno to just say that philosophy seems paradoxical, but there might be a way to do it? I know he wants us to keep contradictions open, but this one to me is a bit on-the-nose.

Something I found interesting in the translator's introduction was that "Bann" can also be translated as "Spell", but the translator chose "bane" because it doesn't have magical connotations like "spell" does. But to say someone is under a spell could also be to say that identity-thinking has a way of becoming so coherent that the difference right before our eyes isn't being seen because we've started keeping track of the concept "reality" rather than what is real. — Moliere

Very nice. It reminds me of what I was saying about magical thinking a couple of years ago.

A bit behind but catching up. — Moliere

Cool. I might be slowing down over the next week or two.

This is why I brought up the phrase "the identity of identity and non-identity". But to be clear, it is Hegel whom Adorno accuses of giving identity to non-identity, in that way, which I claim puts contradiction into the object. This is the means by which Hegel enables substantive thinking: " the determinate particular was determinable by the Spirit, because its immanent determination was supposed to be nothing other than the Spirit". The problem being what is indicated by Adorno at the beginning of the section, that the law of non-contradiction applies to objects, not to subjective thought (here as Spirit, which is in essence free). So when the determinate particular is nothing other than a determination of the free Spirit, this effectively avoids that law, allowing contradiction within the determinate particular, as the identity of non-identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Right, that makes more sense.

Adorno I believe is rejecting Hegelian dialectics, recognizing what is described of Hegel at the end of the section as a mistake. Adorno is looking for a way to give primacy to the object rather than to the subject, but this would be a restriction to Spirit. Primacy of the subject is what I claim leads to contradiction within the object. So for Adorno, the non-identical is not a positively applied category (as you say, and I agree), as it is for Hegel. And, I think he is attempting to avoid any conceptualization of "non-identical", because conceptualization will inevitably be contradictory, as was the case when Aristotle tried to conceptualize "potential", and "matter". Nevertheless, it must be at the base of substantive thinking, as what enables it, the foundation. — Metaphysician Undercover

Yep, although when it comes to the concrete particulars I think it's important to bear in mind that distinction I made between good and bad identity-thinking, and the fact that Adorno's mission is not to reject conceptualization but to reject a kind of conceptualization that is unaware of its tendency to distort and lead to contradiction.

Here I have to disagree, I know of a few stalinists that certainly don't think that their attempt is futile! :) And also I doubt that Hegel thought that philosophy was futile, quite the opposite. — Pussycat

Yeah fair enough. I never did get to the bottom of that comment of his about futility.

What you say about Hegel's restriction makes sense too.

I'll try to explain to you why I see it that way.
[...]
That's why I said Hegelian dialectics projects contradiction into the object. — Metaphysician Undercover

Thanks. I'm not persuaded but I'm not going to dig any further.

I find your next post a bit closer to my wavelength:

However, this dialectical approach is actually based in an act of categorizing them, as non-identical. So there is an illusion created, that those differences which are impossible to categorize, have actually been categorized. But the category is really 'the contradictory', as the non-identical which have been given that contradictory identity. — Metaphysician Undercover

Very meta. I don't know what to say about it, except that I don't think the non-identical is a positively applied category so much as a limit concept, a negative name (a bit like noumena in kant).

I do rather like the following, which seems very dialectical:

So I generally agree with this, but I maybe wouldn't say it is a matter of hiding the non-identical. It's maybe even the opposite to that, as allowing the non-identical (as contradictory) right into the mind as if it has an identity. It hides it by making it so obvious that it's just ignored. — Metaphysician Undercover

And yet, there is more to the history of a concept than etymology.