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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicely put!

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

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

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

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

LND, Lecture 1 (continued)

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

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

Negative dialectics...

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

I think of identity in two ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, what's so bad about identity?

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

So identity thinking is everywhere.

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

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

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

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

But here's another couple of useful definitions:

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

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

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

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

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

That'll do.

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

I see what you mean, good point :up:

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

Do you speak German? — frank

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

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

Otherwise :cool:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your interpretations look good to me MU.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s suitably dialectical, and agreeable.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think I concur with your gist, but...

When you see that it's actually one face of a two-sided coin, that it can't exist independently of that coin, it's like you've fallen into an idealist world. In other words, understanding dialectics should be accompanied by an "Oh shit!" — frank

Marx, Adorno, Zizek, Malabou, Pippin and Brandom seem to have been able to go through that "oh shit!" moment without falling into idealism. We can ditch that, don't you think?

(Unless you just mean, not that you become an idealist, but that you fall into the world of Hegel and the German idealists)

If it's the best way of thinking philosophically, then it's true philosophy, and will never be obsolete so long as there are human beings. — Metaphysician Undercover

But it's not obvious to me that so long as there are human beings, there will be true philosophy. But even if it does follow, maybe what matters more is whether such thinking prevails.

I'll do what I can to keep up with the reading, but that's a lot of material. So I'm happy that you're in no rush. — Metaphysician Undercover

Great :smile:

We start with the Lectures on Negative Dialectics (LND), which is based on recordings of Adorno's lectures in 1965-66, just after he'd completed the six-year task of writing the book. The lectures took place at the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt. Unfortunately it looks like there were no extant recordings or transcripts for lectures 11 to 25, so we only have some notes for those. Even so, I think the first ten work as a nice introduction to ND, not least because they're much less condensed and difficult than his formal writings.


Geist

First, a reminder at the outset (largely for me) to keep in mind the translator's note. When the translation has "spiritual," the word Adorno is using is geistig, in the same way as used by Hegel.

The fact is that the term Geist falls somewhere between the available English words — spirit, mind, intellect — with all of which it also overlaps.

Editor's foreword

Most of the foreword is written from the standpoint of a familiarity with Adorno's theoretical philosophy and is therefore not very useful to us at this point. It focuses on three things:

1. Negative dialectics as advocating and exemplifying subjective philosophical/intellectual/spiritual experience, as opposed to (or as well as) a methodology

2. The attempt, with negative dialectics, to give "fair treatment" to the sphere of the non-conceptual, that in the world which exceeds our concepts, which Adorno believes is the proper concern of philosophy.

3. The method of constellations, designed to get around a huge problem produced by (2) above, namely that in giving fair treatment to the sphere of the non-conceptual, philosophy has no choice but to operate with concepts.

These will make more sense down the line, so I won't dwell on them now.


LND, Lecture 1

Adorno opens the lecture with a tribute to the recently deceased Christian philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich, revealing that Tillich had effectively saved Adorno's life by approving his Habilitation thesis in 1931, which allowed him to get a job at Oxford and thereby secure an exit visa to leave Germany in 1934, before the Nazis closed in. For us, this is not particularly relevant to negative dialectics, but it's much more than a mere personal tidbit, since it supplies some crucial biographical context for the development of his thinking, particularly the thinking that led to Dialectic of Enlightenment.

He begins the lecture proper by saying that due to time constraints he has decided to use his book, Negative Dialectics, as the material for the lectures, rather than create a course with its own dedicated material consisting of the results of his research. In the guise of a preliminary pedagogical remark, this is a clever way of introducing negative dialectics, making the case for a certain kind of philosophical practice:

I am very aware that objections may be raised to this procedure, in particular those of a positivist cast of mind will be quick to argue that as a university teacher my duty is to produce nothing but completed, cogent and watertight results. I shall not pretend to make a virtue of necessity, but I do believe that this view does not properly fit our understanding of the nature of philosophy; that philosophy is thought in a perpetual state of motion; and that, as Hegel, the great founder of dialectics, has pointed out, in philosophy the process is as important as the result; that, as he asserts in the famous passage in the Phenomenology, process and result are actually one and the same thing. — p.4

The students are urged not to expect finished results, but rather, I would say, to share in that intellectual experience which is both the method and the content of his philosophy.

(Incidentally, Adorno in these lectures often addresses himself to the "positivists" in his audience, and seems to make reference to their various non-philosophical specialisms. This leads me to believe that the lectures were attended by, I'm guessing, postgraduate sociologists and psychologists, rather than just or even primarily philosophy students.)

He states the plan for the lecture course:

I should like to introduce you to the concept of negative dialectics as such. I should like then to move on to negative dialectics in the light of certain critical considerations drawn from the present state of philosophy. — p.5

This brings him to considerations of justification by methodology, anticipating a question in the minds of his listeners and readers: "how does he actually arrive at this?" Related to the distinction of process vs. result, Adorno expresses here a scepticism about the familiar distinction of method vs. content:

I maintain that so-called methodological questions are themselves dependent upon questions of content. — p.5

We might come back to this issue as we go through the lectures, but in a nutshell, Adorno criticizes philosophical method "in the precise sense," e.g., that of Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, as an attempt to force the world into a pre-established, abstract conceptual schema. As ready-made methodology applied to the matter at hand, it sees what it expects to see, because in its original formation it has been (a) abstracted too much from the real world and (b) ossified by its formalization. Not only that, but it elevates the rational subject, the philosopher, to the status of an arbitrating, neutral overseer. In contrast, dialectical thought emphasizes the entwinement of method and content, and of subject and object, thus of the philosopher and the world (hence the need, incidentally, for what is known in critical theory as immanent critique, critique as an inside job).

Moving on, next we get a simple definition: negative dialectics...

sets out to be a dialectics not of identity but of non-identity. — p.6

I am not well-versed in Hegel, so I feel like making some small effort to answer the general question, what is dialectics, before looking at Adorno's explanation, and before looking at his own kind of dialectics and thus the question, what is non-identity?


What is dialectics?

Adorno warns us against the popular triadic formulation of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, which came from Fichte and which Hegel did not embrace wholeheartedly ("we sometimes see this form used in a way that degrades it to a lifeless schema" — Phenomenology of Spirit, §50). This warning is not only for the reason that the formulation is not very Hegelian, but also because to the extent that it is Hegelian, it emphasizes (I think) exactly the thing about Hegel that Adorno doesn't like: the neat wrapping up of contradictions in a positive synthesis (in negative dialectics, synthesis is downgraded).

And because I'm not familiar with it, I'm also going to avoid the formulation that Hegel does use, in the Encyclopedia Logic, i.e., abstract-dialectical-speculative. Hegelians reading this are welcome to go into that.

So, here goes. Dialectics is a way of thinking that actively traces the contradictions and movements within concepts and things, and avoids freezing them into definitions and treating things as fixed and complete. Dialectics is the way of thinking that recognizes — or put differently, the dialectic is — the process characterized by the instability of concepts and objects, in which concepts and objects are not graspable in their finality but are transformed through an inner, or immanent, mediation between their contradictory aspects.

An example, from the materialist end of the Hegelian spectrum, is capitalism. Dialectical thinking helps us see that capitalism is not a fixed, natural, eternal state of affairs, but is a moment (meaning a phase or a part) of a dialectical process, a dynamic phase in something ongoing.

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

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

It might be objected that dialectical thinking is not in fact required for all this. You don't have to be a dialectician to be an economic historian who understands the historical nature of capitalism, or to believe that society evolves. But it's notable that the historical nature of socioeconomic structures was not much appreciated prior to Hegel and Marx — or when it was, it was viewed in Enlightenment fashion as simple linear Progress. And this indicates the lasting value of dialectics: it's only dialectical thinking which is always on the alert, always sensitive to the existence, in the here and now, of tensions and potentials that can go unrecognized.

EDIT (I somehow lost this bit when I first posted it):

It follows that there are conventionally acceptable frozen concepts in use right now which dialectical thinking could usefully call into doubt. An example that springs to mind is consciousness. In a lot of philosophy, from the early moderns right up to present day analytic philosophy, consciousness is treated as a fixed property of individuals — perhaps with a locus in the brain — whereas if we take a dialectical approach we might think of it as socially embedded, as substantially a feature or product of the mediation between self and other instead of a product of the brain.

I won't elaborate on that any further, since what I'm trying to show right now is just that dialectical thought might still be useful, and might even remain the best way of thinking philosophically — and that it's not just an obsolete step in knowledge's forward march.


Why must everything be a matter of contradictions?

Another objection, which Adorno actually addresses on page 7 and 8, is that these tensions, conflicts, and discrepancies are not really contradictions, that calling them contradictions is at best metaphorical, and at worst the artifact of a fault in one's conceptual scheme, one's logic, or one's choice of language — and finally, that they can be dissolved just by framing things differently. Adorno is strongly motivated to convey to the audience that dialectics is definitely not merely figurative, suggestive, faulty, illogical, or a bewitchment of language, but really means what it says, logically and rigorously.

On page 7 he illustrates the meaning of contradiction in the concept using the example of freedom. The predicative statement "A is B" functions as an identity statement, A = B [what, generally?]:

Freedom = Self-determination as ensured by the constitution

But the concept of self-determination as defined in such a constitution doesn't capture everything that freedom is:

the concept of freedom contains a pointer to something that goes well beyond those specific freedoms, without our necessarily realizing what this additional element amounts to. — p.7

He doesn't say what this something is, but we can guess: a life unmarked by coercion and compulsion in general, the ability to experience love and pleasure and beauty every day, the chance to exercise one's creativity and thereby to flourish. These are not covered by legal self-determination, thus the A = B identity statement is false, and in fact A ≠ B, thus we arrive at a contradiction in the concept of freedom.

What matters is that traditionally in logic one strives to get rid of contradictions, but in dialectics one faces up to them. It can't be denied that contradictions can be ironed out, but do we really want to do that? Dialectics says no, definitely not.

That Adorno quotation there also makes me think of Wittgenstein's family resemblances and the idea of open concepts. I don't know if it's worth going into that.

Anyway, what do you think? Is it the case that Hegel and Adorno are saying, generally, that a predicative judgment is actually an identity statement in disguise? I doubt this, since it seems to me obviously false and certainly controversial, but the way Adorno lays it out makes it look like the relevant concept of contradiction depends on this claim.


Part and whole

Another way of framing dialectics is in reference to the interdependence of the part and the whole (or particular and universal), which is an important (or the only?) site of contradiction, where the object is in tension with the concept. Dialectical thinking seeks to view the phenomenon as a manifestation of something larger, and thus seeks to go beyond the phenomenon to an expansive concept or system of concepts — but without leaving the phenomenon behind. To be known, the phenomenon cannot be apprehended alone (a dead specimen) and equally cannot be seen as a mere manifestation of something higher, as if all that mattered was this subsumption — but must also be seen anew in its double aspect as a manifestation and at the same time as living and active individual, living and active through its very participation in the whole.


The twofold structure of contradiction

Adorno says that the concept of contradiction has a twofold meaning:

1. The contradictory nature of the concept and the resulting contradiction between the concept and the thing to which it refers.

2. The contradictory nature of the thing itself — for Adorno's purposes, antagonistic society.

This brings him to the question: why does this "disharmony" exist? He gives a striking answer:

To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence. — p.9

This is probably now straying away from dialectics as such and towards specifically negative dialectics. Anyway, I'll end it here, and maybe in another post I'll take a stab, without straying beyond the first lecture, at that second question, specific to Adorno's philosophy of negative dialectics: what is non-identity?

Meanwhile, feel free to post about lecture 1 or about what I've said so far. But I'm in no rush.

@Count Timothy von Icarus, @frank: Welcome aboard. It'll be a while before we get to ND itself so I'll hold off commenting on the prologue and introduction.

Can I ask what you mean by TPFers? — Samlw

Tim means the members of TPF, The Philosophy Forum, and has for reasons known only to himself chosen to be difficult and weird. Don’t take it personally.

Starting there is ok with me.

BTW I haven't studied Hegel, and some might think it's mad to tackle this without doing Hegel first, but I'm not massively concerned — I'm working back to Hegel via Adorno, like I did with Kant, via Schopenhauer (though some might say there's a huge difference, namely that Adorno actually understood Hegel).

Useful as preparation — or we could even start with it — is Lectures on Negative Dialectics: Fragments of a Lecture Course 1965/1966. His lectures are — relatively — a breeze.

Minima Moralia is too aphoristic for a reading group, IMO

Yeah I will/would start a thread. I'm thinking Negative Dialectics, specifically the non-official but apparently only decent English translation by Dennis Redmond.

What do you think? — Moliere

I'm up for it and I'm in the mood.

I'd be up for a TPF reading group. But I reckon nobody else would be interested.

:pray:

That resonates with how I think about things. — Moliere

Yeah, me too, and that's pretty much what his Negative Dialectics is about so that's what I'm aiming for at the moment.

Thanks; I'm glad I'm not crazy. But again I want to say that it's not conservatism: Adorno castigates capitalism at every opportunity. So it's something like knowing that humans suffer domination because of capitalism but also refusing easy categories like those of (official) dialectical materialism.

I'm now thinking of all this is in terms of a link between the dispositional dimension of arrogance vs. humility and the epistemological dimension of identity vs. nonidentity.

From Adorno's point of view, there is a dangerous arrogance in philosophy's attempt to corral the object within the bounds of a concept (whatever that concept might be, e.g., the Forms, the synthetic unity of apperception, the general will, etc.). Youthful rebellion has this arrogance too: the messiness of reality is brushed aside and swept under the carpet in favour of an ideal, since that ideal is based on a certain conception of what exists that might lead, for example, to regarding human beings as nothing more than counter-revolutionaries, or invaders, etc. This is a kind of identity-thinking.

In contrast, humility would lead one to an appreciation of the nonidentical, that which exceeds our concepts; the thisness of this and that. Thus, one opens up to the world in all its inconvenient multifariousness.

But I want to provide a bit of caution to the idea that the 20th century was uniquely evil. The USA's extermination of the natives and exploitation of Africans and immigrants were liberal precursors to the evils of the 20th century; only the 20th century is more evil because of our abilities to continue the same with more firepower due to technological progress. — Moliere

That's a deep can of worms. If I wanted to get into it I'd want to reference Dialectic of Enlightenment, J.G. Ballard's novel Crash (sceptical towards the dichotomy of humans variously using or misusing technology; it's more like technology is an expression of us and also remakes us), and possibly Straw Dogs by John Gray, but I'm not sure I do right now. It's a good point to bring up though. — Jamal

No worries. I'm not exactly addressing your concern, but sort of just thinking out loud because the topic appeals to me and is something I've thought about — Moliere

If you think of something then by all means share it, but also, it's sort of something that's not fun to think about. — Moliere

I realize now that this is pretty much where I unconsciously wanted to go with the discussion, and merely used my own story to look at it --- but the moment I realize that's where I wanted to go, I don't want to.

Sure, but this angle is a new one. Putting it differently, I'm more interested in Adorno than I am in myself. So, I'm reading Adorno via my perennial personal concerns, but I'm more interested in the reading than I am in coming up with an answer as to what I should do myself.

Yeah but I like to think this is a different angle. I'm telling myself that.

That's a great-looking quiche.

I do rather like the developing argumentum ad peanutem. — Banno

:up:

And you and I both know that one is true: there is meaning in food.

I'm living backwards; I become more radical with age. It always seemed obvious to me that the political world is as round as the physical, and wherever one happens to reside, the extremes of left and right meet and become one at the antipodes, where the blood is always redder. — unenlightened

I used to scoff at this idea, thinking it reactionary, not to mention facile and simplistic. It's galling to find myself now gravitating towards it.

My dad was a communist turned socialist - how was I supposed to rebel against that? Oh, I remember now, "turn on, tune in, drop out".

And look how that turned out!

the quote isn't precisely apropos, but its thrust is in the ballpark: "If at age 20 you are not a communist, you have no heart. If at age 30 you are not capitalist you have no brain." - George Bernard Shaw, possibly. — BC

It's a great quote, and I have it at the back of my mind in all this. But it's such a familiar thought that it's become a cliché. Adorno has a way of taking a cliché and making it fresh and thus more serious (or, as some would say, pretentiously rewording it). Another example from Minima Moralia I was thinking of last night was...

the power of experience breaks the spell of duration and gathers past and future into the present.

When I read that I thought, this is "time flies when you're having fun" but without the fun (since the "experience" could be any kind of experience); and, as if underlining that, at the end of the section he concludes with a single sentence: "Time flies."

Anyway, yeah, you might say that the OP is an attempt to, egotistically, dignify a really common experience and dress it up as something more than it is. However, as I've been saying to Moliere, I haven't really become a conservative (or "capitalist"), so the trajectory is not quite the same.

The young are more likely to settle on radical sounding politics and moral severity for the same reason they are likely to settle on any other far-out sounding thing -- music, clothing, slang -- whatever. One's youth is embarrassing later in adulthood.

Then too, as much as young people won't/don't/can't admit it, the young tend to be kind of stupid (this opinion based on my experience). It's unavoidable. Why, after so few years, would they be otherwise?

For my part it took many years, several decades really, to become the sensible person I now wish I had been at 18. — BC

Yes. However, I had an interesting experience recently. I'm accustomed now to thinking I was an idiot in my youth, but I found an old diary in which I was going on about politics and philosophy, and it was actually quite good, more subtle and sophisticated than I thought I was back then.

On reflection, I realized that this was not good news at all, because what it meant was that I had forgotten most of what I knew, and I have not in fact been getting more wise but just unknowingly treading water, learning the same things over and over again while becoming slightly less angry. That was a yikes moment.

But there is a difficulty here where it is very easy to project the systemic onto the personal, without a proper recognition of the limits of personal agency in political contexts. This can lead to simplistic manichean narratives that reduce to "if only the wicked stopped being wicked and the just ruled, all problems would be fixed," or more pernicious, the derivation of personal guilt through mere "complicity" or association with systems that people have no realistic way to escape. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is a great point. I haven't thought about it like that. Maybe it's an argument not only to teach ethics early on, but to teach political philosophy before or during the teenage years of radicalization --- for me, I first learned about politics in this personalized way and found it difficult to recover from that.

You can see this in the careers of some leftist crusaders who, rightly outraged by some of the missteps of the Obama years and upset over some of the deficits in the neo-liberal global order, allowed themselves to become virtual cheerleaders for Trump, who seems almost certainly more inimical to their values. And there definitely seems to be this thought process of: "good, let him win. Then things can get so bad that we can destroy the system and start over!" Which tends to miss just how much suffering such a "tearing down" implies, or the fact that a great many revolutions do not produce better situations, and often end up reproducing many of the same problems (e.g. the Soviets were initially even worse on minority rights than the Tsars). — Count Timothy von Icarus

I certainly recognize the appeal of this viewpoint and I was attracted to accelerationism for a while. Its central point seems to be to face up to that suffering and embrace it, since it is unavoidable and might lead to a better world. What makes this interestingly different from earlier versions of that familiar ends-justify-the-means attitude (both left and right) is that it positions itself counter-culturally against a "soft" mainstream (again, both left and right), thus posing as a radical advancement beyond the various liberalisms and leftisms feebly surviving in the remains of the post-war consensus.

(Incidentally, this could be the Trotskyist in me talking again but I thought it was mainly under Stalin that the minorities suffered, having enjoyed more rights and autonomy from 1917 to 1923, when non-Russian languages were encouraged and ethnic cultural traditions were combined with, rather than replaced by, new socialist ones.)

But this is where the "crisis of meaning" steps in and pours gasoline on the fire. Because people want conflagration. They fantasize about it. The shop for it with tactical gear and rifles. They accessorize for it. And I do think this is different. It isn't (just) about opprobrium, it becomes about fulfilling a life narrative, which I think can make it much more potent.

I think you can see something similar in the period before the First World War, a desire for conflict for its own sake. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Ah, the tragic heart of your post. What do you mean by "And I do think this is different"? Different from the past?

Fortunately, I was educated by conservative Dominicans and Jesuits for twelve years that by the end (somehow) made me an avowed atheist and nascent Marxist. — 180 Proof

:cool:

the decades – the defeats – have only radicalized me so that I've grown even more pessimistic and more anarchistic. Until I drop, for me at least, the struggle against all forms of injustice and dehumanization goes on — 180 Proof

:up:

Yes, and I guess there's always a risk that my kind of reflections are effectively conservative.

That was the most interesting post-length piece I've read in years. — Leontiskos

Thank you, glad you liked it :smile:

Sure, but aren't we ignoring the other side of the coin? Namely that appealing to the inherent mismatch of ideals with reality is a cop out, and serves as an explanation for any act inconsistent with the operative principles of a society that disallows it? As in, there was a downside to the French Revolution, and I'm not convinced your construal is able to come to terms with that downside. The promotion of an ideal is not unobjectionably good, given both that there is moral worth to the stability of the status quo, and that false ideals are very often promoted. — Leontiskos

Having for years appealed to the mismatch between ideals and reality in an effort to protect the ideals, I think I see what you mean (I was radicalized by Trotskyists who were able to casually wash their hands of Stalinism since he represented "the revolution betrayed").

So I guess what you're saying is that the problem is in the very pursuit or promotion of an ideal? And for a couple of reasons: it tends to devalue everything about how things are, the status quo (which is bad because a lot of what exists is valuable); and it's difficult to distinguish bad ideals. Makes sense.

The answer might be something boring like finding a middle way. On one end you have Marinetti and the futurists positively rejoicing in war and the destruction of existing society --- an attitude that can characterize not only fascism but left-wing movements too --- and on the other you have conservatives and traditional reactionaries (as opposed to radical ones like the Nazis).

And maybe that middle way necessitates the relinquishing of the ideal --- or perhaps the shelving of the ideal to the secret Utopian corner of one's mental library.