Because it leads to ambiguity, and some people find ambiguity intolerable. Fear of coming on to a ladyboy, perhaps? — unenlightened

I know you're tri-sexual. You'll try anything. :grin:

using visually-represented phenotype to determine sex is bonkers. — AmadeusD

Why is it bonkers?

What do you think happens at delivery? — LuckyR

I work in an emergency department, so I'm present at deliveries. :grin:

Yup, it's personal. That is your insistance on using karyotype to determine biological sex. As it happens medical personnel (unlike your personal definition) don't use karyotype to determine biologic sex at birth, they inspect the baby's genitalia. — LuckyR

Do they? :lol:

. I believe that a proper understanding of concepts reveals that there is no necessity of a corresponding object, and this lack of object is not a fault of the concept, but a feature of its utility, versatility, and infinite applicability. This is what we see in mathematics for example, conceptions produced without corresponding objects. — Metaphysician Undercover

Adorno agreed with Lukacs that the perspective you're describing is embedded in human consciousness, and its origin is in the concept of exchange value (basically the abstraction we call money). So he would totally understand what you're saying, but would warn that it leads to the conundrum of indirect realism.

By the way, this alienation of subject to object (or concept to content) is what Adorno is calling idealism.

One YouTube summation said that Family Guy and South Park have both expressed their condemnation of Disney's pandering. If The Simpsons does as well, it will be the final satirical dump. Disney will have lost credibility because of the standing of the Simpsons.

In the meantime, it appears Disney has lost somewhere around $800 million. The high figure is partly due to Disney's decision to animate the dwarves instead of using real dwarves. The loss is due to a global rejection of the movie. It's apparently boring and twisted.

Then we agree at the least that faith is to be restrained, and keep it's place amongst the other virtues. — Banno

There's no way to control that.

I can live with that. — unenlightened

'Every wind in the river sure makes its own way down to the sea.'

concepts ...

... are no longer measured against their contents, — Jamal

I think when he says "contents" he's talking about real events that stand as examples of concepts. Like with music, the score is the concept (or form), and a performance is the content. He said it's a mistake to fail to see the way the performance is its own entity, each moment arising out of the history of the performance, and propelled onward from there. The score is literally nothing in the absence of the performance (and vice versa).

That would relate to the mind as when people think of mind as a domain or vault of some kind. They're separating mind from the living flow of events that are the content of the concept of mind.

The nature of the complaint is also ambiguous. :grimace:

Basically in your personal lexicon "biological sex" is identical to karyotypic sex. That's not uncommon and perfectly fine, yet is not universal, far from it. — LuckyR

Not personal. Medical personnel need to know what your sex was at birth. That's not ambiguous, unless it is.

I think we're fond of doing that with individuality, noting in various ways how the very idea of an individual arises against the backdrop of society.

With consciousness it seems like we're bumping against the limits of language. I don't have a vantage point on consciousness.

Dialectics seems to leave everything in a shadowy state. Every property seems to contain it's opposite. We could interpret Hegel as suggesting that we reach the truth by way of synthesis. A higher truth, anyway. So we imagine a pending resolution is a gate to something substantial. But if we take synthesis that way, we've forgotten the point of dialectics, haven't we? Our synthesis is really just another thesis, containing its own negation.

It's in that state of associating satisfaction with synthesis that the act of reification dwells.

The average object is a reification isn't it?

The resolution of conflict. It's not a static thing.

No. We'd have to start by explaining what's meant by negation of the negation. It's Hegel.

Adorno knew the guy who invented the term reification. The negation of the negation is a reification. Remembering that is what negative dialectics is about.

More AI art.

I guess the point was that there are rare cases where biological sex is ambiguous. The vast majority of the time, it isn't.

And there are people who have neither an XX nor an XY karotype, therefore according to your own definitions there are people who are neither biologically male nor biologically female. — Michael

Right.

So “biological male” means “has an XY karotype” and “biological female” means “has an XX karotype”? — Michael

Pretty much

You seem to be saying that even though the vast majority of biological men have an XY karotype and that even though the vast majority of people with an XY karotype are biological men, there are exceptions — Michael

I don't there are exceptions to that.

So what does “is biologically male” mean? — Michael

XY.

For most people it's straightforward. If someone has XY chromosomes, there's a long list of predictions we can make about their biology.

In the other cases, we don't just give up and say we don't know which biological sex they are. We might have a different set of predictions due to a certain condition, but it's still a male or female that has the condition, and that remains significant.

I guess there could be a total gestational screw up where there's no way to tell, but I doubt that thing would be compatible with life. If it is, we'd just give it its own category.

Which means what? — Michael

I don't understand why you're asking that. You really don't understand what it means to be born male?

Then what does it mean? — Michael

It means the person was born male. For a doctor, there are a lot of implications, which is why a patient's biological sex is listed at the top of a patient's electronic chart along with weight, height, and birthday.

Also, the term "biologically male" is ambiguous. — Michael

It's easy enough to pin it down.

Sort of (I can't immediately override an existing value), but yeah, that seems to be what morality amounts to to me, so I'm not perturbed by that. — AmadeusD

As long as you act out of love, it's ok.

It's just that there isn't much power in your should because you can change it anytime you want. There's no should. It's just you doing whatever you do.

My 'morality' is a system that says those values inform my actions. — AmadeusD

They inform your actions? What does that mean?

Do you experience morality that way? Can you change your morality notions on a whim?

I understand they seem to, but there's no way to assess this beyond "people influence each other". — AmadeusD

There is though. It could be that aliens are beaming the moral thoughts into your head. "People influence each other" is just a stab at satisfying a particular worldview.

So leaving behind what we don't know (just read Plato's apology, it's all about acknowledging what I don't know), all we have is that morality seems to have an external ground. It doesn't seem like something I'm making up, it's more something I become aware of through experience.

We can just leave it at that. No need to make peace with a worldview. Is there?

you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?
— frank

Yes. I was a sociopath for several years, partially to achieve this. — AmadeusD

You shouldn't have to do that if morals are a choice. Morals seem to come from outside, that was my point.

But guilt hurts, right? It can really hurt. Up to a point you can chose whether you're going to face it or not, but you can't make the guilt go away by changing your morals, right?

I feel like "mysticism" is not the best term here though. Really what bothers modern sensibilities is just metaphysics and the transcendent in general. Philosophy need not appeal to any sort of mystical experience to fall afoul of this bias in contemporary thought (particularly analytical thought). Which I feel is unfortunate. I think "anti-metaphysics" tends to actually just assume a very particular sort of metaphysics, and then this position essentially just "cheats" on justifying itself by pretending it is "just the skeptical, agnostic position." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Well said.

- Adorno's unfettered dialectics ... eliminates ontology altogether. His rejection of any
ontological stipulation in favor of an infinite dialectics which penetrates
all concrete things. and entities seems inseparable from a certain arbitrariness, an absence of content and direction ... — Kracauer, History, p.207

I think this is a typical reaction by those averse to dropping ontology. It seems to leave one floating on air?

Cool, thanks. — Jamal

:up: As for what Adorno made of it, I'm still trying to formulate that. He spent a lot of time sunk deep in the quasi-mystical. He tried to learn Hebrew because one of his friends became an expert in Jewish Kabbalah. But what I notice from Buck-Morss's outline is that while others around him are tipping over into lunacy, he keeps his head. For Adorno, truth is about facts. Hegel would have said we only ever encounter partial-truths. The final truth would reside in the Absolute (sort of).

I think when he describes the descent of the spirit into human life (which is what that lecture portion you quoted is about), he's describing what Marxists around him believed. He's explaining what's wrong with the picture the Marxists are embracing. The reason Lukacs stifled himself was this belief that they were cruising into this great mystical reunification between the subject and the object, between humanity and the Absolute. God was waking up and looking out onto a human world. That's what the Proletariat was supposed to be. This isn't just about emancipation. In fact, as Adorno shows, it's not about emancipation at all. This is a religious vision. Adorno wasn't buying it.

What did he really believe about the universe? I think he would have said we need to temper the drive to answer questions like that.

I guess we could first look at what Hegel meant by it. I agree with this guy:

Given the evidence for Hegel’s place in the Hermetic tradition, it seems surprising that so few Hegel scholars acknowledge it. The topic is often dismissed as unimportant or uninteresting (it is neither). Usually, it is treated as relevant only to Hegel’s youth (which is false). Surely one reason for this attitude is disciplinary specialization. Few scholars of the history of philosophy ever study Hermetic thinkers. Another reason is the recent tendency among influential Hegel scholars to argue that it is wrong-headed to treat Hegel as having any serious interest in metaphysics or theology at all, let alone the sort of exotic metaphysics and theology that we find in Hermeticism. This is the so-called “non-metaphysical reading” of Hegel. As Cyril O'Regan has pointed out, it goes hand in hand with an “anti-theological” reading. For instance, David Kolb writes, “I want most of all to preclude the idea that Hegel provides a cosmology including the discovery of a wondrous new superentity, a cosmic self or a world soul or a supermind.” But this is exactly what Hegel does.

The phrase “non-metaphysical reading” seems to have originated with Klaus Hartmann who, in his influential 1972 article “Hegel: A NonMetaphysical View,” identified Hegel’s system as a “hermeneutic of categories.” Other well-known proponents of Hartmann’s approach include Kenley Royce Dove, William Maker, Terry Pinkard, and Richard Dien Winfield.

The non-metaphysical/anti-theological reading relies on ignoring or explaining away the many frankly metaphysical, cosmological, theological, and theosophical passages in Hegel’s writings and lectures. Thus the non-metaphysical reading is less an interpretation of Hegel than a revision. Its advocates sometimes admit this — Hartmann, for instance — but more often than not they offer their “reading” in opposition to other interpretations of what Hegel meant. It is, furthermore, no accident that the same authors finish out their “interpretation” by tacking a left-wing politics onto Hegel, for they are, in fact, the intellectual heirs of the nineteenth-century “Young Hegelians” who also gave non-metaphysical, anti-theological “interpretations” of Hegel. The non-metaphysical reading is simply Hegel shorn of everything offensive to the modern, secular, liberal mind. This does not, however, imply that I am offering an alternative “right Hegelian” reading of Hegel. I am simply reading Hegel. In so doing, I hope to contribute to the “nonpartisan, historical and textual analysis” of Hegel’s thought called for by Louis Dupré.

Such a reading, I am convinced, places Hegel’s philosophy squarely in the tradition of classical metaphysics. In this view, I am in accord with the broadly “ontotheological” interpretation of Hegel offered by Martin Heidegger, who coined the term, and by such scholars as Walterjaeschke, Emil Fackenheim, Cyril O'Regan, Malcolm Clark, Albert Chapelle, Claude Bruaire, and Iwan Iljin. “Ontotheology” refers to the equation of Being, God, and logos. Hegel’s account of the Absolute is structurally identical to Aristotle’s account of Being as Substance (ousia): it is the most real, independent, and self-sufficient thing that is. Hegel identifies the Absolute with God, and does so both in his public statements (his books and lectures) and in his private notes — and with a straight face, without winking at us. Hegel does not offer the categories of his Logic as mere “hermeneutic devices” but as eternal forms, moments or aspects of the Divine Mind (Absolute Idea). He treats nature as “expressing” the divine ideas in imperfect form. He speaks of a “World Soul” and uses it to explain how dowsing and animal magnetism work. He structures his entire philosophy around the Christian Trinity, and claims that with Christianity the “principle” of speculative philosophy was revealed to mankind.” He tells us — again with a straight face — that the state is God on earth.

I see no reason not to take Hegel at his word on any of this. I am interested only in what Hegel thought, not in what he ought to have thought. To be sure, Hegel’s appropriation of classical metaphysics and Christianity is transformative; Hegel is no ordinary believer. But his metaphysical and religious commitments are not exoteric. He believes that his Absolute and World Soul, and so forth, are real beings; they are just not real in the sense in which traditional, pious “picture-thinking” conceives of them. If Hegel departs from the metaphysical tradition in anything, it is in dispensing with its false modesty. Hegel does not claim to be merely searching for truth. He claims that he has found it. — Glenn Magee

Cool. How do you think Adorno understood Hegel's use of the term "absolute spirit" in this quote?

Here we see one of the crucial turning points of Hegel’s philosophy, not to say one of its decisive tricks. It consists in the idea that subjectivity which merely exists for itself, in other words, a critical, abstract, negative subjectivity – and here we see the entrance of an essential notion of negativity – that this subjectivity must negate itself, that it must become conscious of its own limitations in order to be able to transcend itself and enter into the positive side of its negation, namely into the institutions of society, the state, the objective and, ultimately, absolute spirit. — p.14

Surely that describes all Hegelians these days? — Jamal

No.

In contrast, the metaphysical reading counters that anti-metaphysical interpretations take a one-sided approach to Hegel’s work (Beiser 2005, Goodfield 2009, Rosen 1984, Taylor 1975, Thompson 2018). Hegel conceived his PR to be a part of a wider system. Isolating any one text from its wider context may appear to inoculate any such reading from metaphysical claims elsewhere in Hegel’s system. However, only a reading that grasps the full metaphysical foundations of his thought will do justice to his self-understanding (Houlgate 2005). — SEP

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

You drew attention to the fact that self awareness is dependent on being in a social arena. I don't think you mentioned the part about how freedom requires intersubjectivity, so that as Hegel's narrative progresses, freedom disappears. In other words, if the Proletariat actually turned into what Marx thought it would, there wouldn't be any freedom. Are we on the same page there?