Just to add: for Hegel, the experience of freedom can only happen in a social situation. We give one another freedom:

The key point, for Hegel, is that only the free will of an individual can ground the free will of another (Stillman 1980). Something is mine when mutually recognized as my possession by another. This is the first appearance of right where the activity of my free will in taking possession is free, and not mere arbitrariness. It is this agreement between two individuals forming a kind of contract which is so important for Hegel. This is because mutual recognition becomes a vehicle for how we can develop further a more concrete understanding of freedom as right in the world. If such recognition was under threat, this would unsettle how we can ground our free will in a free will of another. — SEP article on Hegel's Philosophy of Right (PR)

That article also notes that there are some who read Hegel and ditch the mysticism that it's couched in. I'm sure @Count Timothy von Icarus will see that Adorno's explanation of Hegel (in your quote) has Neoplatonic undercurrents. We don't need to explore that, (unless we do need to).

It's the end of the world.
Is it still here?
I thought it was already gone.

I love the word lunch
It smells of sandwiches
and stars on the walls.

It's the end of the world.
Am I a ghost?
Can they see me?

The lawnmower shaves the world
but if you tried to put all the clovers back
How would you know which way they go?

It's the end of the world.
It's fallen into a well
The little people crowd around.

On the other hand, he does aim to "prioritize the object" and he is a kind of materialist. The world of experience is not entirely amenable to concepts, and it's unpredictable, because there is more to it than the subject puts into it, even though there's a subject-object reciprocity. — Jamal

True. The idealism that bugged him is the alienation of the subject to the object. That shows up in two places: in Kant (as the thing-in-itself problem), and in Marx's ideas about a commodity's exchange value (which means a commodity's value has become abstract for the sake of exchange, rather than use.) Adorno become convinced that these two cases of it are linked, and that what Marx outlined (in the first chapter of Kapital) is the real source of the Kantian thing-in-itself problem. In fact, for Adorno, it goes beyond being a feature of bourgeois culture (as it was for Lukacs), and becomes an organizing feature of human consciousness.

Also for Adorno, history unfolds similarly to music: the present moment has a sense of momentum as it arises out of the past, and the future takes shape according to the inner logic of the cultural story that's being played out. This is his belief in the unity of form and content. The "form" part is like the composition itself, the notes on paper. The content is a unique playing of that composition. Adorno says the orchestra never purely expresses the notes of the form, but rather the whole thing proceeds just like any events in time: arising from the past, and constrained by meaning to fall forward. It's almost like he's saying every musical production is like jazz in a way, with the form as a touchstone. Human history is like jazz.

The human race

I don't think it affirms that he was an ontological antirealist, and I don't think he was an antirealist. — Jamal

I went back looking for where I may have been mistaken. Ontological anti-realism is skepticism about ontology. One formulation would be to say we just don't have the God's-eye-view necessary to determine whether the world is made of mind-stuff or non-mind-stuff.

Through his life, Adorno was along the lines of a phenomenologist. In the 1920s he was surrounded by people who were giving up altogether on reason as a path to truth. For some Marxists, reason was tainted. Adorno rejected both of these lines of thought, but still ended up as, well, an ontological anti-realist. All knowledge is "within the bounds of experience."

Right. Adorno had never believed we can use philosophy to predict historical events, so the only part of Marxism that interested him was the part that was transmitted through Lukacs.

Lukacs was basically saying the mind-body problem originates in the separation between labor and product that takes place when a commodity takes on exchange value. In other words, the abstraction we call money is the source of the mind-body problem.

I mean, we know that everywhere the concept of money went, mathematics blossomed. Math needs that boost of abstraction to get off the ground. I think Lukacs may have been right. Adorno was definitely convinced.

Do I have a moral duty to help YOUR descendants? — Agree-to-Disagree

No. The moral issue I'm talking about has little to do with you in particular.

but it doesn't explain his opposition to the concrete form that activism took in the sixties, i.e., why exactly he did not think much of the student protesters around 1968. — Jamal

Buck-Morss says that was the same opposition he'd always had. The Frankfurt group began to doubt Marx regarding the power of the proletariat to transform the world when Hitler came to power. When the war started, that belief was entirely gone. Adorno had never believed Marx was right though.

This little quote clears a couple of things up for me. It explains why Adorno backed away from supporting any sort of political activism. It affirms that he was an ontological anti-realist, and he would have sympathized with surrealism. I put the extra line spaces in:

Adorno's position did have an inner logic based on
his intellectual experiences, which by 1931 had convinced him of three things:

that any philosophy, and Marxism was certainly no exception, lost its legitimacy
when it overstepped the boundaries of material experience and claimed metaphysical knowledge (this had been the lesson of Cornelius's neo-Kantianism);

that the criterion of truth was rational rather than pragmatic, and hence theory
could not be subordinated to political or revolutionary goals;

and that avant·garde art, even when as with Schonberg's music it had no consciously political intent, could be progressive rather than simply bourgeois decadence, that it was
not mere ideology, but, at least potentially, a form of enlightenment as well . — Buck-Morss

What if an organism could change the environment? They could change the environment to allow themselves to survive. — Agree-to-Disagree

Living things are architects: sometimes profoundly altering the earth to meet their needs. This has been going practically since life first appeared. People who think climate change is a moral issue because it's evil to transform the world are just misinformed about the nature of life.

The moral issue is about having the power to help our descendants, but failing to act on their behalves.

Reality always exceeds the concepts we apply to it, in such a way that no concept, however refined, can all there is to say. — Banno

Maybe it's this;

We know our concepts are limited because the world surprises us, disappoints us, goes all to hell in ways that our theories didn't predict. In this is a kind of materialism. The evidence for materialism is on-going suffering.

So if we spent time poking our heads out of old concepts like a turtle from its shell, would we discover solutions to suffering that we were oblivious to?

It's brilliant, but I definitely wouldn't call it an introduction. It traces Adorno's thinking through his interactions with Walter Benjamin, Lukacs, Brecht, etc. — Jamal

Maybe background would be a better word then. One of Adorno's preoccupations was with the difference between the concept of the thing and an example of the thing in the wild. Imagine that your mind is trying to hold the world in its hands, but the world is like sand and some of it always slips through your mind's fingers. I want to know why that was so important to Adorno.

So, yeah, I go with the system that means welll, but fails from time to time as opposed to the one that means harm and typically gets it right. — Hanover

Do you mean dictatorships usually mean harm?

This is another introduction to Negative Dialectics by Susan Buck-Morss.

Mine was 2.2, liberal airhead.

Very dated. — Jamal

:up:

Speaking of football, I consider your theory to be like a football bat. — Hanover

Since base-football, which makes use of the footbat, is a vast untapped opportunity for merchandise sales stretching out to the horizon, I think you're saying my theory is freaking genius.

In other words, yes it is part of the American psyche to question government, but that is based upon history and well developed ideology, not just mindless fear governments can be bad. — Hanover

Are dictatorships really unusually bad compared to democracies? They're both capable of horrendous mistakes and diabolical episodes, as well as great feats of righteousness. How is one really better than the other?

Speaking of Russia, I'd suggest their willingness to cede power to dictators is also explained by their history. Russian people are bound together by a shared history and attachment to that land. Americans are bound by a limited history, a specific ideology, and a dream of self advancement .

More so not liberals than liberals though. — Hanover

True. I think that explains why we have the oldest constitution in continuous use. The Constitution is all we've got.

Try your gay Trumpery pal out with that and see if you get a hot reaction. — unenlightened

I'll ask him if he thinks his devotion to Trump is coming from a desire to be dominated by him in bed. That's a great idea.

Assuming the goal is to prove yourself to be in that sweet spot between hopelessly strict and hopelessly lenient, the debate will center on where that sweet spot is, with most defending their test score as being the sweet spot. That's my plan. — Hanover

My theory is that Americans are by nature kind of sheep-like. At a football game we all coalesce into a patriotic mass as the national anthem is played. Knowing that about ourselves, we demand democracy to keep our personal identities from being subsumed into the super-identity. In other words, we use democracy to guard against our native tendencies.

A country like Russia doesn't really need democracy because historically, they aren't easy to govern. They don't feel threatened by dictatorship because they don't fear that they'll all just fall in line and lose themselves in the herd.

I think Adorno may have had it backwards. You're open to dictatorship only if you aren't afraid of it. You aren't afraid of it if you're very confident about your own autonomy.

This doesn't really address what you said, but I said it anyway,

This is a blurb from the Adorno entry in the SEP.


"In contrast to the “scientific dualism” of word and thing, formal logic and inference, Adorno calls for an explicitly “aesthetic” method of “configurative language”: “a dialectically intertwined and explicatively indissoluable unity of concept and thing” (ibid., 38) which makes disclosive truth possible. In Negative Dialectics he captures this idea with the claim that “In dialectics … the rhetorical element is on the side of content” (1966a [1973, 41]). Recent scholarship has attempted to bring Adorno’s thinking about language (and rationality) into critical discussion with certain Wittgensteinian, pragmatist, and neo-Hegelian strains of anglophone philosophy (Demmerling
1994;"

It sounds a lot like Russell/early-Witt where the world is "all that is the case" which indicates unity of true propositions and world, or content and thing. I'm guessing that we're supposed to have ejected ontological commitments prior to reading Adorno. We're ontological anti-realists.

suppose you’re right. But then, Adorno was pretty much saying that every philosopher had imposed their concepts extinguishingly on the world. — Jamal

Even British empiricists? How?

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. — Jamal

An example of someone who does this is Schopenhauer. After observing that subject and object are two poles of one concept (along with cause and effect), he posits a One whose will pervades the universe, and all else is sort of illusory. That view extinguishes the things we value the most.

edit: although I wouldn't say Schopenhauer was wrong, just incomplete.

More a matter of coherence. — Banno

Did you show that the theory of forms is incoherent? I missed that.

I think the contradiction he's talking about is that we treat something like the Absolute as a substantial thing (substantial in the Aristotelian sense, as an independent thing).

But we can show that the Absolute isn't independent after all. We conceive if it against a background of disunity, the non-Absolute. This situation generalizes.

"It collides with its own boundary". He's saying it as poetically as he possibly can.

Alternatively, we might understand "triangularity" as a way of grouping some objects, as something we do, and without supposing the existence of a mystic form. — Banno

True. It's a matter of taste, though.

Is our aim to understand true triangles, or is it to understand real triangles? After all, it's the ones with the bumps and imperfections with which we find ourselves working. So why not both? — Banno

It's both. The math class is the realm of true triangles. The real world works by a margin of error. This is pretty much what Plato said.

Plato would require that true knowlege of something is knowledge of the form...
— Hanover
And was he right? I doubt many would now agree. — Banno

The truest triangle is the form. Real triangles always fail to match the concept due to bumpity parts that have to be overlooked.

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

I thought maybe you could read the lecture in German and talk about the translation. I would suspect the translation before deciding that Adorno didn't understand dialect.

Ok. I think later in Negative Dialectics he tries to work through examples. Maybe that will clarify it for me. Do you speak German?

o the way I see it, synthesis represents the positive, hence Adorno's negative dialectics — Jamal

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.

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. — Jamal

If that's true, we aren't really talking about Hegel. Hegel's logic isn't about contradiction per se. It's about oppositions. But I think there are parts of Marx (where he's talking about supply and demand?) that have been taken by some to be an exercise in dialectic, but on closer examination, it's not. It's just an inverse relationship.

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

I don't think "contradiction" is a good word for it. It's an inextricably bound opposition. It's the yin-yang symbol.

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

Right . It's not a contradiction. It's that we understand the concept of freedom by comparing it to its negation: a lack of freedom. It's just like Merleau-Ponty's dot. You know about the black dot because of the white background it contrasts with. The existence of the black dot is dependent on its background.

Most things are like that. We know what freedom is because we're contrasting it with a background of un-freedom. Where we find that un-freedom in the world depends on our agendas.

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). — Jamal

I agree. The path that led me to that feeling of being in a world of ideas would have eventually shown me that I don't have it all figured out (as Hegel seemed to). I just needed to follow it further.

In a way, materialism is about being open to what I don't know yet, don't grasp yet. It's about allowing the process of understanding to be forever open ended.

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? — Jamal

Yes. But when Adorno talks about materiality, he's talking about the unintelligible or the unidentified. He's not talking about rocks.

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. — Jamal

@Joshs can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think by concept, we mean an overarching category. So we have the idea expressed by the word up. But this idea is not yet a concept. The concept is vertical direction, made up of the opposition between up and down. What makes vertical direction a concept is that its parts have no meaning except relative to one another. Ultimately, up is the direction that is not down, and vice versa.

With a lot of logic, we just follow along with intellectual necessity. Dialectic is not like this. It's a little startling to grasp that all the things you think of as having some kind of... positiveness, concreteness, weight, substance.. it's hard to pick the word that describes it. But it's that you always thought a word like masculinity gets its meaning from the things that are unique to masculinity. This would be a positive definition. 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!"

Based on SEP, something like Hegelian dialectic, or just that, appears to be Adorno's target. — NotAristotle

I also turned to the SEP after a while. It looks like he's going to take a deep dive into German Idealism.

In the opening lines of the prologue, we're told that we've inherited a tradition that says dialectics leads to something positive. An example would be this:

A: masculinity
not-A: femininity
synthesis: gender

You can see how masculinity gets its meaning (ultimately) as the negation of femininity, and vice versa. They're two parts of a whole. For instance, imagine you're on a spaceship with all men. They have a device they use to create people and they've been travelling for millennia, so there's no femininity in their world at all. What does "masculinity" mean to them? Since there's nothing to compare it to, it doesn't mean anything. All they have is humanity, even though from our point of view, they're male.

So it's not just the positive traits of a thing, such as masculinity, that lend it meaning. It's also the presence of its opposite. This would appear to be pervasively true: that rationality depends on oppositions. Ultimately, you are the negation of everything that's not you. This insight goes back to Plato, and is present in the cyclical argument in Phaedo.

For Hegel, Gender is the concept. It's made up of an opposition: male and female. But we can also see dialectic as a kind of journey. For instance:

A. Everything is united
B. Everything is discrete

This is an ancient opposition that played out in Greek philosophy. The tradition Adorno mentioned suggests to us that this opposition has to be resolved in a synthesis, and in fact, that synthesis is part of the mystical domain Hegel was introduced to by Franz von Baader.

Adorno suggests that the teleology present here blew up during the Enlightenment. We're going to have a better world by way of reason. This is particularly interesting to me, because there are fairly recent writers who have rejected this teleology, but not because of the Holocaust.

If anyone would want to correct my way of understanding the prolog, please do.

:up: It would fit with Aristotle's finitism.

I have begun to suspect that, because he starts without the true (good) infinite already actual it not only fails to actually be a true infinite, but radically destabilizes his whole outlook — Count Timothy von Icarus

If you think of actuality as the infinite's Other, then it's an outpouring down into actuality, and then a return journey to the infinite.

Not a physical wave. — jgill

That doesn't mean it's not real. It's just not physical. Likewise energy is real, even though it's a construct.

But is also possible or to conceive of ethical ideals which don’t rest on notions of injustice and blame. — Joshs

I doubt it.

Except that Nietzsche is no pessimist. — Joshs

That's a complicated issue. In a way he was. He was saying, "I see a way out of this." He never made it out himself though.

A metaphysical, theoretical or perceptual interpretation about an aspect of the world commits itself to certain expectations about the way things should be. What lies outside of the range of convenience of that interpretive understanding may not be seen all, it may be seen as confused or non-sensical, or it may be construed in social terms as an ethical violation of accepted standards. — Joshs

What would be an example of this?

In this way, all understanding is normative, defining its own limits of the acceptable and intelligible. — Joshs

That's true, but this normativity isn't ethical in nature. As you say, it's a matter of expectations.