ND Part II. Concept and Categories: Indissolubility Of The Something
This is the beginning of the core theoretical part of the book, and Adorno begins by taking on idealism, showing that thought presupposes what idealism claims it produces: real content.
“The Something” is the translation of “Das Etwas” from Hegel’s Science of Logic, but we don’t need Hegel’s apparatus here. Adorno is using it to mean the indeterminate residue of the “I think.” It’s the object as such, and not any determinate object. Another way to put it is that it’s the logical or grammatical position—but crucially, a position that cannot be just emptied out, as if there could be nothing there. Thought is directed outside itself.
And this is stronger than a merely psychological point. It doesn’t just mean that we can’t help thinking of a Something; rather, it’s that the position is constituted by its being occupied by something, such that thought must be always dependent on something outside itself.
That substantive which the form of what is at large [Ueberhaupt] in thought would like to shake off, the supposition of its absolute form, is illusionary.
The supposition that there is an absolute form of thought, i.e., thought purified of its content, is an illusion.
Constitutive to what is substantive [Sachhaltiges] for the form is above all the substantial experience of what is substantive. Correlatively, the pure concept, the function of thought, is not to be radically separated at the subjective counterpole from the existent “I”.
The first sentence states that you can’t have a form in which there is a place for something substantive, without there being an experience of something actually substantive. The second sentence makes the point from the other end of the subject-object polarity: the pure thought, the thought ostensibly purified of its content, cannot be separated/purified/abstraced from a real thinker, the “I”.
The prôtou pseudos [Greek: proto-falsity] of idealism since Fichte was that the movement of the abstraction would permit the discarding of what is abstracted from. It is eliminated from thought, exiled from the latter’s home domain, not annihilated in itself; the belief in this is magical.
So the original mistake of idealism is to think that in abstracting from the real, you can do away with it, and claim it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t follow from I’ve removed it from view, leaving only the form of thought that It doesn’t exist independently of thought.
So far this all looks like a flat denial, nothing close to a refutation of idealism. But Adorno is doing a bit more. He is performing immanent critique, showing that the abstraction performed in idealism already presupposes the content, i.e., things outside of thought. Thus, as Adorno sees it, idealism refutes itself.
Or rather, it creates a contradiction. Next he makes a point which I think is crucial if we want to understand where he is with respect to idealism and realism:
This would remain offensive to the logic of non-contradictoriness; solely dialectics can comprehend it in the self-critique of the concept.
The contradiction is in these two statements together: (a) the thought produces the something; (b) the thought presupposes the something. Adorno doesn’t just say that (a) is wrong, like a realist would. He believes that (a) is true, in a sense. This sense is what might be called a kind of correlationism, so it’s like Kant plus an awareness of the contradiction. The something in a sense just is the-something-as-available-to-experience, so there’s an important insight in (a), the idealist impulse.
But, you might object, this is just idealism. That’s the whole point of the term correlationism, to name the general class of modern idealism.
This is where the non-identical and the preponderence of the object come in. Since the substantive Something is presupposed, there’s always a remainder, where the concept cannot close over the object. And the remainder falls on the object side rather than the subject side because, while the subject is always an object too, the opposite is not the case. This means that the subject is also an object among objects, contained by objectivity. So although Adorno proposes mediation and a dialectical refusal to dissolve the contradiction, his answer is not just to sit in the middle: there’s an imbalance in the subject-object polarity. The object is more weighty. This, I suppose, is the root of Adorno’s materialism.
But the last paragraph issues a warning: don’t thereby install the non-identical, or the preponderence of the object, as the first principle of your system. That’s the hypostatizing, totalizing move that Adorno is against.