This difference in our perspective has been evident since the beginning. I take the subjective perspective of personal experience, what Adorn calls, in the current chapter, “reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself”. From this perspective the substantial existence of “society”, and even in the skeptic’s eye, the existence of any external objects, cannot be taken for granted. But you seem to take for granted, the existence of society, as an entity which we can talk about. So I am always looking for justification.
I saw in the introduction how Adorno substantiates society with Aristotelian principles of matter and form. Society provides us with the formal aspect, the concepts which form ideology, while the individual subject as part of society provides the material aspect. As a whole, there is a unity of matter and form, substance.
In this chapter, “Necessity of the Substantive”, I see how the concept, as property of society, is itself substantive. This is an interesting inversion of idealism, which attempts to make the concept substantive, but doesn’t have the means to justify this. With Adorno’s approach, the nonconceptual, matter, or content, inheres within the concept, allowing for the unity of matter and form required for Aristotle’s “substance”.
I think we need to be aware of the consequences of this special inversion though, and that is that ultimately the true nature of the concept will now be as a particular. Having that aspect within it, the nonidentical, matter, content, assigns to the concept itself, the characteristics of a particular, substance.
So Adorno criticizes how Kant deals with the nonconceptual, as sensations. The issue is that sensations are particular to the individual subject, and this leads to a transcendental subject where matter is distinct, or separate from the subject while the so-called “pure apperception” must somehow still be attached to the matter. Now “matter” is also the sensations themselves, so there is a sort of dual meaning, or ambiguity to “matter”.
The nonconceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy. Whenever it was master of itself, it dealt with the historically existent as its object, not first in Schelling and Hegel, but contre coeur [French: against its own will] already in Plato, who baptized the existent as the non-existent and yet wrote a doctrine of the state, in which eternal ideas are closely tied to empirical determinations such as the exchange of equivalents and the division of labor.
It is this relation between the conceptual and the nonconceptual which produces the need for substantiality. Substance is the impurity of the concept. And he proceeds to describe how a philosophy which raises itself above other philosophies, by seeking the purity of the concept, is really misguided.
It is not merely that by belatedly trumpeting its purity, it turns away from everything in which it once had its substance. Rather the philosophical analysis strikes immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences. The smallest ontic residuum in the concepts, which regular philosophy stirs in vain, compels it to reflectively include what is existent there [Daseiende] in itself, instead of making do with its mere concept and believing itself to be safe there from what it means.