ND Part II / Non-contradictoriness Not Hypostasizable
These sorts of considerations seem to give rise to a paradox. Subjectivity, thinking itself, would not be explained by itself but rather by the factical, especially by society; but the objectivity of cognition in turn could not be without thinking, subjectivity.
To understand this paradox, it helped me to look back at the previous sections, because there’s a thread running through them.
Quoting myself for context
According to his denial of the self-standing priority of each pole of the subject-object opposition, there might seem to be a paradox, because it’s contradictory to say that x is based on or presupposes y and that y is based on or presupposes x.
But…
Such a paradox originates from the Cartesian norm that the explanation ought to ground what comes later, or at least logically later, in what comes earlier. The norm is no longer binding [verbindlich].
In Cartesian philosophy, grounding is always one-way grounding. What dialectics can handle easily—reciprocal dependency—Cartesian philosophy finds to be an unnaceptable logical contradiction, because it violates one-way grounding.
Adorno’s critique:
But the matter-at-hand is not to be explained according to a hierarchical ordering schemata, called up from outside.
Explaining the reciprocal relationship according to one-way grounding is an imposition of an external norm, applied without justification. It is not drawn from the matter itself. The hierarchy of one-way grounding is presupposed and laid over the matter at hand like a template. But this is to presuppose the very thing in question, and…
the explanatory attempt presupposes the explanation, which it first needs to find
Then he says something interesting:
In certain respects, dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism which condemns it: it respects the object which is to be thought as thought, even there, where it does not follow the rules of thought.
The first part of the sentence plays on positivism’s self-image as the approach to knowledge that respects the object for what it is and no more, i.e., without the additions and distortions of metaphysics. But ironically, dialectical logic, which positivism classes as one kind of illegitimate metaphysics, actually respects the object more than positivism does, because it doesn’t forget that it is a constituent of thought, and it allows it to be contradictory, i.e., “does not follow the rules of thought”.
The rest of the section argues, entertainingly and persuasively, in favour of dialectical reason, especially how it sidesteps foundationalism, the need for a first.
There is a part that stands out:
To be sure antagonism is no more limited to society than suffering. So little as dialectics is to be extended to nature as a universal explanatory principle, so little nevertheless are two kinds of truth to be maintained next to each other, the dialectical one inside society and one indifferent towards it. The separation of social and extra-social being, oriented to the compartmentalization of the sciences, deceptively veils the fact that blind natural-rootedness perpetuates itself in heteronomous history.
This is said kind of in passing, but if you combine it with what he says in the final paragraph about identity, you begin to see what he meant way, way back in LND, lecture 1:
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.
— LND p.9
Here in ND itself he establishes the continuity implicit in this statement: mastery of nature, mastery of men, and identity-thinking all go together.