Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

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@Jamal

Adorno is saying that the judgement always intends itself to apply to the actual object in its fullest particularity, not just to the object qua target of a judgement, conceptually determined. The particular “included in the judgement” only approximates to that real existent.

I think this is an important point, the distinction between the “particular”, within the judgement, and the “real existent”. Notice that he is not calling the independent ‘thing’ “the particular”, but he puts the particular inside the mind, in the idealist way which makes the object an idea in the mind. So he maintains the Kantian unknowability of the independent, so much so that it cannot even be said to consist of particulars or objects, as these individuals are within the thinking, and the independent is merely “the existent”.

@Jamal

The thing is what the judgement says it is (insofar as the judgement is a good one), but is also not what the judgement says it is (because it exceeds the judgement as just described above). When he says that “nothing particular is true, none is, as its particularity claims, it itself” he means that the particular-as-judged is never equal to the particular itself.

So I think, that what is the case here, is that “nothing particular is true” means that there is no real independent particulars. All we have is “the existent”. I think this may be important toward understanding the reality of contradiction. The non-contradiction law applies to what we say about things in predication. Contradictory predicates cannot be true of the same object at the same time. Now Adorno is removing “the object”, or “particular” from the independent, to make it a mental construct produced for the purpose of applying that law. Now we have only “the existent” as the independent, so we have no basis for the application of that law.