ND Part II / Synthesis
I’ll cover this section briefly. I don’t think the detail on Hegel and the comments on the history of philosophy are particularly interesting or enlightening. However, there are some good bits.
Back in the lectures Adorno expressed his extreme distaste for the concept of synthesis. Here he points out that the true power of Hegel’s method is not synthesis but determinate negation, the approach whereby the concept, closely examined, becomes non-identical with itself, i.e., non-identity in identity. This is a kind of analysis, not synthesis.
But typically, rather than just reject synthesis, he wants to reconceive it and repurpose it:
The Hegelian synthesis is throughout the insight into the insufficiency of that movement, into the costs of its production, as it were.
In other words, synthesis as it actually happens in Hegel is not the intended reconciliation and unification, but the moment in which the object’s diversity and disunity are revealed, when the movement of thought registers a loss and is thus revealed as insufficient.
But traditionally, philosophy is “a partisan of the One”, always coming down on the side of unity and identity. However…
Not even its abstract negation deserves thinking.
This is a familiar move. He is not recommending the Many against the One. That—the abstract negation of simply asserting the Many—would be an equally bad hypostasization, also ending in mythology and domination. At the same time, he is not rejecting the conceptual polarity entirely.
The take-home message:
Solely the One transcends the One.
Paying careful attention to how synthesis does violence to the diversity to be reconciled allows us to get beyond the falsity of synthesis.
The tendency of the synthesizing acts is to be redirected, by becoming aware of what it inflicts upon the Many.
NOTE: His comment about a “repulsive” anti-Freudian movement is about psychosynthesis, which is about unifying and harmonizing the conflicting unconscious drives.