Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

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I agree with this:

the Kantian dualism is not easily escaped

And indeed, that is why he doesn’t just reject consciousness and the subject/object frame, as Heidegger did.

But otherwise, you’re reading Adorno against his stated position and aims. Instead of arguing the point, I’ll just remind you where Adorno is coming from, with a few quotations.

His goal is stated plainly in the prologue:

Since the author has trusted himself to follow his own intellectual impulses, he felt it to be his task to break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity by means of the power of the subject […]

Against idealism, the object of intellectual experience in negative dialectics …

… would itself be the antagonistic system, something utterly real, and not just by virtue of its mediation to the cognizing subject which rediscovers itself therein.

The whole movement of the text runs in the opposite direction to the one you’re proposing:

The compulsory constitution of reality which idealism projected into the regions of the subject and Spirit is to be retranslated back out of these.

On non-identity, one of his first formulations is that the object does not vanish into the concept—one object, one concept, not two objects:

Its name says to begin with nothing more than that objects do not vanish into their concept

The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity

And the aim throughout is the non-conceptual:

The utopia of cognition would be to open up the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it the same as them.

And there is more to come. It’s particularly clear in the “Preponderence of the Object” section, which we’ll be coming to in the next few weeks or months. I’ll quote at length but you don’t have to read it all now—we’ll be covering it soon enough.

The thorough-going critique of identity gropes for the preponderance of the object. Identity-thinking is, even where it claims otherwise, subjectivistic. To revise this, to account for identity as untruth, establishes no equilibrium between subject and object, no hegemony of the functional concept in the cognition: even where it is only infringed upon, the subject is already disempowered. It knows why it feels absolutely threatened by the slightest surplus of the non-identical, according to the measure of its own absoluteness. Even as something minimal it violates the whole, because the whole is its pretension.

In the same section:

Insofar as the construction of the transcendental subjectivity was the magnificently paradoxical and fallible effort to master the object in its antipode, then what positive, idealistic dialectics only proclaimed is to be achieved solely through its critique. It requires an ontological moment, to the extent that ontology critically strips the binding constitutive role from the subject, without however substituting for the subject through the object in a sort of second immediacy. The preponderance of the object is attainable solely by subjective reflection, and that upon the subject. […] This would always already deal with objects. […] If it was argued against this that there would be no cognition concerning the object without the cognizing subject, then no ontological priority of the consciousness follows from this. Every assertion that subjectivity would somehow “be”, already includes an objectivity, which the subject by means of its absolute being would first need to ground. Only because the subject is for its part mediated, hence is not the radical Other of the object, which first legitimates this, does it have the capacity to grasp objectivity at all. Rather than constitutive, the subjective mediation is the block before objectivity; the former does not absorb what is essential to the latter, the existent.

None of this would make any sense if he were “turning this into a totally subjective affair.”

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Empathy as first philosophy? That’s quite attractive, somewhat Levinasian, but I don’t like the “private subjective realm” stuff. Anyway, the penultimate section of this part of the book addresses it:

The abolition of suffering, or its mitigation to a degree which is not to be theoretically assumed in advance, to which no limit can be set, is not up to the individual who endures suffering, but solely to the species that it belongs to, even where it has subjectively renounced the latter and is objectively forced into the absolute loneliness of the helpless object. All activities of the species make reference to its physical continued existence, even if they fail to recognize this, becoming organizationally autonomous and seeing to their business only as an afterthought. Even the institutions which society creates in order to exterminate itself are, as unleashed, absurd self-preservation, simultaneously their own unconscious actions against suffering. Narrowly restricted indeed by what is their own, their total particularity also turns against this. Confronted with them, the purpose which alone makes society into a society demands that it be so arranged, as what the relations of production here and there relentlessly prevent, and as what would be immediately possible to the productive forces right here and now. Such an arrangement would have its telos in the negation of physical suffering of even the least of its members, and of the innervated reflection-forms of that suffering. It is in the interest of all, at this point to be realized solely through a solidarity transparent to itself and to every living being.

— Concept & Categories: Suffering Physical

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The point I made earlier, is that what a philosopher shows in one’s expressions, writings, and demonstrations, is very often not consistent with the person’s stated position and aims. That is why I seek justification for stated claims. The first philosophy I read was Plato, and I learned quickly, the need to understand the justification (the argument) because sometimes it is consistent with the claim and other times it shows something different. Plato will have a character state a claim, and Socrates will ask the speaker to justify. It is left to the reader to interpret what the justification actually shows. Actually understanding the argument is what makes philosophy difficult.

So, the author may approach with the object of demonstrating that constitutive subjectivity is a delusion. And that may be stated. But if the author stays true to oneself, and to one’s understanding (no self-deception), and that objective becomes impossible to obtain, then the demonstration will reveal this. Sometimes the end arrived at is not consistent with the stated goal. Good logical practise shows us that we cannot start from the conclusion and shape the argument to produce that conclusion. That is begging the question.

You are not accurately representing what I said. Maybe a reread would help. The “object” which I said is made to be compatible with the concept, so that the concept may be applied to it (vanish into the concept), is not a true object. I called it a poser. That is how I am representing Adorno. The supposed “object” which the concept is applied to (by your suggestion), is not an object at all. It’s a rendition of the object formulated in a way to make it already in some sense compatible with the concept, in order that such an application can be made.

Did you get to my final paragraph, especially the final sentence?

I’ll tell you what I think. I think you and I are both arguing the very same thing, but from opposite sides of the coin. I say it’s tails and you say it’s heads. Unless some one gives us clear perspective on direction, which way’s up, and which way’s down, neither of us is right. You’ve taken a stated goal, aim, to provide direction. I’m looking at the content itself, to see where it is leading.

The preponderance of the object is attainable solely by subjective reflection, and that upon the subject. […] This would always already deal with objects. […]

Notice, the preponderance of the object is attainable “solely” by subjective reflection. Do you see why it appears to me, like he is “turning this into a totally subjective affair”? I am looking at the process where by the preponderance of the object is said to be attainable, and that is solely subjective reflection. You are taking the preponderance of the object for granted, as attained.

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I see that.

The quote you provided isn’t saying that suffering is not an object of personal experience, which is associated with the idea of a private subjective realm.

That quote is saying that where one suffers, we all suffer. Therefore, the society, as a kind of living organism, would live up to its own basic nature if it attended to the suffering of all of its members.

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What you are doing, then, is judging as to what the implications of Adorno’s arguments are, despite his own intentions. Personally I don’t think you’re in a good position to do that if you’re demanding at every turn that he answer to the principles of your own favourite metaphysics.

No, I understand you well enough.

Yep.

I’m looking at what he writes. That is all that matters.

Of course. This is the whole problem of negative dialectics and I’ve been talking about it in this group since early 2025.

Sure, but don’t mistake “the triviality that everything existent would be coloured by the observer” for proof of idealism.

It’s true that I’m already convinced, but I am also looking for his arguments, and carefully setting them out in my exegetical posts.

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I don’t care how the quotation relates to whatever it is you are saying.

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I will post more this week, but I caught up to the beginning of Part 2 today and I want to summarize Part 1 as succinctly as possible.

Adorno is critiquing existential phenomenology to make way for negative dialectics.

Existential phenomenology presents itself as radical, but it is a redressing of Kierkegaard and Plato, without the light or God.

Authentic subjectivity thereby becomes authoritarian fascism as easily as it becomes Marxist liberation. Even though the claim is towards an all-encompasing general Dasein every specific claim can only be lead by the authoritarian impulse to simply say: This is the way it is! This supported by quoting persons as diverse as Jaspers, Heidegger, and Sartre as co-creators of this existential analytic derived from Keirkegaard’s subjectivity.

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What of intellectual experience?

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In no way am I talking about “proof of idealism”. I don’t know where you got that idea.

I said “I believe Adorno is turning this into a totally subjective affair..”

You produced a number of quotes, and said: "None of this would make any sense if he were “turning this into a totally subjective affair.”

So I took from the quotes you provided: “The preponderance of the object is attainable solely by subjective reflection…”

Does this not indicate to you, that Adorno is making this (the preponderance of the object), “a totally subjective affair”? And why are you so highly disagreeable on this matter?

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I apologize.

But this is ambiguous. If the “affair” is Spirit’s effort to grasp the non-conceptual by means of thought, then in one sense of course this is a subjective affair: so long as we are thinking, we are within the subjective realm of thought. On the other hand, the non-conceptual, the non-identical, and the preponderant objectivity that contains the subject and which Spirit is aiming at—this is not subjective merely owing to the fact that thinking or experiencing it happens from a point of view, i.e., is subjective. Can you see why I brought up the proof of idealism? The logic is the same: from subjective access to subjective constitution.

And yes, I realize that Adorno also recognizes that even that which is aimed at, the non-conceptual, is partly subjective too, to the extent that we (think we) have encompassed it with those concepts (“non-conceptual”, “non-identical”, “real”, etc.). Adorno has been saying since LND that the project of philosophy is in a sense paradoxical; I think that is what we struggle with. This is the reason dialectics is the right method, because it can handle the contradiction that the object both is and is not subjectively constituted.

I believe Adorno knows what he is doing. He is not making mistakes and saying things that have implications he has not realized.

Anyway, we shall advance in loose formation.

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@Meta_U Following up on my reply just above, I should emphasize that this logic:

…is Adorno’s target throughout the Introduction, Part I, and especially here in Part II. To “break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity” is the project. From your point of view he has not succeeded, but let’s not judge the effort till the end of Part II.

But you’re right that I see the issue from the other direction. I have never been very enamoured by the logic of subjective access therefore subjective constitution. From my point of view, it obviously doesn’t follow. But the philosophical tradition that Adorno is fighting against is very much on the side of that logic.

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And also logical, therefore ontological. The logical dictates “ye shall not contradict”, and so this is made into an ontological principle. I guess it is part of the process through which the subject achieves constitution, and so related to it. Another would be the confusion of the immediate with the mediated. What else is there?

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ND Part II / On The Dialectics of Identity

Link to online text

I enjoyed this section.

His first point is that critique is reciprocal: a concept fails to do justice to its object, but an object can fail to live up to its concept. These are not merely two descriptions of the same thing, because they have different normative force:

  1. The concept fails to do justice to the object → keep on thinking
  2. The object fails to live up to the concept → change the object

To change the object, holding it to the promise of the concept, is politics.

This helps us understand what he is saying about exchange in this section. The promise contained in the liberal-capitalist concept of exchange is of a free and equal interdependence. Our politics, Adorno suggests, must be to make such freedom and equality real.

But exchange is not a mere example of identity-thinking. He gets to exchange in this section directly from a consideration of the meaning of identity:

The exchange-principle, the reduction of human labor to an abstract general concept of average labor-time, is Ur-related to the identification-principle. It has its social model in exchange, and it would not be without the latter, through which non-identical particular essences and achievements become commensurable, identical.

In other words, identity is the thought-form of a particular society-form, that of the exchange of commodities in markets.

Crucially though, it’s no good just saying “down with reducing the particular products of human labour to equivalent values!”:

If the principle meanwhile was abstractly negated; if it was proclaimed as an ideal that, for the greater honor of the irreducibly qualitative, things should no longer go according to like for like, this would create an excuse for regressing into age-old injustice.

This is no good because the simple negation of the purported equality would allow naked inequality to take its place:

If one simply annulled the measurement-category of comparability, then what would step into the place of the rationality, which was indeed ideological yet also inherent as a promise in the exchange-principle, is immediate expropriation, violence, nowadays: the naked privilege of monopolies and cliques.

Instead, social relations must be held to the promise of the exchange principle:

What the critique of the exchange-principle as the identifying one of thought wishes, is that the ideal of free and fair exchange, until today a mere pretext, would be realized.

And this of course has political force:

the critique of the inequality in the equality aims towards equality

But all of this means that negative dialectics is itself inescapably dependent on identity-thinking:

The totality is to be opposed by convicting it of the non-identity with itself, which it denies according to its own concept. Negative dialectics is thereby tied, at its starting-point, to the highest categories of identity-philosophy. To this extent it also remains false, identity-logical, itself that which it is being thought against.

Its only advantage is that it is aware of this, so that it can

correct itself in its critical course

But continual correction means avoiding the slide into dogmatism:

It is one thing if thinking, sealed off by the necessity of every inescapable form, adapts in principle in order to immanently repudiate the claim of traditional philosophy to the conclusive structure – it is quite another to spur on that form of conclusiveness by itself, with the intention of making itself into what is first.

The former is good, the latter is bad. The former is using the philosophical system to repudiate itself, the latter is setting up one’s repudiation of the system as a rival system. But this difference can only be made apparent in ongoing, repeated correction.

The will to identity labors in every synthesis; as an a priori task of thinking, immanent to it, it appears positive and desirable: through this, the substrate of the synthesis would be reconciled with the I and for that reason good. This promptly permits the moral desiderata that the subject, by virtue of the insight into how much the thing is its very own, ought to bow to what is heterogenous to it.

Once that which is heteregeneous to thought, or that which is the aim or object of thought, is conceived as part of thought after all, it is seen to be worthy of respect (by philosophy/idealism/identity-thinking). What presents itself as humility and fidelity in the face of the other is nothing of the sort if the other has already been subsumed into the subject.

Adorno’s point is that this kind of philosophy is ideology: in the guise of profound insight and the grasping of truth it preaches acceptance of the existent.

The last paragraph starts out with some brilliant speechifying, but then:

Ideology owes its power of resistance against the Enlightenment to complicity with identifying thought: indeed, with thinking at large.

Ideology, as a form of identity-thinking, has a power of resistance against the demystifying forces of the Enlightenment, because the Enlightenment is the province of reason, i.e., thinking and especially identity-thinking, par excellence. The Enlightenment replaces authority with reason, following blindly with thinking for oneself. Therefore reason escapes the Enlightenment’s demystifying impulse.

It demonstrates therein its ideological side, that it never makes good on the assertion, that the non-I would in the end be the I; the more the I grasps it, the more completely the I finds itself downgraded to an object.

Idealism never entirely succeeds. If it did, the subject would rule over all it surveyed, in other words it would be at home in the world. But the reality is that the more the subject exerts itself to subsume everything, the more the subject is reduced to a thing, because the subject is one particular among others, all of which are targeted by identity and thereby reduced to instances of universals:

Identity becomes the authority of a doctrine of adjustment, wherein the object, according to which the subject would be directed, pays back to the latter what the subject inflicted on it.

His conclusion is that since ideology operates through the basic form of identity-thinking, the critique of ideology is not a matter of correcting false beliefs one-by-one but is a central philosophical task: to critique thought itself:

That is why the critique of ideology is not something peripheral and intra-scientific, something limited to the objective Spirit and the products of the subjective one, but philosophically central: the critique of the constitutive consciousness itself.

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Described this way I’m noticing how this mirrors his criticism of existential phenomenology.

They claim to have Dasein, but each philosopher is in their own way ontic when it comes to any actual application.

Thus, in the same way, motivating a negative dialectics. Interesting how he’s not so much rejecting ontological/ontic, but instead holding people’s feet to the fire with the distinction. In a manner Kant comes “for free” since Heidegger’s dismissal of Kant follows this same pattern.

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Exactly.

Well put. I think it’s a powerful approach.

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Accepted. I like discussion with you, especially concerning Adormo, it has opened my eyes to a lot of things. And unlike most members you seem to actually appreciate what I say, sometimes.

I don’t think Adorno accepts the concept of “Spirit”. Spirit is a universal that is supposed to be a particular., based in Hegel’s “pure insight”, where universal (concept) and particular (object) are united. It ends up signifying a totality which is incomplete, and this is contradictory. This concept is the base of Heidegger’s “Being”, which Adorno spent much time refuting. I believe much of that refutation extends to “Spirit”, as he classes these two together sometimes.

Accordingly, I believe you need to reword this paragraph for it to be consistent with Adorno. Your phrase “Spirit’s effort to grasp the non-conceptual by means of thought” expresses what I think Adorno would call mythology. “Spirit” is a concept, not a thinking being. Subjects are intentional thinking beings. So attempting to grasp the non-conceptual by means of thought is not just subjective in a sense, it is purely a subjective.

Then, I think we need to be careful how we position “the non-conceptual, the non-identical, and the preponderant objectivity”. I don’t think Adorno has provided us with the information to judge that it “contains the subject”. I think, being contained in this way would deny the possibility of freedom.

We see that society as “a whole”, as objective cognition, or what gets conceptualized as Being, or Spirit, in many ways contains the subject. But this is the foundation of “the concept”. So I think we might say that the concept contains the subject, in that conceptualization, i.e. that system of thought. And, we know that the object extends beyond the concept, this is a strong point which Adorno has made a number of times. But I don’t think that he has clarified yet, the relation between object and subject, such that we might be able to say definitively that one contains the other.

I don’t find that idealism takes this path, from subjective access to subjective constitution. It’s more like how Plato lays it out, as the ideas are more real to us, than anything else, being the most immediate. Since ideas are the most real to us, we must describe reality through reference to ideas. This produced mythology. The mythology evolves through concepts like “soul”, “spirit”, “being”, but it always gets outdated as knowledge progresses and mythology doesn’t keep up. But we tend toward the assumption that there is something even more real than ideas, because that is highly intuitive. So, it might be called matter, or objects. And whatever we assume, it doesn’t free us from idealism, because the idealists will demonstrate that it’s just an idea. So it’s very problematic. We can readily show many specific idealist principles are faulty, but this doesn’t get to the point of disproving idealism in general.

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Likewise, MU :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

But my use of Spirit seems to have distracted you and sent you down another rabbit hole. I regret that.

Spirit is a general term for the human capacity for conceptual thought and the range of mental powers. It’s the province of meaning, value, and reason, both in the individual and in society. Adorno uses it like this sometimes, and it’s implicit in his notion of geistige Erfahrung: spiritual/intellectual experience, the theory of which makes up the introduction to the book. Geist = Spirit.

And Adorno’s particular conception has a similarity to Aristotle’s psyche, in that it is inseparable from the body, not a ghost in the machine or a higher realm.

I just think of it as the animating element (de anima) that makes us human, so I sometimes even use “soul”. I don’t always want to get pinned down by terms such as “mental” or “cognitive”. Unfortunately “spiritual”, in English and in lower case, is very problematic (though obviously “soul” has problems too, thanks to Christianity).

The upshot is you could probably replace “Spirit” with “the mind” in what I wrote, and forget I ever said it.

Otherwise, I meant modern idealism, since Descartes, which hovers around the thesis that the world is subjectively constituted. This is usually what Adorno is referring to and is very much the gist of German idealism. Negative dialectics aims to “break through the delusion of constitutive subjectivity”.

Anyway, I’ve made my points about your “totally subjective affair” to the best of my ability.

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The problem I see with the concept of “Spirit” is ambiguity. Sometimes it refers to the whole of humanity as one “Spirit”, like “collective soul”, and sometimes it refers to the psyche of the particular individual. The two are actually quite different, but habits of common usage allow us to slip around between the two and speak of the collective Spirit as if it is an individual. This was a big part of Adorno’s criticism of Heidegger’s being.

I think this provides a good example to look at the relationship between concept and object which Adorno talks about. Corresponding with the collective soul meaning of “Spirit” is an object we know of as “society”. Before reading this material, I would never have accepted that “society” refers to an object rather than a concept. But Adorno has provided in the introduction, the principles whereby he judges society to be substance, and this justifies the conclusion that society is an object. We can see how this object, in all of its complexities, extends far beyond any concept of it, like “collective soul”, “Spirit”, or “Being”.

On the other hand, if we take the “soul”, “spirit”, or “being”, of the individual, it’s hard to justify a corresponding object. So we don’t have the premises required to develop any concept/object relation. We have a sort of imaginary fiction with no corresponding object and this produces produces myth. Notice though, that this is exactly what idealists do. They attempt to justify by saying the concept is an object. They start from the assumption that there must be such a thing (object, or substance) as mind or soul, to support the reality of concepts. But this is a faulty object, and the concept itself is an object in the same faulty way.

But fictitious objects provide unwarranted license to logic. And from here, they can move logically toward another faulty object, the collective soul, or “Spirit”. I think this is similar to your “subjective access to subjective constitution” objection.

Look at how Adorno reverses the order, to begin by substantializing society as an object. Then, after “concept” is understood as property of society, rather than something the soul or spirit of the individual subject grasps, he now moves toward establishing a relation between concept and thinking subject. This I think is dialectics and negative dialectics.

I think my use of “totally subjective affair” was a mistake, an aggressive use of words, and I regret that. I apologize. Now I’ll get back to the reading.

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At first I thought you had taken a detour, but now I see you have used Spirit as a worked example of the concept-object dichotomy. That’s cool. I can’t fully get my head around what you are saying, but I think it contains some good insights and ultimately it does feel like it’s moving towards a (negative) dialectical understanding.

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That’s what I’m aiming for. For me, the best way to understand philosophy is to apply it in thinking. If it works, that justifies it.