Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

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So, this is where I had stopped:

I was trying to find out where epistemology and liberalism fit in. So here goes.

Regarding epistemology, I take the reference to mean Kant’s project, which drives away the metaphysical essence, traditionally seen to confer substance, in favor of conditions.
I mean, before Kant, epistemological questions were of the form “what is X”, but Kant’s system replaces those kinds of questions with “what are the conditions under which X is possible?”.
For example “what is truth” against “what are the conditions that satisfy truth, of its validity and possibility”. Or “what is knowledge” vs “what are the conditions that make knowledge possible”.
So, in epistemology, things moved from a substantial setting to functional validity within a preconditioned system. Then I would have Adorno saying that the same thing happened to society, and that this was no innocent act, since the former represses the latter.
He seems to be implying that what shifted in epistemology way back has long since crystallized in society. Or was it the other way round? Was there first a drift, a trend towards functional supremacy originating in society, which then epistemology happen to pick up?
In the very general, I guess what I am asking here is how to read history, whether from an idealistic and subjective, or from a materialistic and objective point of view. Adorno would probably say that neither side has supremacy, they mediate each other.
And yet, in the quote above, I think he is taking the idealist side (as once). But maybe it doesn’t really matter, as long as you don’t choose sides.

And so, substantive concepts are somehow degraded, and questions regarding those, are not allowed to be asked after Kant. It is not really that we are not allowed to ask questions like “what is truth, or knowledge”, it is more that these sort of questions
are disqualified as philosophically illegimate: the crowd in general considers them as “philosophical”, something alien to themselves and to their own reality, and the philosophical community just functionalizes them, the point being that there is no attempt to answer them
as they would have liked, the (new) regime of validity just forbids it.

And at this point I am just wondering whether the functional’s only function is to repress, suppress, and oppress the substantial. Or what their relation would be. I guess it would only be internal, since they are targeting the same thing. I would have liked if the functional would
have augmented the substantial.

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Your interpretation looks good to me.

I have at least two answers to this. One is along the lines of your suggestion of “a trend towards functional supremacy originating in society, which then epistemology happen to pick up.” It’s one underlying material reality—let’s say, commodity exchange and the exchange-principle—manifesting clearly first in epistemology, and later unfolding fully in society into the “total functional context”. Thus epistemology could be said to anticipate this context, though it wasn’t the cause.

But that feels like a slightly crude attempt to reconcile Adorno’s words with Marxist materialism, and I’m a bit happier saying is doesn’t really matter, that sometimes Adorno may emphasize the ideal, sometimes the material, as having causal efficacy.

On the other (third) hand, Adorno is a materialist and for him the object is preponderant. Does this mean we can’t avoid interpreting him as saying what Engels said when explaining historical materialism: that despite the two-way interplay between base and superstructure, “in the last instance” it’s the base that determines the superstructure?

I don’t like that very much either.

As I see it, the problem is the total functional context, not the functional as such. That the functional is dominant records the loss of the substantial and helps to explain the ontological need. Or else, the problem is the kind of functions that exist in the total functional context: exchange, the extraction of surplus labour, etc.

In either case, the functional could indeed conceivably augment the substantial. Presumably Adorno’s utopia of full and free life would be a rationally organized society of abundance achieved through the functionality of science, technology, and administration.

I think you’re right that one way of seeing this is as an internal relation.

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I have difficulty understanding the way that Adorno uses “identity”. He seems to mix together different meanings within this section. So I revisited the footnote a few sections back, where he describes three distinct senses, the first two he explains as closely related. These two are first, the identity of “I”, whereby the human consciousness is a unity of temporally distinct experiences, and second, what was supposed to be juridically the same for all rational beings, the general concept.

The second is the source of logical generality, whereby A=A, and your concept of what “A” is supposed to be, is the same concept as my concept of “A”. This is what he calls the “logical moment in idealism”, and I understand it to be the way that Platonic realism makes the concept into an object (something with identity).

So he explains how the second sense is dependent on the first sense because the first allows for temporal extension, therefore the temporal existence of 'the concept". Then something “which is past could be maintained in something which is present”. But in a reciprocal way, the individual thinking presupposes the identity of generality as a requirement for thinking, so that “the individual moment of unity, always requires the supra-individual generality”. Further, “The individual-I is One only by virtue of the universality of the numerical principle of the unitary”. So the conclusion is “Neither of the two moments has priority over the other.”.

The third sense is the epistemological sense, whereby “the subject and object, however mediated, go together”. As described above, the first sense is the particular and the second the general, but they are wrapped together in codependency. The third sense validates a separation between them, through a required mediation, and this “legitimates the dialectical conception of the particular and the general”.

With this background, I’ll take another look at the current section.

In the second paragraph where he speaks of the compulsion that identification has imposed on humanity, this is identity in the second sense, the general sense. This I am inclined to reduce to the simplest form, human equality. This leaves “non identical particular essences and achievements” but they are made commensurable, therefore identical, through the social model of “exchange”, That brings the totality of the world into “the identical”. In this way the non-identical particulars are made compatible with identity, the unequal are exchanged as equal, providing for “the surplus-value of labor”.

In the next paragraph, the critique of “the exchange-principle” seeks “the ideal of free and fair exchange” by means of an ideal which would transcend all actual exchanges. When the ideal is demystified, it is simply an aim of equality by criticizing the inequality within equality. This ideal equality is “rational identity” which would take society beyond the need to identify (identifying being the act of making the non-identical identical, the non-equal equal). This he says, “comes close enough to Hegel”.

But then he describes two distinctly different possible directions, 1) to make identity the ultimate absolute goal, or, 2) to see it as “universal apparatus of compulsion” which we might ultimately escape.

After discussing the role of negative dialectics in the fourth paragraph, he moves toward the other of the two entwined senses of identity in the fifth. This is the sense of the identity of “I”. So the last paragraph deals with the relation between the two forms of identity, and it is actually quite complex. I interpret it like this.

The thinking I desires identity in the general sense because it’s conducive to thinking. But this is to go “against itself” as an “I”, having identity in the particular sense. So this “ideological side” sees the non-I (what is non-identical in the I), as what is essential to the I as a particular. That reduces the I to a mere object. Then we get the third sense of identity, the epistemological sense whereby there is a need for the dialectical separation between the particular and the general.

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. 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.

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Note that the footnote describes “several meanings in the history of modern philosophy”. For Adorno, they orbit around the same basic meaning; they are the same kind of thing operating in different ways. The upshot is that we don’t have to attempt a mapping from his own comments about identity back to those footnote meanings.

That said, since Adorno is all about using, interrogating, pushing and thereby critiquing concepts from the history of philosophy, the correspondence will often roughly hold. However, it’s important that he sees them as unified and moreover related to (or in some sense based on) another sense: social and economic identity, whereby qualitatively different things are made equivalent.

So I’m not really disagreeing with you here, just providing some orientation.

This lands in the right place, I think, but I’m not sure about “non-I (what is non-identical in the I)”. For Adorno, the non-I is the object of thought, not part of the subject. To say the non-I is in the I is to assume what Adorno is criticizing, the idealist promise of the identity of the not-I to the I.

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Yes, I see that this is a fundamental sense of identity to him, which he works from, at this point. But this I think is specifically the second sense from the footnote, the general. The concept, “human” for example is applicable to all human beings, by ignoring the inequalities between particulars, to make them equal. So there is non-equal within the equal as particular differences within the individuals. I think I explained this adequately in my post.

And, as you say, that sense is tied to the other two senses. It’s tied to the particular sense in a fundamental, reciprocal, and inseparable way. It’s tied to the epistemic sense in a different way. Those two senses together create the dialectical need to separate them, and that produces the third sense. I assume that this dialectical need is produced from the contradictions which arise from the union of the other two senses of identity (non-identity within identity, non-equal within the equal).

I could say the same thing here, but then it might appear like I’m disagreeing. We understand the meaning the same way, but our orientation differs. I suppose the difference in yours and my “orientation”, is that I see what you call “social and economic identity, whereby qualitatively different things are made equivalent”, as the second sense, the basis of generality, and “the concept”, while you seem to see it as a distinct fourth sense. Notice, I said that the second sense, in its simplest form is “human equality”. We could say this of any concept, two rocks are “equal” in the sense that they are both rocks. This provides the grounding for the application of quantitative principles. Since the two rocks are equal, each being a rock, we can count them as “two”.

We both seem to understand this sense of “identity” quite well, so it may not be an issue. But you ought to know, that if I am correct in designating this sense as the second sense, then it would be beneficial for you to take this orientation, because in that footnote Adorno explains rather clearly how the second and first sense are related to each other, and how the union of the two are related to the third sense.

And I believe my interpretation is correct from what is said in the latter part of the chapter. He talks about the identity of the particular “I” in relation to the generalized, equal “I”, and how the two are contrary. Then he vaguely touches on the third sense, here and there, like when he outlines two possible directions for the critique of identity, to cast identity as the absolute ideal, which we strive for but is not existent, or to cast identity as universal compulsion which we would strive for escape from. So even negative dialectics must respect the primacy of identity.

What I see as the most significant difference between you and I here is that from my perspective we can see Adorno as proposing a distinct sense of ‘identity", the third sense, what he calls epistemological identity. This sense is proper to the critique of identity which is dialectics. The contradictory nature of the combined particular/general senses produce the need for a new sense of “identity”. As he says the primacy of identity cannot be avoided even by the critique of identity. So the dialectical critique in the Hegelian tradition is to claim that those problems are due to the fact that true equality, true identity, has not been obtained, but absolute equality is still an ideal to be sought, that might never be obtained. This would be a different sense of “identity”, as an absolute, ideal goal. But Adorno proposes another sense, as a negative dialectical sense of “identity”. This poses the quest for the ideal "identity’ as something negative (bad), a compulsion which we should rather seek to free ourselves from.

We need to pay attention to the context. But what you say is not contrary to what I say. Notice he says that this is what reduces the subject to an object.

I believe he is describing how, when the individual subject, I, is made equal with all the other subjects, as required by the general sense of identity, there are aspects of the individual which cannot truthfully be identical. These are “non-identical” in relation to that sense of “identity”, but they are (somewhat arbitrarily) made to be identical through the exchange-principle.. However, these very same aspects are what provide “identity” to the individual, as that particular individual, in the sense of particular identity. Notice though, that this is what downgrades the subject to an object.

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.

So I see it as a deep contradiction between the two fundamental senses of “identity” which are nevertheless closely tied. From the perspective of identity in the general sense, ideology, there are aspects of any “I” (subject) which do not fit the essence of an “I” (subject) by that concept of what is an “I” (subject). These are the accidents in Aristotelian terms. By that concept they are non-I, and they inhere in the individual as particular differences. The exchange-principle provides some form of identity for them, so they can be valued under some sort of equality principle producing concepts like the surplus-value of labour. But the critique of “identity” sees the faults, and the need for a distinct sense of “identity”, the epistemological (dialectical) sense.

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I think Adorno would be careful not to easily deduce causes, and especially not to derive prime movers, like Engels does. Otherwise he would just be attempting to trace history to a predefined state, much like Hegel or Marx. The object may well be preponderant, but its resistance to (complete) conceptualization is, as far as I understand him thus far to be saying, quite unpredictable.

Yes, I see the same interplay between concept and object, appearing here as well between function and substance: substances trying to resist total functionalization. But one cannot exist without the other.

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ND Part II / Self-Reflection Of Thought (Part 1)

Link to online text

Adorno has just said that critique of ideology implies a philosophically fundamental critique of identity and thus a critique of consciousness itself. Then:

The power of consciousness reaches all the way into its own deception. It is rationally cognizable, where a detached rationality which has run away with itself becomes false, turns truly into mythology.

Consciousness has the power to rationally cognize its own false way of operating, namely when detached rationality lack self-awareness and thereby becomes false. Thinking, which proceeds according to identity, must not get too carried away with its identifications, i.e., its determinations—that way lies myth.

The ratio recoils into irrationality as soon as [it] mistakes, in its necessary course, the fact that the disappearance of its substrate, be it ever so diluted, is the handiwork of its abstraction.

I’ve inserted the “it” that Redmond forgot, but the sentence is still difficult to parse. If we substitute “fails to recognize” for “mistakes”, we get something more comprehensible:

The ratio recoils into irrationality as soon as it fails to recognize, in its necessary course, the fact that the disappearance of its substrate, be it ever so diluted, is the handiwork of its abstraction.

The basic point is: when rational thought fails to recognize the fact that its act of abstraction makes the concrete material disappear—this is when it becomes irrational.

But notice: “in its necessary course”. Adorno is not saying that we have to avoid doing this abstraction. It is just the way reason works, so it cannot be avoided. The only thing we can do is be aware of it.

If thinking follows its laws of motion unconsciously, it turns against its own meaning, that which is thought by thinking, which commands the flight of subjective intentions to halt.

When thinking proceeds unreflectively, following its own momentum, it works against the very thing that gives it meaning, i.e., its object, the something actually being thought about. This something has the role of arresting the free, self-generated movement of subjective thought. Without that check, thinking no longer answers to anything outside itself.

The dictate of its autarky damns thinking to nullity; this becomes in the end, subjectively, stupidity and primitivity.

“Its autarky” refers to the autarky of thinking, when it is unreflective.

The next paragraph makes the point that “Non-identity is secretly the telos of the identification”. Identity-thinking aims to grasp the thing in its thisness, the thisness that is always missed and is thereby non-identical.

Thinking comes to see the non-identical by applying identity-thinking and noticing how it fails. But this, the heart of the negative dialectic, has its positive moment too:

The cognition of the non-identical is dialectical too, in the sense that it identifies more, and identifies differently, than identity-thinking. It wishes to say what something would be, while identity-thinking says what it falls under, what it is an example or representative of, what it consequently is not itself.

The negative moment is when thinking comes to see the non-identical by applying identity-thinking and noticing how it fails. The positive is the substance of reflective thinking (as opposed to the un-self-aware thinking he has been criticizing), namely a different kind of identity-thinking: thinking what the thing would be.

But what does “what something would be” mean? It is not so much “what the thing really is, more adequately observed,” so much as a Utopian vision: what the thing would be if it were not degraded and reduced by the ideology and the bad existent.

He is trying to more precisely describe the difference—I almost want to say the practical difference—between identity-thinking and the cognition of the non-identical that comprises negative dialectics, given the unavoidable fact that the latter is identity-thinking too. So far what he has said is that it’s about self-awareness, and now he tells us that this self-awareness means you can reach for the thing, trying to do justice to it (in the spirit of identity), but do it without turning it into a mere instance of a universal, a species of a genus or member of a class, a mere representative.

It is hubris … that the thing-in-itself would correspond to its concept. But its ideal is not to be simply thrown away: in the reproach that the thing would not be identical with the concept lives too the longing that it would like to be so. In this form the consciousness of non-identity contains identity.

So, a simple correspondence between concept and thing remains the goal of thinking, even in its negative dialectical form. And this supposition, that such a correspondence is the goal, underlies even the most neutral-seeming identities of formal logic (A = A):

Indeed, the supposition of this, all the way down to formal logic, is the ideological moment in pure thinking.

It is ideological because it assumes that the correspondence, the identity, is achievable or unproblematic. But there’s a moment of truth in this: the hope of reconciliation, where the identification really works, producing no contradictions:

In it however the moment of truth of ideology is also hidden, the injunction that no contradiction, no antagonism ought to be. In the simple identifying judgement, the pragmatic element which controls nature is already conjoined to a utopian one. “A” is supposed to be, what it is not yet. Such hope is contradictorily tied to that which breaks through the predicative identity.

Then, this is the gist:

Utopia would be beyond identity and beyond the contradiction, a togetherness of what is divergent.

I’ll post something about the remainder of this section in a day or two.

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I like the way he says “the ratio recoils into irrationality”. In my mind this elicits the irrational ratios of mathematics, like the ratio between diameter and circumference of a circle, and between two perpendicular sides of a square. These irrational ratios indicate an incommensurability between the concrete circle or square, which you might draw on a paper, and the ideal, abstract circle and square. It indicates a fundamental lack of correspondence between the concrete and the ideal.

Here is some background from my perspective, for what it’s worth. Aristotle’s law of identity (a thing is the same as itself) deals with the identity of the concrete individual, as a particular. My belief is that he directed the law of identity against a type of sophistry exposed by Plato, which came out of the tradition of Pythagorean idealism, who treated ideas as if they were objects. The law of identity creates a distinction between concrete objects (with an identity as a thing), and abstract objects. The law of identity is the type of identity which Adorno says that Kant assigned to the “I”, but ultimately it reduces the subject to an object. This sense allows an individual thing to maintain its identity as the thing which it is, even while time passes and the thing is actively changing.

Hegel rejected the law of identity as superfluous, unnecessary and useless. This opened the door to what Adorno calls the general sense of identity, and the modern day sophistry which flows from what Adorno calls “identity-thinking”. Notice that in identity-thinking, “is equal to” has the same meaning as “is the same thing as”. for example, people on TPF commonly argue that “2+2” refers to the very same thing as “4” does. Really though, with the general sense of identity, “X=Y” means that X is the same type of thing, or is in the same classification as Y. So the difference is basically the difference between “X and Y are the same thing”, meaning two names for a single identified particular, and “X and Y are the same”, meaning two different things which are of the same type. The latter is identity-thinking.

The problem which Adorno showed in the last chapter is that both these types of identity are necessary, even though they are fundamentally opposed, or contradictory. This means that we cannot just reject one for the sake of the other. So dialectics has taken on the task of sorting this out.

So what Adorno is calling the non-identical, is what Aristotle called accidents, that part of the concrete thing which does not fit into the concept, which is the essence of the thing. But this way of thinking, “identity-thinking”, is very problematic because those accidents, the non-identical, are exactly what gives the particular concrete thing an identity as the very thing which it is. Both senses of “identity” are necessary but they are fundamentally contradictory. The non-identical within the context of identity-thinking is the identity in the context of concrete particulars. In my opinion the two ought not both have the same name, “identity”.

The next part gets quite difficult for me. He makes a reversal when he starts to talk about “the more emphatic concept”, with an example of freedom. In this case, the concept has a certain priority over the object. The concept is not simply something abstracted from a group of objects, and the objects cannot even properly serve as tokens of the concept, because the concept extends beyond what any object can demonstrate of it.

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This is a nice parallel, but as far as I’m aware, accidents in Aristotle are still part of the conceptual determination of a thing. They aren’t what escapes conceptuality as such, but are just its non-essential predicates, which happen not to be part of the thing’s defining concept in this case.

The non-identical, by contrast, is what is left out by the failure of conceptuality to coincide with its object—a failure internal to conceptual identification itself, not the result of leaving out some predicates.

Well, this is a big part of Adorno’s point. Recall this from the introduction:

To the consciousness of the phenomenal appearance [Scheinhaftigkeit] of the conceptual totality there remains nothing left but to break through the appearance [Schein] of total identity: in keeping with its own measure. Since however this totality is formed according to logic, whose core is constructed from the proposition of the excluded third, everything which does not conform to such, everything qualitatively divergent assumes the signature of the contradiction. The contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity; the primacy of the principle of contradiction in dialectics measures what is heterogenous in unitary thinking. By colliding against its own borders, it reaches beyond itself.

A particular thing’s (or the I’s) own self-identity is exactly what general identity-thinking reaches for and necessarily fails to grasp. That gap, recorded within identity-thinking itself, is what shows up as contradiction.

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ND Part II / Self-Reflection Of Thought (Part 2)

Link to online text

To understand the “emphatic” concept, it helps to recall the distinction I made earlier:

  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

The emphatic concept doesn’t quite belong in (2). It’s more like:

  1. The concept, in practice, fails to do justice to its own potential

Every determination is necessarily a step down from the concept. Freedom is almost like a kind of pure uninstantiable but ever-motivating utopian concept. This is what he means by emphatic. It expresses an awareness of what could be.

Incidentally, it’s worth taking note of his unusually clear description of non-identity:

The moment of non-identity in the identifying judgement is reasonably comprehensible, to the extent that every individual object subsumed under a class has determinations, which are not contained in the definition of its class.

The reason it’s here is to mark the contrast between a mere class and the emphatic concept, “which is not simply the characteristic of the individual objects from which it is derived”.

The concept of freedom lags behind itself, as soon as it is empirically applied. It is then itself not what it says.

So this is a nice summary:

The last paragraph of the present section is quite clear up to and including “The individual is both more and less than its general determination”. Getting it straight helps to make sense of the rest of it.

The concept of freedom lags behind itself

… because every time it’s applied in a predicate, it is saying less than the concept itself is saying, or wants to say.

But the concept does not float free of its objects, so:

it must always be a concept of what is grasped under it

Therefore:

it is to be confronted with this latter. Such a confrontation impels it to the contradiction with itself.

This is another way of saying that “contradiction is the non-identical under the aspect of identity” (Introduction / Dialectics Not a Standpoint).

But the obvious solution to these contradictions doesn’t work as well as we like to think:

Every attempt, by merely posited, “operational” definitions of the concept of freedom, to exclude what philosophical terminology once called its idea, arbitrarily degrades the concept for the sake of its utility in relation to what it means in itself.

In other words, we can solve the contradictions by defining freedom more precisely, e.g., absence of legal restraint—but that’s a degradation of the concept, not a solution.

The individual is both more and less than its general determination.

More, because the individual is never entirely subsumed under its concept; less, because the individual falls short of what the emphatic concept promises.

Now, it gets more complex:

Because however the particular, the determinate would come to itself only through the sublation of that contradiction, hence through the achieved identity between the particular and its concept, the interest of the individual is not only to preserve what the general concept robbed it of, but as much in that “more” of the concept as in its neediness.

The determination would come to be equal to the thing only in the resolution and overcoming of the contradiction, which would amount to the “achieved identity between the particular and its concept,” e.g., the individual is exactly as free as the concept always promised.

EDIT: But that’s not quite right. He said the particular/determinate would come to itself, not that “the determination would come to be equal to the thing”. The question is, is there a significant difference between the thing becoming itself in its determination (Adorno’s meaning, as I interpret it), and the determination coming to be equal to the thing?

So the interest of the individual (so to speak) is not only preserving the non-identical, what is lost in the subsumption into the concept, as in (1) above—but also the “more” of the concept, in other words the emphatic concept.

In the last two sentences we get the important distinction stated quite clearly:

The contradiction between the general and particular has as its content, that individuality is not yet and for that reason is bad, where it establishes itself.

This is the object failing to live up to the (emphatic) concept, as in (2).

At the same time, that contradiction between the concept of freedom and its realization also remains the insufficiency of the concept; the potential of freedom wishes the critique of that which its compulsory formalization made it into.

This is the concept failing to live up to itself, as in (3).

In the end, I might have to scrap my three-part distinction, but that’s how I got to the understanding I have.

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So then the individual should also give back to the concept what it is owed?

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Maybe.

the potential of freedom wishes the critique of that which its compulsory formalization made it into

The individual’s role is, in a manner of speaking, to give back to the concept by critiquing it. It’s only the subject that can do that.

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Yes accidents may be determined, but not necessarily. That’s an important point, they do not need to be predicated, just assumed that they exist. So we can talk about them without determining them, to say that one thing which is the same as another (by type) is still different from the other, even if we do not know exactly how it differs. In other words, reference to accidents allows us to say they are different without needing to explain why they are different.

So for example, two laptop computers, exact same brand and model, the same production line, are the same, yet we can truthfully say that they are different. When asked how are they different we might refer to serial number, but even without serial numbers, we might say that they are composed of different mater, and this is where it gets vague. What does that really mean? Different spatial temporal presence, or whatever. Some philosophers have turned to internal and external properties (relations), and ideas like that. But it’s still problematic because internal properties become the external properties of the parts, so that we never get a proper distinction between external and internal.

I think we’re talking the same thing here. Aristotle approached it as a problem intrinsic to predication. Predication will never suffice to completely conceptualize any object. I think Adorno extends this though, saying conceptualization of any type will never suffice. Aristotle’s law of identity sort of foresees this though, because to be “identical” (by the law of identity), the concept must actually be the object, one and the same, and this is what Adorno stresses is impossible. This is a strong point which Adorno takes as well, maintaining that there is always a difference between concept and object.

It’s very important to the refutation of idealism (esp. Platonism) which makes the concept an object, thereby allowing that concept and object are one and the same. Modern systems of formal logic like set theory and modal logic for example, establish that their concepts are objects through axioms. This allows them a loophole, to claim that their form of identity-thinking is consistent with the law of identity, concept and object are one and the same. The problem then is that there is no real grounding to any distinction between imaginary and real objects, the principles become somewhat arbitrary, and we end up with ontologies like “model-dependent realism”.

That’s right. And if we hold fast to this principle, that there is always a gap between concept and object, as Adorno argues, then we have what is required to mount a base level criticism of Platonist formalisms that employ axioms which state that the concept is an object.

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This is not entirely true though, because notice how the eternal ‘always’ enters the equation. For Adorno it’s a safe bet that in a broken society, concept and object do not coincide, however there must be room for a society that hasn’t come yet where this doesn’t hold. Otherwise Adorno would be advocating just another inalienable ontology.

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Interesting as they are, I will pass over your comments about formal logic in silence. But I’ll push back on accidents vs. the non-identical.

Granted. However, you’re talking about a contingent and epistemic gap. Adorno’s gap is necessary and structural. The point of my response was not to claim that accidents are always specified, but that “accidents in Aristotle are still part of the conceptual determination of a thing,” which is still the case when the predicates are not actually specified.

For Aristotle, this is only because we don’t have infinite time and means to discover the properties in question. The non-identical is not the name for obscure, unspecified properties.

However, I do agree that when you put it like that, they seem quite close. And the method of constellations looks rather like it is aiming at an imagined ideal enumeration of all an object’s properties.

EDIT: If you want something like an argument that there is such a “thing” as the non-identical over and above Aristotelian accidents, it’s what we’ve been working through: the generation of contradiciton through the application of identity-thinking. It’s also in the very structure of predication, which is always general, necessarily never purely particular. This is why proper names are of interest to him:

The determinate failure of all concepts necessitates the citation of others; therein originate those constellations, into which alone something of the hope of the Name has passed.

There are a few other ways he has tried to show it, and he will go on to talk about the somatic and suffering later in Part II, I think.

Matter vs accidents

A side-issue. If you bring in matter to distinguish the laptops, surely you’re appealing to sheer individuation, whereas accidents are about what escapes the classifying concept. But this is probably too technical to bother about.

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I believe this is the difference between the critique of identity in the dialectics of the Hegelian tradition and negative dialectics, which Adorno set out in the last section. The Hegelian approach recognizes that absolute identity does not exist in our world, but it makes it into an ideal to be striven for. Adorno’s approach, of negative dialectics makes identity a “compulsion” which ought to be avoided. Identity-thinking is fundamentally not good for dialectics. This means that the ultimate society, “utopia”, would not have absolute equality as a guiding principle, but would avoid that principle and its derivatives altogether, and be guided by something else. For example, Plato’s Republic stresses difference rather than equality as the first principle of justice.

It may be the case, that we commonly think of accidents as predicable properties, but I think it is debatable as to whether this properly matches Aristotle’s intention. He did use “accidents” to account for the material aspect of the thing. And the matter is what escapes the form of the thing, and therefore would not consist of predicable properties. Matter accounts for the potential for change, and “potential” he determined violates the fundamental laws of logic.

This was the issue with potential, or possibility, and matter itself, it slips through the binary true or false logical structure. As such, Aristotle determined that it must either violate the law of non-contradiction, or else violate the law of excluded middle. He thought that violation of the law of noncontradiction would cause all sorts of problems, so he insisted that we maintain this principle, and allow that potential violates the law of excluded middle. So the classical understanding of potential, and possibility, is as that which may be or may not be. Notice the violation.

In my understanding, dialectical materialism takes the more radical approach of allowing that the law of noncontradiction is violated by potential (Aristotelian matter). This seems like a significant difference, because the classical way, violation of excluded middle, holds that possibility is neither one nor the other of opposing predications, while the other, violation of noncontradiction holds that both of opposing predications would apply at the same time.

But since these two principles (laws) are tied together by the law of identity, what it really comes down to, reduces to, is that the material aspect cannot have identity. The three “laws” are tied together, such that if a thing has identity, the other two laws must apply. But this is where what you say about “contingent and epistemic” comes into play. “Identity” restricts conceptualized understanding of the thing to predication. When we get to that “thing”, potential, matter, where the laws of predication do not apply, then “identity” serves no purpose, and it’s actually not coherent to even say that such a thing has identity.

We’re still just enveloped by a difference of perspective. If you understand “Aristotelian accidents” as predicates, and this is common, then you don’t see how this leads to the non-identical. But if you understand “Aristotelian accidents” as a reference to the material aspects of a thing (a thing consisting of both matter and form), then you can understand how “non-identical” comes into play from this context.

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Adorno’s charge against Hegel is that he first presupposes the subject-object identity, and then sets out to prove it, coming to its inevitable conclusion. But since the result was preordained, Hegel’s system is a massive one of begging the question, hysteron proteron, cart before the horse etc. If subject is indeed identical to object, this must be shown throughout the investigation, as something to be discovered, and not already built-in since the very beginning. Thus Adorno begins with the preponderance of the object, which is another way of saying that the subject-object relationship is not symmetrical, the object weighs heavy on the subject.

Adorno writes:

I am generally worried about an ontology of difference or différance. But maybe we are still a long way from this.

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Could you quote the passage that gave you this impression?

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This is what i was talking about, it’s in “On The Dialectics Of Identity”.

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. This alone would transcend the exchange. Once critical theory has demystified this latter as something which proceeds by equivalents and yet not by equivalents, then the critique of the inequality in the equality aims towards equality, amidst all skepticism against the rancor in the bourgeois egalitarian ideal, which tolerates nothing qualitatively divergent. If no human being was deprived of their share of their living labor, then rational identity would be achieved, and society would be beyond the identifying thought. This comes close enough to Hegel. The demarcation line from him is scarcely drawn by particular distinctions; rather by the intent: whether consciousness, theoretically and in practical consequence, would like to maintain identity as the ultimate, as the absolute and reinforce it, or else become aware of it as the universal apparatus of compulsion, which it ultimately requires in order to escape from the universal compulsion, just as freedom can only really come to be through the civilizing compulsion, not as a retour à la nature [French: back to nature].

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Sure, I believe it’s all over the place. The most clear and decisive parts are later in the reading, more specifically in the “OUTSET FROM THE CONCEPT”, “CRITIQUE OF POSITIVE NEGATION”, “RELAPSE INTO PLATONISM” chapters, which I will quote last (couldn’t help it and had a sneak peek).

From the introduction, “SYSTEM ANTINOMICAL”:

“The Hegelian one was not truly in itself one of becoming”: no genuine dynamic discovery

“but was already implicitly preconceived in each particular determination”: the dynamic was prefabricated

“Such assurance condemned it to untruth”: because of preconceived guaranteed success, it failed. A dialectic that always knows where it is headed, with no surprises, is condemned to untruth.

“Consciousness must immerse itself unconsciously, as it were, into the phenomena on which it takes a position”: objects should have been let to speak for themselves, instead of the subject speaking on their behalf, again preconceived certainty

“Therein indeed dialectics transforms itself qualitatively. Systematic unanimity would fall apart.”: If that was allowed to happen, then Hegel’s system would have fallen apart. Taking away the guarantee of unanimity supplied by the system, thought would have to follow its own impulse. Hegel’s system seems to be immensely deductive, computational even, striving towards identity. Dialectics would also have to be transformed, a point I didn’t make above, which, as far as I can see, is Adorno’s second major indictment against Hegel: that he doesn’t make the dialectical and mediating process a social and historical practice, but he introduces it from above, from the outside, as if it escaped the system altogether. Like dialectics is not part of the development process, like it is off limits, thereby beyond critique, beyond transformation. Nonetheless, for Hegel, dialectical movement always culminates in identity.

“The phenomenon would no longer remain what it nevertheless remains in Hegel, in spite of all declarations to the contrary, namely an example of its concept.”: the phenomenon, in its hegelian conception, never has independence, it just exemplifies and confirms the concept. Again, phenomena are not allowed to speak.

“The thought would be burdened with more labor and effort than in Hegel’s definition, because to him thought always only extracted out of its objects what was already thought.”: Notice the phrase “Hegel’s definition”. Also, what the subject extracted out of the object, was what the subject already thought. Again, there’s no genuine objective receptivity, but a subjective-objective confirmation, preconceived identity thinking.

“In spite of the program of realization [Entaeusserung], it satisfies itself in itself, whirring right along as often as it demands the contrary.”: Hegel’s program was one of objective realization in the subjective, but what it ended up with was satisfaction of what the subject knew all along before encountering the object, dismissing all dissonance as a buzzing in the ear.

“If the thought truly realized itself [entaeussern] in the thing, if this counted for something and not its category, then the object itself would begin to speak under the thought’s leisurely glance.”: Thought’s realization didn’t realize, it was just subsumed under a concept. Otherwise, the object would begin to do its own thing and thought would be a jolly spectator and perhaps allow itself to be transformed by the spectacle, without reducing all this to plain theater of course.

Then there is the tension between the static and the dynamic, between the invariant and the variant. The charge is that Hegel’s invariant structures secure their own development, they have a double character, whose structure was preformed such that their development could only lead to their own confirmation, at the expense of the non-identical. Adorno says that the stability between the two could only be secured by the invention of the semi-theological Spirit, something that is many things at once: it is a process, a becoming, it is a substance, an existent, it is universal yet particular, it is subject yet object, it is free yet necessary, it acts as both ground as well as unity, well what the heck is it? Whatever it is, it functions to culminate in the identity of subject and object, that reality can be eventually fully cognizable. I’ve highlighted many of Adorno’s expressions, but maybe many is never is enough.

DOUBLE CHARACTER OF THE SYSTEM:

SYSTEM ANTINOMICAL:

FRAGILITY OF THE TRUTH:

DIALECTICS AND THE SOLIDIFIED:

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

ONTOLOGIZATION OF THE ONTICAL:

NON-CONTRADICTORINESS NOT HYPOSTASIZABLE: