Isn’t it taken for granted that Adorno is attempting to stay as true as possible to the Hegelian meaning of “concept”?
Since it’s all under the umbrella of Hegel, you’d definitely be looking for that every time he uses the word. Does he mean Hegel’s Concept?
I don’t think he means it that way every time, though. If I read German, it would help me distinguish it. As it is, all I have is context.
Good stuff. I forgot to read that footnote tbh.
Pretty good advice, especially in regard to the “Synthesis” section. I suspect Adorno is not switching between the different senses—he is not so obscure that he would not be clear about doing so—but is rather bringing the meanings together, or holding them together in tension. The concept is both an act of the subject and something with objective scope; they’re mutually mediated, neither reducible to the other.
Now, Hegel brings those together too, but the difference is that for Hegel this is a unification, the achievement of identity, whereas Adorno’s picture is of an unreconciled mediation.
So when Adorno is talking like this:
the concept experiences itself as non-identical and moves, it leads, no longer merely itself, to what Hegelian terminology terms its Other, without sucking it dry.
… he is certainly employing the Hegelian meaning, but at the same time denying that the Concept’s Other is completely absorbed and recognized as a mere moment of the Concept—hence the “sucking it dry” comment.
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I’m not sure that would help, since it’s Begriff in either case, and capitalized in either case too.
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The concept is fundamentally an aspect of society for Adorno, the formal aspect. But as Hegel shows with his principles of dialectics concepts are actively changing. Where I see a difference is that Adorno attributes this changing activity to the material aspect of society, the content, which is the subjects, while Hegel tried to maintain objectivity. We might see society as the One, and subjects as the Many,
So Adorno is critical of Hegel’s distinct moments (temporal as described) of the dialectics, which ensures the objective nature of the concept by excluding subjectivity, even within the becoming of the dialectical process. It is “the concept itself” which observes and experiences its own becoming.
Now the role of the subject is allowed into the dialectics by Adorno, without making the concept subjective, because the subject is still an aspect of society, as the material content of it. So the concept itself is the mediation between object (society) and subject (conscious thinking). On the one hand it is ideology, on the other hand it is the subject/object of dialectical thinking.
The question of unity or division is the difficult issue of the One and the Many. The One is a unity of the many, and the Many is only a valid description if some division exists within the one. But I think what Adorno is alluding to is that it’s best to consider them as distinct categories, which I believe is the solution Plato leaned toward. This means that the same thing is both one and many under different principles of judgement.
The Hegelian idea of “the Concept’s Other” is misleading, because it implies something other than conceptual, that is the categorical difference referred to above. To make it work, “the concept” referred to must be a particular, which can be negated by another concept. But this annihilates the true general meaning of “the concept” as something universal. So a true rendering of “the Concept’s Other” requires something non-conceptual. This non-identity is allowed into the objective concept, through the dialectical process, because it is a “moment of the concept”.
Yes.
For Hegel, yes. Not for Adorno. Making the non-identical a “moment of the concept” is the absorption that “without sucking it dry” rejects. The concept leads to the non-conceptual Other but doesn’t reconcile it into itself. The Other stays outside.
Otherwise, I expect you know that I disapprove of your system-building adventures, so I won’t address them.
I think it’s better described as understanding. Understanding is an act which consists of establishing relations between ideas.
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ND Part II / What Is Individual Too Is No Ultimate
In this section, Adorno flips things around again, developing the thought he anticipated in “Outset From the Concept”, about which I said this:
In the present section, he does something similar for the singular existent, das Einzelne, translated by Redmond as individual. This translation is right, because Adorno makes use of its different shades of meaning, crucially using it to also mean the human individual in society.
So “individual” works on two levels simultaneously: the singular existent that no concept exhausts, and the social person whose absolute individuality is an abstraction.
So my nutshell version of Adorno’s main point is that despite everything about doing justice to the existent, setting up the individual in its nonidentical resistance to conceptuality as the aim of philosophy proper, it is not to be enthroned as an uninterpretable object of theoretical veneration like being—the Individual, cherished sanctum of the great Non-Identical, Which No Concept May Touch.
The first sentence of the section crams it all in:
Thinking, which went astray in identity, capitulates easily to what is indissoluble and turns the indissolubility of the object into a taboo for the subject, which is supposed to irrationalistically or scientifically resign itself not to touch what is not the same as it, surrendering to the current cognitive ideal, thereby even paying homage to it.
There’s a memorable statement describing the non-identical, which is the “more” of the object beyond any concept of it.
What is, is more than it is.
On commas
I’ve removed the second comma that appears in Redmond’s translation. There are two commas in the original German, but the second comma doesn’t belong in the English—in German there’s always a comma before als in this kind of comparison, whereas in English there is no comma before “than”.
He reminds us:
- The “more” is not imposed on the object by the subject.
- The “more”, though it’s beyond any concept of the object, nevertheless belongs to the object.
We should carefully try to understand this bit:
To this extent the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications. The innermost core of the object proves to be simultaneously external to this, its sealed-off character as appearance [Schein], the reflex of the identifying, solidifying procedure.
It’s a briar patch but in the end I think it’s fairly clear. The (real) innermost core of the object is not the same as its apparent sealed-off character. The latter is the product of identity thinking: in claiming exhaustiveness, identity thinking closes the object to further analysis and other concepts, i.e., solidifies it. The result is something sealed off, hard and impenetrable. This is exactly the conception of the individual that we should reject.
Now, the significance of this observation is that it undermines the stance of reverence, because the object’s impenetrability, that which might impress us so much, turns out to be a product of identity-thinking, not something that’s come from the object. The real core, the non-identical, can be reached, because it lies outside the sealed appearance, not behind an impenetrable wall.