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.
I see this in a slightly different way. When he says “To this extent the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications.”, I take this to mean that the non-identical is the part of the thing which extends beyond the concepts which provide the identifications. This part of the thing is what provides for the uniqueness of the thing itself, as the particular thing which it is, therefore it “would be the thing’s own identity”. This is what is referred to by the law of identity, “a thing is the same as itself”, the uniqueness of the thing’s own identity, in contrast with its identifications.
The next part is the difficult part, “The innermost core of the object proves to be simultaneously external to this”. He seems to be starting from the principle that the most general is the most inner. “In fact, the general, as Husserl recognized, dwells in the center of the individual thing,”. This is consistent with Aristotelian logic, where the more general is said to be within the more specific. This is the way we define things. For instance, the concept “animal” is within the concept “human being”, as a defining feature. For Aristotle, the general is within the specific, and the specific is within the individual. But the individual is not within anything.
But Adorno says that the innermost core (most general), is also, simultaneously external to the thing’s own identity, which is the outermost aspect of the thing itself. I assume he is saying that the general concept is not only the inner most part of the thing itself, but is also at the same time external to thing itself, being a universal, and through its communication with others, it is the inner most part of many individuals. This makes it simultaneously the inner most part, and also existing externally.
While the individual is not to be deduced out of thought, the core of the individual would be comparable to those works of art which renounce all schemata, which are individuated to the utmost degree, whose analysis rediscovers moments of the generality in the extremity of their individuation, its participation, hidden even from itself, in what is typical.
I believe, the renouncing of all schemata is for the purpose of avoiding anything general at its core from which it is created. This would allow individuation to the highest degree. But even with this highest degree of individuation, generality reappears in the inverse way, at the extremity of individuation, because its “participation” cannot be avoided.
A lot of what you say actually anticipates the important next section, particularly your relational point: that the individual is reached through its participation in something beyond it, its relations to others. This is part of what’s going on in the “Constellation” section.
Where I’m not completely on board is the Aristotelian interpretation—the general within the specific, reached by moving up toward the master-concept. It looks like the classifying method rejected by the next section: the constellation as a method isn’t “advancing step by step towards the general master-concept,” but the concepts “entering into a constellation” around the thing. Anyway, that’s the next section.
Also, note that the “this” in “external to this” is the “sealed-off character”:
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.
So the innermost core is external to the sealed-off appearance—not to the thing’s individual identity, as I think your reading has it.
That idea, of the general within, Adorno claims to take from Husserl. The general he says “dwells in the center of the individual thing”. Whether or not he is rejecting it at this point is unclear, but he does say that it does not constitute itself in a comparison with others.
The idea comes from a long tradition of the way that the essence of a thing (what is essential to it) is presented in logic. It is an expression of logical necessity, a man is necessarily an animal. Notice Adorno’s use of “essence” in that context as explicitly referring to what is unique to the individual, in contrast with any general conceptions which the logicians would say form the essential (necessary) nature of the thing. Aristotle planted the seed of that dual nature of “essence” in his Metaphysics. He used it as a way of getting beyond what the logicians assign as “the essence of a thing”, to what he consider the true essence of an individual, as being the very unique thing that it is.
I think Adorno will be rejecting the Aristotelian mode. Aristotle positions the individual as having nothing outside it, and Adorno has already mentioned that there is something external, as required for the individual’s participation. This I think, is also the core of Adorno’s rejection of Aristotle’s designation that the individual is primary substance, as not within anything. Adorno assigns substance to society, and the individual is understood as necessary (essential), and within.
This is the difficult part, and I think we may have some disagreement here. First he sates “the non-identical would be the thing’s own identity against its identifications”, and I think we agree on what that means. Then he says:
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.
We have to pay respect to “simultaneously external to this”, and I believe “this” refers back to the thing’s own identity. So we might have a good candidate for objective contradiction here. The innermost core of the object, by Husserl’s designation that the most general is the very centre, must also, simultaneously be external to the thing’s own identity. The thing’s own identity is its “sealed-off appearance”, “sealed-off” implying inside. The “sealed-off identity” is what the description through this process of using general concepts as descriptive terms (predicates), fails to capture.
If you’ll oblige my digression here, I’ve given this issue considerable thought in the past, and where Adorno is pointing is to the limits of our spatial representations. At some point there is a distinction to be made between the spatial and the metaphorically spatial. The general “within” the specific is an expression of logical priority, with a spatial metaphor. And the problem gets very complex, because the spatial representation is limited by our conceptions of space, whereas logic is not limited in this way. Then we reach a point where the spatial metaphor fails, and so does our understanding which is based on it.
This I believe is where Adorno is pointing, and the failure happens at both extremes, innermost and outermost. In many cases, the innermost will suddenly flip to become the outermost, and vise versa. So for example if we follow the generalization principle toward the “master-concept”, we proceed from human being, animal, living being, to “being” in general. But at each step of the way, the definition is reliant on the next one to follow, to derive its meaning and understanding, until we get to the end, the most general, where we find the most vague and meaningless concept. This is because the system relies on the next, and there is no next. So we get to “the centre”, and what lies there is most unintelligible, as beyond what is provided for by the system.
This whole process is modeled after spatial understanding, as a sort of inversion of it, whereby we divide the object up, to get to the bottom of it, in order to obtain a true understanding. But in understanding this process a real problem with our spatial representations gets exposed. We understand the object as having a boundary, and everything outside the boundary is external to the object. This is very explicit in systems theory. But then when we divide up the object we keep dividing without imposing any internal boundaries.
So when we get to the innermost aspect of the object, and it lies beyond our ability to conceptualize it, it automatically gets bounced to the outside “external to the object”, even though it’s really further inside by the precepts of the system of understanding. The problem is that we do not have a boundary to the inside of the object, so that we can say X activity indicates that the object is influenced by something beyond its internal boundary, instead everything beyond the object must be external to it. So we have no way to distinguish what is beyond the boundary to the inside, from what is beyond the boundary to the outside, because we only have one boundary. This issue is very evident in quantum mechanics where virtual particles (nondimensional) are represented as having spatial attributes, but those spatial attributes must really be some form of an inversion of the true nonspatial, beyond the boundary to the inside.
That quote sounds like something Heidegger would say. He would say that a jug’s innermost core is what the jug means to us, and that comes from all kinds of activities in a social setting.
This creates a clash with the Cartesian picture, which has the subject isolated in the skull, and the jug out there. In Cartesian language, Heidegger is saying that there are pieces of you all over the place, and those pieces form the cores of objects.
How does Adorno’s view of an object compare with that?
That’s quite reasonable.
I think we were both wrong. Here is the German:
Das Innerste des Gegenstandes erweist sich als zugleich diesem auswendig, seine Verschlossenheit als Schein, Reflex des identifizierenden, fixierenden Verfahrens.
I got four translations:
The innermost part of the object proves to be simultaneously external to it, its closedness a mere illusion, a reflection of the identifying, fixing process.
— Google Translate
The innermost essence of the object turns out to be, at the same time, its exterior; its inscrutability is an illusion, a reflection of the process of identification and fixation.
— DeepL
The innermost part of the object proves to be at the same time memorized by it, its closeness as an appearance, a reflection of the identifying, fixing method.
— SYSTRAN
The innermost of the object proves to be at the same time external to it [the object]; its closedness [proves to be] mere appearance, a reflex of the identifying, fixing procedure.
— Claude, in a discussion about the translation
So in each case the “this” is the object. It’s not the “sealed-off character”—the appearance—as I thought; and it’s not the “thing’s own identity”, which is doing something very specific in that sentence (it means the object’s non-identical core).
I had offered this reading:
I wasn’t far off, but now I can do better. Adorno does two things:
- The object’s innermost core proves to be external to the object; what’s deepest in the thing isn’t a sealed interior but its relations to what it is not.
- The object’s closed, sealed-off character is Schein—mere appearance, and the impenetrability is an artifact of identity-thinking’s claim to exhaust the object.
There’s no impenetrable core to revere, and the non-identical is facing outwards and in reach of our knowledge-hungry fingers.
Otherwise, your reflections on the spatial metaphor and its breakdown are interesting. The inner/outer language is clearly metaphorical, so it makes sense to ask where that metaphor breaks down, as all metaphors must. But it’s your own line of thought more than a reading of this passage, so I won’t follow you down that road.
Adorno read John Locke, so it’s interesting that the idea of thing’s core goes back to Locke. For Locke, an object’s core is some sort of substance that supports the associated properties. The core is along the lines of the thing’s identity, in this case viewed as belonging to the structure of the outside world. We expose our tabula rasa minds to the properties, and discern the core.
So for instance, I see a tree and identify it as a maple. The concept of the maple is the core of the object. The properties, transient phenomenal stuff, could be thought of as orbiting the unchanging core. David Hume famously created a thought experiment that appears to show that there is no such core, although some would argue that his thought experiment, which asks you to imagine an object with no properties, is really just showing that a core of identity makes no sense in the absence of its associated properties. Hume’s bundle is like a bag of properties with no core. Or rather, the core is a name we give to the bag.
Kant argued that this picture can’t be right. If you’re just a bag of properties, how do you ever arrive at an unchanging identity in the first place? Instead, Kant gives us our representational theory of mind. The mind actively weaves all the transient properties into something meaningful. But where’s the core now? The core of the self is the weaver in the tapestry story. Where is the core of an object? In a way, Kant has withdrawn the core into the realm of the mind. The core-property complex is something you project out onto the sea of incoming data. On the other hand, Kant has moved the core out beyond the realm of the mind, as the thing-in-itself.
I think the idea that the core-property complex is a projection endured into the 20th Century in continental philosophy. Maybe Adorno is suggesting that we could think of the core in a different way.
Imagine that I’m learning the Latin names for trees, and I’m practicing by walking around identifying them. Every time I see a maple, I announce: “Acer rubrum.” Everybody from Kant onward in continental philosophy would say that I’m doing a fine job of projecting identity.
But what if, instead of thinking of the Acer rubrum as the core of identity, I open myself to the unique living being in front of me (the tree)? All the different shapes and textures. You, the unique tree, free for just a second from the mantle of identity as a maple. I’m seeing you now, not just your Latin name. You have your own identity that I’m not projecting, but taking in through my senses.
I think the important thing is the contradiction, the innermost is at the same time what is external.
What I think, is that Adorno is pointing down this same road with this contradiction of the innermost being simultaneously what is external. The issue has become very important in quantum physics with the local/nonlocal debate, action at a distance, and entanglement. It seems that the most inner aspect of the object, the fundamental particles, mysteriously have a connection with what is completely external to the object.
So not only is it the case that the use of spatial metaphor breaks down at some point, our spatial concepts themselves come to a point where they fail as well. This is what I was pointing toward, and I think Adorno points this way as well. The breakdown of the spatial metaphor in metaphysics is indicative of the breakdown of spatial concepts in physics. The innermost aspect of the individual is not simply directly related to the external (as described by nonlocality), but Adorno says that it is the external.
I’d say that’s a question I really can’t answer.
For Adorno, this core, which comprises the thing’s identity, is also the thing’s non-identity, what is other to it. So the core is, at the same time, the thing’s innermost identity, and also what is external to the thing.
As you say about Kant:
But are you actually taking in “the core” with your senses. The core appears to be hidden, concealed within and not sensually perceived. Yet it is grasped by conception. So the issue is, how is it that the core is the innermost aspect of the thing, hidden from sense perception, but it also, at the very same time, exists within you as the conception of the thing, when you are completely external to that thing. What is the innermost core of the thing is also what is external to the thing.
I think you have to go to a time in your life when you experienced this: that you let go of the conceptual and became immersed in the realm of sensation. Imagine standing at the ocean, when you’ve been thinking of it in intellectual terms, but then you’re arrested by the sensations of the moment: the wind, the unique light, the particular twinkles. It’s a shift in perspective. It’s an experiential thing, very kin to existentialism.
The transient, unique, phenomenal character of things has long been downgraded in favor of ideals (in continental philosophy). Turn it around. See the unique. See the moment now that will never come again. Don’t worry that you can’t capture it in your hands or hold all of it in your memory. That’s the nature of the non-identical.
I agree that the important thing is the apparent contradiction, but it’s not important in the way you describe. I’ll quote my own account and then develop it in response to your interpretation.
(I regret the terrible finger metaphor)
That the innermost is simultaneously external is not an “objective contradiction”—not in Adorno’s terms and I’d say not in any other terms. What it is is a paradoxical expression used for contentful stylistic effect—to undermine a habit of philosophical thought—but it’s one that he resolves. There is no such resolution of objective contradictions in Adorno.
He lays it out. The innermost core means what is most characteristic of the thing as an individual non-identical thing, or what makes it what it is in the strongest sense. And that is its relations. To call the relations the innermost core is Adorno being playful, using the language of contradiction to undermine the spatial metaphor. You had an insight into this before I did, and I give you a lot of credit for that.
But it’s not mere rhetoric. It shows us that the object’s “core”—its ownmost itselfness—isn’t internal and impenetrable. It challenges the habit of associating selfhood with the inaccessible interior. It’s not a contradiction of the same status as the contradicitons in concepts and objects, e.g., freedom and the exchange principle.
I think we’ll just have to disagree in our interpretation of this. Maybe it will resolve itself later with further reading.
“Relations” requires things which are related. And this produces the spatial metaphor. The relation is external to each of the related things, and this means that things are external to other things. If the supposed innermost core is simply external relations then the designation of “innermost core” is empty, void of any meaning.
So I believe Adorno is making a stronger statement, claiming that the non-identical which is revealed through the identification process, to be at the inner core of the thing, as it’s most essential nature, is actually something which is not a part of the individual at all, but something other. The uniqueness which makes the thing, the very thing which it is, is actually something other to the thing itself, but it inheres within the thing, at its innermost core. This “other” which is within the thing itself accounts for the reality of the thing’s external relations.
In keeping with the most enduring result of Hegelian logic it is not simply for itself but an other in itself and tied to others.
Here’s an example I thought of, which may allow us to an extent, to escape the trapping of the spatial metaphor, and how it restricts our understanding of “relations”. Take a look at family relations, the relations between brothers and sisters, and cousins, etc.. These are not spatial relations, but there is something internal, genetics or something like that, which provides for the validation of “related” with empirical, physical evidence.
Notice how establishing this type of relation is working within the structure of identification. So if we dig even deeper, to see what’s beyond the genetics, we find that this system, which identifies by determining a genetic commonality, and establishing a relation through that commonality, ultimately fails in its attempt to identify, at the very base, the centre, because it is fundamentally incapable of being applied toward understanding the uniqueness of the individual person. Since this uniqueness is what escapes the identification process, it is deemed non-identity. So it can only be a form of “other”, which inheres at the very centre of the individual, making the individual something other than how the person is identified through the genetic relations.
Now, we have taken that system of non-spatial relations (genetics) to its point of failure, where it leaves us still with an inherent “other”. So this “other” can only be something distinct from the individual, as incapable of being identified as part of the individual, and now we only have the spatial metaphor left to understand it, as something “external” to the individual. Therefore at the innermost core of the individual is something distinctly not a part of the individual, something 'external". It is something other than the individual, which we can only call an aspect of “the external”. Now “the external” inheres within each individual, at the innermost core, and this I believe is how “participation” is validated by Adorno, and why the chapter is called “What is Individual Too is No ultimate”. At the inner core of the individual is something which is actually not a property of the individual, but a part of the external, something other.
I’ve done this many times, and I tend to get the opposite effect. The entire “realm of sensation” becomes completely unreal to me, a sort of self-deception which my senses are feeding me. I mean, the natural world can be very beautiful, but that’s just a feature of the way I am looking at it. It can change in a moment, and appear very dangerous and intimidating, but it’s really just a change in my attitude.
You are saying “see the unique”, “see the moment…”, instead of seeing the ideal. But I don’t think we actually see any of this at all. These are ideals which you are imposing. You assume that there is a uniqueness there, that there is a moment there, and you are asking me to see them. That’s not what I see when I do the experiment you suggested, those are the ideals which you are asking me to look for. What I see is all tied up in feelings and emotions, associations. The non-identical is not something seen, it is assumed. If it were seen it would be identified.