Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

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That the philosophy oriented towards the primacy of the method remains satisfied with such preliminary questions, and for that reason possibly also feels as a basic science on safe ground, only creates the illusion that the preliminary questions, and philosophy itself, scarcely have consequences any more for cognition.

— Disappointed Need

Here’s a curious thing. Analytic philosophy and neo-Kantianism both seem to fit in this role of scientistic, methodogically-oriented deflationary thought—they have in common a desire to restrict the question of philosophical validity to formal-scientific criteria.

So Adorno often thinks of positivism, neo-Kantianism, the Vienna Circle and analytic philosophy as being in the same ball-park.

But from the analytic point of view, neo-Kantianism is either ignored or else cast as one of the enemy alongside Hegel. And the thing is, both Adorno and the analytics are right, given their different concerns. Neo-Kantianism, while prioritizing science, does it transcendentally and with an element of idealism, and that was anathema to much of the early analytic crew.

From Adorno’s point of view, which is penetratingly ironic, both are accomplices in the priority of the subject since they subordinate thought to method and thereby force the object to conform to prior concepts.

But I’m guilty of stereotyping and reductionism with respect to analytic philosophy, as Adorno himself is sometimes.

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I see what you mean. Thanks for pointing that out. I came across that passage at the end, and it was sort of out of place, unexplained, and I jumped to a conclusion.

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ND I.I., “Lack as Gain”

This section says three interesting things:

  • It’s not just that Being is an empty concept; it’s that its philosophical support is a network of concepts that borrow legitimacy from each other, with nothing ever actually making good on those debts.

  • Heidegger has a rhetorical strategy: he always presents a lack of content in his philosophy as a sign of its profundity.

  • Heidegger gets to give his Being a theological aura while maintaining plausible deniability: an attractively archaic, primordial depth of flavour while strenuously emphasizing how new and groundbreaking it is.

ND I.I., No Man’s Land

Adorno describes Heidegger as inheriting Husserl’s desire to break free from epistemology and get to the things themselves, but recoiling at making things substantive—in the way the idealists made their thought substantive with the identity-thesis, or the neo-Kantians did with their infinitesimal method (this has something to do with neo-Kantian philosophy of mathematics but I don’t really know).

It’s almost like Adorno is saying that an essential characteristic of Heidegger’s philosophy is that it doesn’t dare to be substantive enough that it is exposed to direct scrutiny.

Next, Adorno says that Heidegger not only repudiated empirical particulars like Husserl did, but also got rid of Husserl’s eidos, the basic essence of a phenomenon, or “the highest, fact-free, conceptual unity of the factual, in which traces of substantiality are intermixed.” The eidos, though abstract and pure, is still somewhat determinate. Heidegger gets rid of that, leaving only his more primordial Being, which is thus not only fact-free and non-empirical, but also conceptually indeterminate. Being thus represents the “contraction of essences” down to an indeterminate remainder.

In the end it [ontology] scarcely dares to predicate anything, even of being. Therein appears less any mystical meditation than the privation of a thought, which wishes to go to its Other and can permit itself nothing, for fear of losing what it claims. Philosophy turns tendentially into a ritual pose. In it indeed stirs something true, its falling silent.

The last sentence is a head-scratcher. It’s an “after all” concession to Heidegger, saying that his very reluctance to say anything substantive contains something true. Maybe this is because Adorno and Heidegger share a scepticism towards the ability of concepts, logic, and language to capture phenomena adequately. Heidegger’s silence—bolstered by pretensions to profundity—might be the wrong response to that, but the problem it’s reacting to is real. Adorno’s own response is the somewhat paradoxical one of accepting that concepts are necessarily inadequate to their objects but refusing to give up on our ability to conceptually grasp those objects.

@Moliere: almost caught up!

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What?! You’re going to make me read again?! :smiley:

Sounds good.

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The “falling silent” implies that philosophy is, at this point, unable to say anything. But the metaphor goes deeper because it’s a “ritual pose”, which implies an intentional prevention of action, a self-paralysis. So he seems to be saying that the activity of philosophy, what Heidegger liked to call “thinking” is paralyzed by this privation. The thinking has only what it allows itself, being, and therefore cannot go to any Other, for fear of losing the only thing that it has. Under this scheme, thinking can’t do anything without negating the ontology it professes.

But notice the last line, something “stirs”. Therefore the self-paralysis is not complete. The thinking remains active, under the guise of not being active, as if “being” satisfies the ontological need. But the thinking falls silent. And the falling silent is a pose.

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ND I.I., Unsuccessful Materiality-at-Hand

Your summary seems really good to me so I won’t try to outdo it. I’ll just make a couple of points.

Militarism

I think the reference to militaristic language is more specific:

… a militaristic manner of speaking, something Heidegger does not shrink from.[17]

Footnote 17 is: See Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik [Introduction to Metaphysics], ibid. p.155.

I wasn’t able to track down the passage Adorno was referring to, but in the same book Heidegger does unironically mention the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism and say a few things about the great destiny of the German people. There is also a lot about the struggle (of Dasein and the German people, I think), and lots about war and conflict in general.

And it’s not just that Heidegger had fascist sympathies or that his style tended make use of military metaphors. It’s that militarism is built into fundamental ontology:

[fundamental ontology] wishes to overcome this [delimiting and obscuring moment of subjectivity] with a militaristic manner of speaking

Nothing

Again I think the reference is quite specific. In his What is Metaphysics? lecture, Heidegger famously equates Being and Nothing, or at least argues that they belong intimately together. Adorno’s claim is that Heidegger was aware that Hegel was right about this, that they’re identical—and yet he (Heidegger) didn’t treat this as a reductio ad absurdum of the concept but rather, once again, made use of it as a mark of profundity.

Das Nichts selbst nichtet

The verb has been variously translated, so you get “The nothing itself noths/nothings/nihilates.”

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Yes, that’s a fuller account than my own. :+1:

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Whether it’s a correct interpretation or not is another question. But there’s more, which came to me as a dream last night, and inspired me to take a deeper look. It has to do with the whole pretense that the ontological need has been satisfied, and the fact that it is a pretense. This relates to what you and @Moliere have been discussing how Heidegger was not unaware that being and nothingness will be equated.

The point is that the same principle which is supposed to ease one’s mind a sort of solution. “a mark of profundity”, is also extremely unsettling, as a “reductio ad absurdum” . And the effect it has on you depends on how you take it, your perspective.

So this line:

“…appears less any mystical meditation than the privation of a thought, which wishes to go to its Other and can permit itself nothing…”

will lead up to this line:

“It would like to break through the intermediary layer of subjective positions, which has become a second nature, the walls [Waende: interior walls] which thinking has built around itself.”

Thinking is inspired and driven by want, deprivation, which is a discomfort. If we suppose a pure “thinking”, thinking for the sake of thinking, or Aristotle’s thinking which is thinking on thinking, then the thinking itself must be its own deprivation. If such a pure thinking was possible, then the thinking itself would be the source of the discomfort which inspires it to think. To end the discomfort, the uneasiness which inspires thinking, requires resolution of the problems which drive it to think. Instead of self-torture, it must present to itself some resolutions. These assumed resolutions become the self-imposed interior walls which imprison the thinking. The thinking itself may actually be aware that these are just stopgaps, but they are necessary to quell the unrest and discomfort of the thinking.

However, we need now, to consider the other perspective. This is another person’s perspective, from the outside looking in on the thinking, interpreting what the philosopher has created . From this perspective, it appears like all those self-imposed walls are actually meant to satisfy the ontological need, which Adorno implies cannot be done. But this is now a subject-to-subject issue, so the positioning of everything gets inverted in relation to the second subject, as compared to the first thinker, and the self-imposed walls of the first subject become the mediations of the second subject.

So the imprisonment is no longer self-imposed, but imposed by the mediations, and this leads into the paragraph which begins with: “Because subjectivity however cannot think its mediations out of existence…”. This section is very dense, and I’ll take a stab at it later.

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I wouldn’t mind having dreams like that.

I think the consolation-reductio opposition is a good frame, and I like the idea that which one it is depends on perspective—inside or outside.

Adorno’s statement is, on reflection, quite simple: Heidegger wants to break through to something substantive but cannot do so because he has thrown away the conceptual tools to do so. And throwing away the conceptual tools expresses a truth, which is that every concept fails and is insufficient—something Adorno agrees with.

Your post seems to be an imaginative meditation on the psychology of the philosophizing subject in this situation—Heidegger being the philosophizing subject and Adorno being the observer.

I believe that Adorno does not imply that the ontological need cannot be satisfied. This would be an abandonment of the effort to find substantive truth in philosophy; Adorno is never very optimistic, but he is always hopeful and never just throws his hands in the air despairingly.

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The way I expressed this, is that the pure thinking cannot break through to anything substantive because it cannot have anything other than thinking as its content. But the thinking needs an end as I would call it, to satisfy the ontological need, or else it gets lost in the circularity of that credit system referred to, and over-exerts itself, or to maintain the credit analogy, over-extends itself.

The end for Heidegger is being. But these ends which idealist philosophers propose, God, Spirit, and even being, are really just self-imposed walls, to reign in the thinking and prevent self-destructive exhaustion, ‘being spent’. The debtor has the upper hand, and the thinking may spend beyond its means. “Involuntary abstractness presents itself as voluntary vow.” 91 The thinking can get carried away if it doesn’t practise self-restraint. So Heidegger’s thinking displays this self-imposed wall as “being”. This serves as a substitute for something substantive, as an attempt to satisfy the ontological need.

This is what I derived from the dream. For some reason thinking about this material from Adorno had entered into my dreaming condition, I was dreaming about it. Then I suddenly woke up. At this point, I was looking at my thinking (in the dream) from the outside in, and it made me keenly aware of the difference in perspective, the dreaming thinking was obviously seen as inferior, but still somehow insightful. I also became aware that what Adorno had written actually exposes this difference in perspective.

So ontology, as a form of thinking, ends up being a no-mans land, just like my dreaming. It does maintain its own self-consistency, but since the consistency is its own, and its all wrapped up in its own thing, it’s meaningless, no different from a dream. The dream, from the dream’s perspective, is consistent, just like the ontological philosophy, from within it, is consistent.

Each subject has one’s own thinking, and these are the subjective positions spoken of in “UNSUCCESSFUL MATERIALITY-AT-HAND”. The “walls which thinking has built around itself” are the ontological ends, which prior subjective thinking has impose on itself in an attempt to satisfy the ontological need. However, even the content of the subjective thinking is derived from the ends of other subjective thinkers, and these all form walls, which are not truly self-imposed walls, but walls imposed by other selves. So they are mediated. Then whenever the subjective thinking tries to escape the imprisonment, it seeks something immediate, to escape those walls which are not immediate.

The surfeit of the subjective prison of cognition gives rise to the conviction that what is transcendent to subjectivity would be immediate for it, without being soiled by the concept. -93

The subjective thinking desperately wants to transcend those walls of subjectivity, so it’s convinced of something immediate, which cannot partake in the concept, which produces the walls. It may even demand immediacy in a “militaristic” way.

The inside/outside distinction comes into play here because in the prior chapter, the walls are self-constructed by the thinking. This would make them immediate to the thinking. But when the thinking wants to escape the walls it sees them as derived from others, outside, from ideology and therefore conceptual. So the walls are not truly self-constructed. This is what drives thinking toward the origin, to determine what is not mediated in this way (not coming from outside). This effort ultimately fails because it would drive out all content from the thinking.

Because neither speculative thinking, as whatever might be posited from thought, is allowed, nor, as in the reverse case, is an existent insisted on which, as a piece of the world, would compromise the precedence of being, the thought does not dare to think of anything other than something totally empty, far more of an X than the old transcendental subject ever was, which always carried along with it the memory of the existing consciousness, “egoity”, as the unit of consciousness.

This “X”, which is basically the contentless object of thinking is supposed to be “most real being”, under the name “being”.

How I interpret this further, is that the thinking apprehends the walls of its imprisonment as self-constructed, in a way. But they are not self-constructed in the sense of constructed by that thinking subject which is confronted by them, they are constructed by prior thinking subjects. So they are mediated in respect to the individual thinking subject.

The thinking subject then feels an ontological need to transcend these walls of mediation and determine something immediate. That might provide the thinking subject something concrete, a ground, substance. Now the walls, though they appear as self-imposed, are really mediated, so the thinking subject can simply dismiss them as aporetic, or for whatever reason, in thinking.

So the thinking subject pushes aside all that conceptual content in an attempt to find something immediate, something original. However, this leaves it with absolutely no content, nothing, and this Heidegger called “being”. This is what Heidegger is said to be aware of. He dismissed all “the aporetic construction of the concept”, to produce something original, but this production was nothing other than an aporetic construction of a concept.

I’d say that this is debatable. To me, he implies, as Catholic theology does, that substantive truth is not possible for the human intellect to obtain. This is why theology turns to a higher intellect for Truth, in its ontology. But that is my perspective, and perspective is very influential to one’s interpretation.

The clearest description so far, of Adorno’s perspective on this may be back in “Dissappointed Need” p88. “Many adepts of science expect a decisive completion from ontology, without this needing to touch on scientific procedures.” But there is a problem which is the “distinction between essence and facts”. So there’s a long discussion, but the philosophy of essence ultimately exercises supremacy over the science of fact as what is required to finish (put an end to) science.

After this, things get complicated, but we can see that the ontological need will always be higher than the science of fact. So science cannot bring about such an end. However, “substantive truth” could be understood in a way other than as fact. And Adorno discusses substantive philosophy.

As I noted in the introduction, “substance” is assigned to society. This is how I got the idea that society is ontology. So perhaps Adorno believes that if philosophy of essence is replaced by philosophy of substance (society), this could actually fulfill the ontological need, as you say.

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Seems like a reasonable way to put it.

Looks like you experienced Adorno’s critique vividly and for real, rather than abstractly. That is remarkable, and I wonder how the inside/outside, dream/waking split maps to negative dialectics as a philosophical practice.

Adorno says that Heidegger, though he has the ability, has taken philosophical/intellectual/spiritual experience—as set out in the introduction to ND—in the wrong direction, influenced by ideology, romanticism, nationalism, and whatever other anti-philosophical influences.

But it remains possible for a thinker to follow through the search for truth, via negative dialectics, while on the inside, so to speak. So Adorno’s pattern or technique with regard to social and cultural criticism is immanent critique. And the philosopher must be aware of his own mediation, his own embeddedness in a social and ideological milieu:

Elitist arrogance has not the least place in philosophical experience. It must give an account of how much, according to its own possibility in the existent, it is contaminated with the existent, with the class relationship.

— INTRODUCTION: Privilege of Experience

Possibly we could describe this as a second order thinking—thinking about one’s thinking, as if from the outside, observing one’s own thought. And the same might go for this critique of fundamental ontology and other bad responses to the ontological need.

I think this is a very cool analogy, but the split between deluded dreamer and omniscient conscious observer is, I feel, too clean to represent the situation accurately—because, again, critique is not top-down and outside-in but is immanent.

Now, you might answer and say that there remains an asymmetry within that immanence, namely between the deluded, wayward, dozing philosophers and those, like Adorno, who can see (and/or see through) the facade of falsity. But describing this as dream/waking makes it seem to easy. When you’re doing negative dialectics, you don’t have a magical key that admits you to the Truth, the treasure trove of special knowledge you have as the waking observer. It’s messier and more difficult than that; it’s always a struggle to stay awake, if you like.

Well put. :+1:

You seem to have arrived where I am by a very different route. :smiling_face_with_sunglasses:

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I don’t know if I can follow this possibility logically, at this point. Maybe Adorno will elucidate further, but I’ll give it a try right now. Seeing everything as inside, immanent, is what turns Heidegger’s being into nothing. In other words it appears like there is nothing which is purely immanent in thought. All the content of thought comes from outside, from others. Yet you refer to the philosopher’s “own mediation”, and Adorno says that subjectivity cannot think “its” mediations out of existence. But in what way are the mediations proper to the philosopher, or to the subject?

The mediations appear to transcend the thinking, as the thinking reaches “nothing” when it attempts to dismiss the mediated, and reach the originative thought. All the content is mediated by the externally sourced concept. And when Heidegger reaches the bottom he just creates another concept, which will become an externally sourced concept for others.

But if the thinking is not the entirety of the thinker, then the mediations may still be proper to the thinker. For example, Kant’s a priori intuitions of space and time.

To compare with my perspective of approach, the Catholic theology assumes the thinking to be proper to the immaterial mind, and the material body is the mediation. Here, matter is the medium. Matter though is fundamentally unintelligible as we understand its forms only. So it doesn’t make any sense to say that the matter, as medium, is a ‘property’ of the thinker, properties being intelligible form. So the matter between thinkers cannot be proper to any of them.

From this perspective, matter as the medium, it becomes very problematic to talk about the philosopher’s own mediations. As philosophers, you and I are thinkers, and there is mediation between these two thinking activities, but it becomes very difficult to draw a distinction between your mediations and my mediations. @Evald was arguing principles from Ilyenkov in another thread, where the claim was that tools etc., are an inorganic extension of the subject’s body.

I find that sort of approach very difficult because everything between this active thinking, and that active thinking is equally ‘the medium’. So it doesn’t provide any support for biological needs, fundamental properties, or ownership of anything, even one’s own body. That’s an ethical can of worms.

Back to Adorno. if there is mediations which are proper to the thinking subject, and these must somehow not be present to the thinking or else they’d be immediate, yet really immanent within, then this would support a material body providing mediations, which are proper to the thinking subject as “its” mediations. The true mediations inhere within therefore, they are nonconceptual, and are not properly apprehended as an external medium, but are closer in character to the a priori intuitions of Kant.

So, what could you mean by this, critique is not outside-in, but is immanent? That position, of what is immanent, is assigned to the mediations in my exposé above. How could the critique get inside itself, to critique from an immanent position?

This is where things get really difficult because we have to start by asking what is being critiqued, the thinking of others, or one’s own thinking. If I am critiquing the thinking of others, I need to be aware of my own mediations, my perspective, and how this affects my interpretation. So a more productive critique might be to critique my own thinking, and this is where I might start pushing aside all those mediated concepts, like Heidegger, to get to the originative. But how could I ever get to that inside-out perspective, so that the critique could be immanent?

Ah, I see now, we have this backward. The immanent perspective is the dreaming one. The awake is the mediated, rational and conscious, so it holds its position of arrogance over the irrational dream. Notice in my original description I put them both on equal footing as consistent from each one’s own perspective. But the conscious, awake perspective gave itself supremacy.

In the analogy, the dream is actually critiquing the rational arrogance from the immanent perspective. The dream is showing me that I do not necessarily have to follow that arrogant rational, mediated perspective, because there’s an entire unmediated realm hidden within, free from all those self-imposed walls. So the true critique aims to get beyond all those self-imposed walls of consciousness, and tap into that inner realm of true freedom, without falling into Heidegger’s trap of simply creating a new wall. And this seems to be a totally irrational activity.

We approach from completely different perspectives, but are led in a very similar direction. I think that means the philosophy is comprehensive and well written.

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ND I.I., On Categorical Intuition (Part 1)

Adorno returns to Husserl’s concept of categorical intuition (also sometimes translated as categorial intuition or categorial vision), the super-sensuous perception of essences, which he previously identified as the secret basis for Heidegger’s Being (in the Being, Subject, Object section).

However much Heidegger’s Being shrinks to a dimensionless point, it still has categorial intuition as its fundamental basis. The comments on synthesis and Kant are meant to support the concept of categorical intuition: Kant didn’t realize that the manifold already corresponds with the synthesis when given in intuition. Otherwise, a synthesis wouldn’t be possible. The sides must be commensurable: the sensory manifold and the synthesizing subject are in a sense equal. Kant found an asymmetry because he prioritized the subject too much.

Incidentally, I found the Ashton translation clearer for this passage:

A simple mathematical theorem would not apply without the synthesis of the figures between which the equation is set up, and neither—this is whatKant neglects—would a synthesis be possible if the relation of elements were not in line with this synthesis, regardless of the trouble in which such a manner of speaking entangles us, according to current logic.

To put it drastically, in a way that invites misunderstanding: there could be no synthesis if the two sides of the equation were not actually alike.

— Negative Dialectics, tr. Ashton, p. 80

When he says this way of speaking gets us in trouble with current logic, I’m guessing what he means is that it’s circular, effectively treating the result of the synthesis as the precondition for the synthesis. But if a logician complained, Adorno might say, “that’s just too bad”—it’s logic that is lacking.

Back to Redmond:

This matching is no more to be spoken of outside of the thinking synthesis than a rational synthesis would be without that correspondence: a textbook case of “mediation”.

The rational synthesis and the correspondence between subject and object are mutually dependent.

As a result of all this correspondence and mediation, nothing is foundational. The thought wavers:

That one wavers in the reflection, as to whether thinking would be an activity and not on the contrary, precisely in its effort, something which measures itself, refers to this. What is spontaneously thought is, inseparable from this,something which appears.

Spontaneity and receptivity are inseparable. Kant already affirmed this, but Adorno is saying something stronger, namely (a) that they are not even separate faculties, and therefore (b) Kant’s subjective priority is not justified.

The next part elaborates on the section on Materiality-at-Hand:

If Heidegger had emphasized the aspect of the appearance [Erscheinens] against its complete reduction to thought, that would be a salutary corrective on idealism. But he isolates therein the moment of the matter-at-hand [Sachverhalt], gets hold of it, in Hegel’s terminology, just as abstractly as idealism synthesized it. Hypostasized,it ceases to be a moment, and becomes in the end what ontology, in itsprotest against the division between the concept and the existent, leastof all wished to be: reified.

@Moliere explained this earlier:

I take the gist to be that despite the initial focus on materiality-at-hand, Heidegger ultimately takes it back into idealism.

It is however according to its own character genetic. The Hegelian doctrine of the objectivity of the Spirit, product of the historical process, permits something like an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual, as many idealists rediscovered, the late Rickert for example. The more insistently the consciousness feels assured of the realized objectivity of what is intellectual, instead of attributing it to the reflecting subject as a “projection”, the closer it comes to a binding physiognomy of the Spirit. Such forms become a second immediacy to a thinking which does not draw all determinations to one side and disqualify what it faces.

The Hegelian doctrine permits an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual, meaning that our relationship to our ideas is similar to our relationship with objects of perception: our ideas thence become objects of a kind of intuition, thus objective, and the idea that they are mere projections of the mind is abandoned.

Adorno agrees with this last part about projections, because ideas for him become objective features of history and society, not reducible to projections of consciousness. So the idealist is right to feel that the ideas are objective: categorial intuitions, and the idea of Being itself, have formed historically and are thereby “genetic”.

Spirit, i.e., the world of human thought, thus presents an outward face, a physiognomy (because ideas do not remain purely subjective and private) from which we can infer Spirit’s character.

Second immediacy is something like second nature, although the latter is about reified social entities rather than ideas as such. Second immediacy, unlike second nature, is not something “bad,” but just the way ideas appear to us. The forms of thought generated in the historical process of mediation come to be the apparently immediate objects confronting the thinking subject (of course, all immediacy is also mediated).

Adorno is saying that this second immediacy is something we can face and genuinely encounter, so long as we don’t focus purely on the subject.

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This chapter I find to be extremely difficulty. It required numerous readings. There is the thread of Husserl’s approach, and the thread of Heidegger”s. They are so tightly woven, and twisted together, being similar in the first place, that it’s difficult to separate them always, in Adorno’s statements. Nevertheless here’s an attempt to understand what’s oging on/ Please correct me where mistakes are apparent.

I would say here, that a synthesis is only possible when the potential for that synthesis is already there. This leads into Heidegger’s “matter-at-hand”, which I interpret as this potential for synthesis. This might be considered the content of thought, which serves as the elements necessary for the synthesis. That content, matters-at-hand, is what “appears” to be spontaneous to the thought, or the act of thinking.

I believe it is this, being prior to synthesis, as the basic matter which provides the potential for synthesis, which gives matter-at-hand its special status. But Adorno says in so doing, Heidegger hypostasizes it, and in the end it must be reified.

However, Hegel allowed for “the objectivity of the Spirit” through “an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual”. This reassures the consciousness of the objectivity of the intellectual (I interpret Adorno’s “intellectual” as similar to the traditional “intellectual object”, but with the desire to remove “object”), rather than approaching it as subjective projection. Adorno states that for a certain type of thinking, “a thinking which does not draw all determinations to one side and disqualify what it faces” these objective forms become a “second immediacy”.

I interpret this second immediacy as a false immediacy. And when Adorno says the doctrine of categorical intuition confuse first immediacy with second immediacy, I think he means that the false immediacy was taken as a true immediacy.

The issue is the difference between what comes to the thinker directly, immediately “something produced by being thought”, and what comes from external sources, training, research, etc.. Adorno seems to be saying that the second immediacy, the objective forms, are not truly immediate, as the idealists and categorical intuitionists, would have you believe. In fact to me, he goes further to imply that all ‘matters-at-hand’ which come to the thinking subject, are mediated in this way, being no less mediated than the textbook example of mediation which he gave already.

So the concept of categorical intuition is shown to not really be adequate for explaining the mind’s apprehension of universals, because it attempts to downplay this mediation. Adorno even says:

Phenomenological analysis was for a long time aware of the fact that the synthesizing consciousness has something receptive about it.

After dismissing “matter-at-hand”, as a secondary immediacy, he then turns to what I would call the true immediacy, and he names it as “insight”. How “insight” differs from “categorical intuition”, I would say, is that it is not supposed to be the thing which grasps the universal directly, as categorical intuition is. We might say that it enables the apperception. The matter-at-hand is received from an outside source, as a “specific object” and insight makes the particular general, in a way that Hegel proposed.

The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right, rather its hypostasis. The sharpest light falls on the species, when something primary emanates from a specific object: in it the tautology dissolves, which knows nothing else of the species, than how it is defined. Without the moment of immediate insight Hegel’s remark, that the particular is the general, would remain mere assertion. Phenomenology since Husserl rescued it, albeit at the cost of its complement, of the reflecting element.

So, the apperception of the universal is said to involve contradictions not easily resolved. I believe he then describes how Heidegger differs from the phenomenological school “which produced him”. The categorical intuition smuggles in immediacy through that which is mediated, to put everything immediate within the subject. Heidegger on the other hand with Matter-at-hand offers an objective unity of the multitude of subjects within society, “the collective life of the Spirit”. This takes “the intellectual” outside the subject, but forces an absolute nature on “Spirit” which for Heidegger is being.

If I understand correctly, Adorno says that this absoluteness does not escape the problems of the categorical intuition. It allows the Spirit to look at itself as if it is a sensory object, but then it suffers the same problem as the assumption of sensible things, meaning it will be criticized by the skeptic. “But this intuition is so little absolute and irrefutable as that of sensory things.”

So the categorical intuition actually contributes to how we can understand the thing itself, the particular, but does not do what it’s supposed to do, and that is to help us to understand apperception of universals. And even the understanding of the thing itslelf which it allows for us, is a false understanding, because the particular is apprehended as an “appearance” within the gaze of ideation. Therefore the rift between concept and thing is exposed.

In the final paragraph, the manifestation of this problem is described. What is supposed to be “an object”, is really a universal. Notice Husserl’s “ideal unity of the species”. We commonly think of “the species” as an object, but this assumed unity which makes it a whole, as an object is actually an ideal. So “the species” is properly understood as a universal rather than as an object, though we commonly interpret as an object.

Heidegger’s emphasis on being, which is not supposed to be any mere concept, can be supported by the indissolubility of the judgement-content in judgements as previously Husserl did to the ideal unity of the species. The positional value of such exemplary consciousnesses may indeed rise historically. The more socialized the world, the more tightly its objects are spun with general determinations, the more the particular matter-at-hand is tendentially, as Guenther Anders remarked, immediately transparent in its generality; the more can be descried by micrological immersion in it; a state of facts of nominalistic bent indeed, which is strictly opposed to the ontological intent, although it may have given rise to the apperception without this latter’s knowledge.

This has been described as a “dogmatic scientificization”, which Adorno now reveals as unscientific. It is more like a “false or overhasty generalization” which is not adequately supported by empirical evidence or good thought.

Insofar as empirical investigations concretely confront the anticipation of the concept, the medium of exemplary thought, with the fact that what is viewed out of something particular, quasi immediate, possesses no generality as something categorical, Husserl’s method just as much as Heidegger’s is convicted of its failing, that it shrinks from that test and yet flirts with it with the language of research, making it sound as if it had submitted itself to the test.

So the problem I believe, which Adorno identified is that this “second immediacy”, allows the ideas to be presented as immediate in the ontology, when they are really mediated through what you call “the historical process”. That is why I called it a false immediacy. I do believe that Adorno proposes a true immediacy though, “insight”, and this would be an immediacy which is not mediated. Notice, it really has no form, and remains as undescribed.

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Yes.

Not sure I agree with this though.

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We’ll see how it pans out in the rest of the book. But he does say “The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right”. And then, “Without the moment of immediate insight Hegel’s remark, that the particular is the general, would remain mere assertion.” And this “assertion” leads to problems which are involved with what is called the “objectivity of the Spirit”. Notice the point though, “the particular is the general” is missing something required for a full description. That third thing is “insight”.

Those problems of “objectivity of the Spirit” involve a false object, the false thing itself, derived from closing the rift between particular and universal. That is “the false or overhasty generalization” which is Heidegger’s “being”, a misuse of the “scientific ethos“.

So the conclusion of the chapter is that when the universal is derived from the particular in an empirical way, this is a “quasi immediate”. And if you refer back to the part about “insight”, you’ll see this description of that quasi immediate: “The sharpest light falls on the species, when something primary emanates from a specific object”. That is the faulty, empirical representation. The “insight” itself, which Adorno says cannot be disputed in its immediacy, is not necessarily related to the particular nor to the species.

I would say this leaves insight as sort of independent, not attributable or a property of the particular, nor attributable to the general. As the medium between the two, it is immediate to both.

If I understand you correctly, you interpret that the two, particular and general, are fundamentally united, each mediated by the other, so that nothing is immediate. That’s a significant difference, and we’ll have to see what way he proceeds. However, I would say that at this point he is diverging from Hegel who attempted to close the rift between particular and universal, because this has proven to be the unacceptable identity philosophy, which leads to “dogmatic scientificization”. And if there is a separation between the two, there must be a medium which acts to separate them.

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ND I.I., On Categorical Intuition (Part 2)

After praising the doctrine of categorial intuition, Adorno criticizes it for confusing second immediacy for first immediacy:

The doctrine of categorical intuition relied all too naively on this; it confused that second immediacy with a first.

That is, the doctrine took the historically sedimented intellectual forms—categories like identity, relation, causality—to be directly accessible by intuition (perceivable), forgetting that they were socio-historical prodcuts.

The rest of the passage is dense, but I’m not going to disentangle it in any detail in this case, because I think I get the gist: the doctrine of categorical intuition already rests on an idealism, hidden behind the “to the things themselves” descriptive phenomenology and assuming that thought has a stable, pre-given object it can receive immediately without transforming it. It’s this idealist core that Heidegger extracted and elevated into Being.

But it doesn’t seem to add anything spectacularly new to what he’s been saying for a while now.

Phenomenological analysis was for a long time aware of the fact that the synthesizing consciousness has something receptive about it. What belongs together in the judgement allows itself to be cognized in examples, not merely comparatively.

This contrasts Kant with Husserlian phenomenology. For Kant, things are brought together in judgement based on abstracting from what they share, e.g., redness from this thing and that thing. But in phenomenology this can be receptively intuited (perceived) and thus cognized in the synthesizing consciousness, for a single instance, i.e., without requiring an abstraction from multiple instances. In other words, it’s not that there’s a spontaneous faculty here and a receptive faculty over there; rather, the receptivity is always already part of the spontaneous, synthesizing faculty (for Adorno, sensibility and understanding cannot really be treated as discrete capacities).

The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right, rather its hypostasis.

@Meta_U I see what you mean now. I hadn’t even read this bit when I doubted you. But! This immediacy is a phase, a moment in a dialectical process. He’s still a thinker of radical mediation, i.e., in Hegelian fashion, all immediacy is mediated. Settling for the immediacy would be to hypostatize it. Or put another way, we do experience things immediately, and that’s not to be doubted. Just don’t absolutize this immediacy or treat it as a foundation.

And I take the point to be that this hypostatization is basically what Heidegger did with his concept of Being. Or maybe it’s a continuum of hypostatization from categorial intuition (Husserl) to Being (Heidegger).

The sharpest light falls on the species, when something primary emanates from a specific object: in it the tautology dissolves, which knows nothing else of the species, than how it is defined.

Without the actual individual things, all you have is an abstract and tautological relation between concept and definition. That is, in Kant’s terms it’s analytic and explicative knowledge, not synthetic and ampliative. We need “something primary” from the thing itself to shine the sharpest light on the species concept.

Without the moment of immediate insight Hegel’s remark, that the particular is the general, would remain mere assertion. Phenomenology since Husserl rescued it, albeit at the cost of its complement, of the reflecting element.

This takes the same thought into the Hegelian dialectic. It’s all very well seeing the particular in the general (or universal) and vice versa, but unless you see it for real, as in see for yourself that the particular is the general, it’s too abstract to have any purchase, and remains “mere assertion”.

Its apperception however – the later Heidegger shied away from the slogan of the school, which produced him – involves contradictions which are not to be resolved for the sake of peace and quiet from the nominalistic or the realistic side. On the one hand, ideation has an elective affinity to ideology, the smuggling of immediacy through that which is mediated, which clothed it with the authority of the absolute, evident being-in-itself, unimpeachable by the subject.

This is describing, once again, Heidegger’s act of taking something mediated as immediate, and presenting it as an absolute, beyond reproach (and beyond criticism).

On the other hand the apperception names the physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand. It legitimates the fact that the intellectual is not constituted by means of the cognizing consciousness directed at this, but is objectively grounded in itself, far beyond the individual prime mover, in the collective life of the Spirit and according to its immanent laws.

The “physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand” goes back to what he was saying a few paragraphs previously:

The more insistently the consciousness feels assured of the realized objectivity of what is intellectual, instead of attributing it to the reflecting subject as a “projection”, the closer it comes to a binding physiognomy of the Spirit.

Ideas that come to form the second immediacy present a physiognomy, i.e., a face that can be read to reveal their underlying character.

But I’m not sure why he is bringing up apperception: does he mean the awareness of one’s own awareness—which is close to the Kantian concept—or does he just mean to refer to the total act of synthesis and the consciousness accompanying it? Does it matter?

Anyway, this is the “on the other hand”. On the one hand there was the ideology of Being, but this is about the right way to view and to think about ideas, reading their content from their physiognomies.

In a nutshell, I think Adorno is saying that ideas are not just projections of the subject but confront the subject as objectively grounded—and in fact are objectively grounded, “in the collective life of the Spirit and according to its immanent laws”. In other words, belonging to culture and society, not just to the individual subject.

And I haven’t even finished this section. It’s quite tough.

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I think I still have disagreement on this point. I’m starting to think that Adorno proposes radical mediation as you say, but I think this is a divergence from Hegel.

Hegel allows “pure insight”. In “The Phenomenology of Mind” there’s a section entitled “Belief and Pure Insight”. I read through the section but its extremely difficult. Consciousness as an undivided unity is nevertheless twofold. The distinction is between belief and insight. Belief has content while insight is pure and free of content.

Pure insight has, therefore, in the first instance, no content within it, because it exists for itself by negating everything in it; to belief, on the other hand, belongs the content, but without insight. While the former does not get away from self-consciousness, the latter to be sure has its content as well in the element of pure self-consciousness, but only in thought, not in conceptions — in pure consciousness, not in pure self-consciousness.

So insight is very difficult because it is consciousness without content, therefore no belief or thought. It becomes a simple self-consciousness.

In the case of pure insight, on the other hand, the passage of pure thought into consciousness has the opposite character: objectivity has the significance of a content that is merely negative, that cancels itself and returns into the self ; that is to say, only the self is properly object to self, or, to put it otherwise, the object only has truth so far as it has the form of self.

We have already seen what pure insight by itself is. Belief is unperturbed pure consciousness of spirit as the essentially real; pure insight is the self-consciousness of spirit as the essentially real; it knows the essentially real, therefore, not qua essence but qua Absolute Self.

Pure insight, therefore, is the simple ultimate being undifferentiated within itself, and at the same time the universal achievement and result and a universal possession of all. In this simple spiritual substance self-consciousness gives itself and maintains for itself in every object the sense of this its own individual being or of action, just as conversely the individuality of self-consciousness is there identical with itself and universal.

The last quote is the conclusion and it’s where Adorno derives “Hegel’s remark, that the particular is the general”.

But this is what Adorno is rejecting. It is the position taken up by Husserl and Heidegger, but Adorno goes on to explain its faults. It turns the self into a thing itself, and this produces the “dogmatic scientificization” which is the categorical intuition, the appearance of an intellectually given, as apperception. This manifests as the faulty whole, “the ideal unity of the species”, which is a “false or overhasty generalization”.

So the awareness of one’s own awareness is most likely Hegel’s “pure insight”, self-consciousness. It is the grounding for “Spirit”, as spirit appears to each individual, apperception. But Adorno is dismissing it, as a quasi immediacy. Here’s Hegel again:

“This pure insight is, then, the spirit that calls to every consciousness: be for yourselves what you are all essentially in yourselves — rational.”

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I think it’s pretty clear at the beginning of the next section:

every immediacy … is a moment, not the entirety of the cognition

— BEING THESEI

But I think the key to the whole section is what you’re getting at here:

I’m not sure if you’re right about what he’s rejecting—it looks like you’ve put too much on the “rejected” side. I’ll try and explain…

The section revolves around a distinction between two different kinds of categorical intuition, or two different ways it can be used: (a) hypostatized, like Heidegger; and (b) physiognomic-critical, like Adorno (Husserl being somewhere in between).

Apperception describes the taking up into consciousness of the immediate insight of categorial intuition, to produce a reflective cognitive stance. Thus, it’s how you use it. So it’s specifically within the apperception of categorial intuition that the distinction lies, i.e., between two ways of using (or conceptualizing) the immediate insight of categorial intuition.

And these two ways are contradictory:

Its apperception however – the later Heidegger shied away from the slogan of the school, which produced him – involves contradictions which are not to be resolved for the sake of peace and quiet from the nominalistic or the realistic side.

On the one hand, ideation has an elective affinity to ideology, the smuggling of immediacy through that which is mediated, which clothed it with the authority of the absolute, evident being-in-itself, unimpeachable by the subject.

Ideation, the direct intuition of the eidos, is not bad in itself, but it has a temptation to turn into ideology, because it is tempted to turn what it “sees” immediately into an absolute, a foundation, thus forgetting the mediation of the very practice/process of ideation. So we have a hypostatization, turning second immediacy into first.

But Adorno is careful not to condemn categorial intuition entirely. It can go a better way, because:

The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right, rather its hypostasis.

And in describing the good side of the apperception, he waxes lyrical about the power of categorial intuition done right:

On the other hand the apperception names the physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand. It legitimates the fact that the intellectual is not constituted by means of the cognizing consciousness directed at this, but is objectively grounded in itself, far beyond the individual prime mover, in the collective life of the Spirit and according to its immanent laws.

When categorial intuition is seen as fallible, not a self-evident axiom or eternally immediate, then:

What however the categorical intuition, fallibly enough, contributes to, would be the comprehension of the thing itself, not its classificatory preparation.

For Adorno, that’s a good thing. It’s part of the proper orientation towards particulars, that can allow the non-identical to show itself.

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ND I.I., On Categorical Intuition (Part 3)

I said in my last post that for Adorno, Husserl is an ambiguous figure, not wholly bad like Heidegger. At this point in the section, Adorno criticizes him:

Husserl has no qualms ascribing that which flashes from the physiognomy, like the a priori Kantian synthetic judgement, to necessity and universality, as in science.

It’s not just a matter of degrees, with bad Heidegger on one end and good Adorno on the other. Husserl has his own special way of going wrong. He does his own kind of hypostatization of the immediate insight: he tries to turn it into a foundation for science, seeing it as universal and necessary, as he believes scientific knowledge ought to be. This kind of apperception of the immediate insight can lead to “dogmatic scientificization”.

So whereas Heidegger finds the ground of ontology, Husserl finds the ground of science. One ignores or rejects science, the other claims too much for it.

Next, Adorno turns to look at the historical process that led to all this:

Heidegger’s emphasis on being, which is not supposed to be any mere concept, can be supported by the indissolubility of the judgement-content in judgements as previously Husserl did to the ideal unity of the species. The positional value of such exemplary consciousnesses may indeed rise historically.

The first sentence here looks like a bad translation. Heidegger’s X can be supported by Y as Husserl did to Z. This is badly formed.

Ashton’s version:

Heidegger’s stress on Being, which is not to be a mere concept, can be based upon the indissoluble content in judgments, as Husserl previously based himself on the ideal unity of the species.

Much better. But it’s still obscure, so Adorno gets the ultimate blame.

  • Heidegger’s being → based on → the indissoluble content in judgments

  • Husserl (Husserl’s what?) → based on → the ideal unity of the species

But maybe Ashton sacrificed accuracy for readability; Redmond’s can be read entirely differently.

But I’m not going to dwell on it. I’ll go with reading Adorno as saying that the indissoluble content in judgments and the ideal unity of the species play a similar justificatory role in Heidegger and Husserl, respectively. And…

The positional value of such exemplary consciousnesses may indeed rise historically.

This is the pivot to into the socio-historical account. The “exemplary consciousnesses” are those acts of apperception, one by Heidegger and one by Husserl. “Exemplary” I think ties the apperception back to the basics of a categorial intuition, namely that you see the universal through the particular, i.e., the example.

But the point is that these alternative cognitive stances to the immediate intuition of the categorial, i.e, the universal, relation, etc.,—these arise hisotrically, i.e., they’re already thoroughly mediated when immediate insight happens.

The more socialized the world …

“More socialized” parallels a distinction I was making in the “Scrolling Past the Dead” discussion, between social and societal: the social is just about the natural living together of human beings, and the societal is, loosely speaking, about the institutions of civilization. Adorno’s “socialized” points to the societal, not the social. So the more institutions, rules, classes, etc., there are, and the more everything is drawn into this societal network, the more “socialized” the world is.

The more socialized the world the more tightly its objects are spun with general determinations, the more the particular matter-at-hand is tendentially, as Guenther Anders remarked, immediately transparent in its generality; the more can be descried by micrological immersion in it; a state of facts of nominalistic bent indeed, which is strictly opposed to the ontological intent, although it may have given rise to the apperception without this latter’s knowledge.

The more socialized the world is, “the more tightly its objects are spun with general determinations” because it is organized by classicatory concepts, e.g., a person arriving in a country might be a …

  • passport-holder
  • citizen
  • tourist
  • immigrant
  • record in a database of potential threats

And it’s not just that these are ways of classifying a pure independent person; it’s that these determine what the person is. There is no possibility, in society, of finding a pure person underneath. Everything is mediated.

And the more this is the case, the more the particular appears immediately as the general, e.g., the more the person is reduced to “immigrant”—and the more this takes on the character of a universal generality.

But at the same time…

the more can be descried by micrological immersion in it;

This micrological immersion is a way, not of doing away with the universals entirely, but of seeing the right universals, in a situation where things are reduced to universals falsely.

a state of facts of nominalistic bent indeed, which is strictly opposed to the ontological intent, although it may have given rise to the apperception without this latter’s knowledge.

So when we see through the immediate categories, we see that the socialized world is held together with universals that we invented. They are contingent, so they fit with the nominalism of universals, not with Platonic realism. And this may have given rise to the apperception of Heidegger and Husserl, that which presents itself as most fundamental.

The experience that both phenomenology and ontology take as evidence for their transcendental and ontological claims, is actually caused by the nominalistic condition of the world—but phenomenology and ontology are not aware of this.

If however this procedure always and again exposes itself to the particular scientific objection, to the in the meantime long since automatized reproach of the false or overhasty generalization, then this is not only the fault of the thought-habits which have long misused their scientific ethos to modestly ordain the matter-at-hand from outside, as the rationalization that they are no longer in this, or do not understand them.

Categorial intuition is vulnerable to empirical objections not just because scientists are narrow-minded positivists who don’t understand it.

Insofar as empirical investigations concretely confront the anticipation of the concept, the medium of exemplary thought, with the fact that what is viewed out of something particular, quasi immediate, possesses no generality as something categorical, Husserl’s method just as much as Heidegger’s is convicted of its failing, that it shrinks from that test and yet flirts with it with the language of research, making it sound as if it had submitted itself to the test.

To the extent that empirical investigation actually tests the immediate intuition of the universal and finds that the particular doesn’t permit you to assign necessity, universality, and self-evident uttermost basicness—to this extent Husserl and Heidegger have failed the empirical test, while making it sound like they had passed it (in their own ways).

Made it! Maybe I went too micrological for this section. Or maybe it really was more difficult.