Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

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.

I don’t think Adorno is pointing to anything good here. On the one hand is Heidegger’s approach, and on the other is Husserl’s. In the end, they are both convicted of failing.

Perhaps you might say that it is good because it reveals itself as bad. Inasmuch as the bad reveals itself as being bad, and that is a good thing that it has done that, this “objectivity of the Spirit” reveals itself as being bad, and that is a good thing, because it reveals an improper orientation towards particulars. This exposes the rift between concept and thing, by exposing the faults with the identity relation. But the non-identical doesn’t really show itself, more like identity shows itself to be false, necessitating non-identity.

[Jamal]

@Meta_U

I don’t think Adorno is pointing to anything good here. On the one hand is Heidegger’s approach, and on the other is Husserl’s. In the end, they are both convicted of failing.

If you read my post again you’ll see I’m setting out Adorno’s contrast between the hypostatizing and the non-hypostatizing ways of using immediate insight. Heidegger and to some extent Husserl are guilty of the former, but the the latter is how it ought to be used, and the way Adorno wants to use it: as a self-aware moment in a dialectic.

@Meta_U

Perhaps you might say that it is good because it reveals itself as bad. Inasmuch as the bad reveals itself as being bad, and that is a good thing that it has done that, this “objectivity of the Spirit” reveals itself as being bad, and that is a good thing, because it reveals an improper orientation towards particulars. This exposes the rift between concept and thing, by exposing the faults with the identity relation. But the non-identical doesn’t really show itself, more like identity shows itself to be false, necessitating non-identity.

The non-identical showing itself is identity showing itself to be false (but repeatedly and cumulatively). So the dialectic I mentioned above is negative.

So I think you are quite close, but it’s incorrect to say that the orientation is improper. The orientation to the things themselves, and seeing the general in the particular, is not improper—it’s exactly how we can see how concepts fail:

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.

I think this is unambiguous. The problem is how this is taken up:

Phenomenology since Husserl rescued it, albeit at the cost of its complement, of the reflecting element.

The critical self-awareness that shows the immediate insight to be a moment in a dialectic and not the be-all-end-all, was lost by Husserl in the hypostatization of the immediate insight.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

If you read my post again you’ll see I’m setting out Adorno’s contrast between the hypostatizing and the non-hypostatizing ways of using immediate insight. Heidegger and to some extent Husserl are guilty of the former, but the the latter is how it ought to be used, and the way Adorno wants to use it: as a self-aware moment in a dialectic.

As we both agree, the chapter is very difficult, but I’m having trouble seeing it this way. I’ll try another reading, I’m up to somewhere around 10 for the most part, I’d say.

Here’s the issue I think, in a nutshell. With negative dialectics, can there really be a way that a concept like “immediate insight” ought to be used? If we accept the concept as something to be used we are hypostatizing. That’s what happens when “insight” is converted to “categorical intuition”, and to “being” for Heidegger. As soon as you accept something as a fundamental concept, to be used toward an end, you are system building, rather than critiqing.

So I don’t think Adorno wants to use “immediate insight”, or “categorical intuition” at all, though he may believe that “immediate insight” points to something real. He wants to criticize these, and move on, having shown that they are unacceptable.

He starts the chapter by talking about the correspondence which is essential to synthesis in general. This correspondence is an example of mediation. But the idealist move, and Heidegger’s as well, is to employ the categorical intuitive to portray the corresponding thing as within the intellect. This hypostatizes the object of thought, instead of leaving it as a moment of correspondence. That move is said to be permitted by Hegel’s objectivity of Spirit, which leads toward a physiognomy of the Spirit and a secondary immediacy.

Next, “Husserl’s demand” was that an object which enters thinking in reflection, could be the same object as in the original thought. Reflection would be portrayed a sort of repetition of the same intellectual object, or “matter-at-hand”, ignoring that it is truly different each time it is thought up. This dogmatizes “matters-at-hand”, providing that an intellectual object, or an object thought, could be independent from the thinking which produces it. Idealism becomes ontology, but this ontology collapses phenomenology because it “does not bear the stigma of the reflecting intelligence”. Phenomenology was somewhat aware of this problem.

@Jamal

I think this is unambiguous. The problem is how this is taken up:

That paragraph, about the “immediacy of insight”, you say is “unambiguous”. However, I find it to be the most difficult of the chapter. because the word “insight” is used but is not explained. That’s why I turned to Hegel above, to get his description of “pure insight”.

In this paragraph, phenomenological analysis is said to be somewhat aware of the problem of reflection, described above. They knew the synthesizing consciousness also must have something receptive added in. This “something receptive” is exemplified as examples. The insight itself appears to be the means by which the example is apprehended as an example, and this allows us to escape the inherently circular tautology of definition. That is “the moment of immediate insight”, which phenomenology since Husserl rescued, by sacrificing the reflective feature described above.

However, the apperception of “immediate insight” involves contradiction. So Heidegger avoids apperception, he turns to “ideation” and its dogmatized ideology. But that smuggles immediacy through the mediated, in the form of absolute being.

On the other hand, apperception “names the physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand”. This is very problematic, sort of self-contradictory. It says that the intellectual may be judged by its physical appearance. And this is why “apperception” involves contradictions. Also “physiognomic”, already has connotations which imply that this judgement is known as a false judgement anyway. So apperception grounds the intellectual in something beyond the individual subject, “the collective life of the Spirit”, but this is inherently a self-contradicting grounding.

This ”objectivity of the Spirit”, casts the Spirit as a sensory thing with a physical appearance. But this produces all the problems of “sensory things”. And portraying Spirit as a sensible thing would only help in comprehending the nature of sensible things, not the categorical intuition. And, since Spirit is not a sensible thing it is a false help anyway. It’s a different form of dogmatism, a “dogmatic scientificization”.

So I conclude that Adorno is demonstrating that neither the Heideggerian, nor the way of Husserl is the way that we ought to understand “immediate insight”. Husserl’s way, “apperception” is inherently contradictory, and Heidegger’s way, which avoids the contradiction of apperception, hypostatizes just like idealism. At the end, Adorno even says “Husserl’s method just as much as Heidegger’s is convicted of its failing”.

[Jamal]

Since your reading strenuously refuses to give mine an inch, I’m not sure what to say, other than … maybe consider my interpretation again? I struggled with the section but now think it’s quite simple, as is often the case with this book.

But I’ll pick up on this:

@Meta_U

That paragraph, about the “immediacy of insight”, you say is “unambiguous”. However, I find it to be the most difficult of the chapter. because the word “insight” is used but is not explained. That’s why I turned to Hegel above, to get his description of “pure insight”.

Here’s the first part of the paragraph, where the insight first makes an appearance:

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

The insight is the immediate apprehension in which the particular and the universal belong together in the judgement. This is what Husserl calls categorial intuition. The spontaneous and receptive are bound together in this insight, such that you don’t, as Kant believed, infer that the particular falls under the universal by comparing multiple instances of intuition, nor do you apply the categories via a separate non-intuitive faculty—you just see it directly.

And Adorno agrees that this happens and explicitly says it’s not to be disputed (he is pretty clear in his lectures on Kant that like Husserl he opposes the dualism of sensibility and understanding). The problem is in what kind of apperception happens next, i.e., how the insight is taken up in consciousness, which is an act of hypostatization in Husserl and especially in Heidegger: treating that moment of seeing as self-grounding, as if it could stand on its own without mediation, that it really was immediate in an absolute sense.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

Since your reading strenuously refuses to give mine an inch, I’m not sure what to say, other than … maybe consider my interpretation again?

The reason why I am not giving you an inch is because I referred to Hegel’s description of “pure insight” which I quoted from above, and I see that Adorno is rejecting this. Pure insight is the means by which the self apprehends itself as an object. As such, the immediacy of insight cannot be denied. What I am saying is that the concept of “insight” is being denied.

The following is from Hegel:

@Meta_U

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.

@Meta_U

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.

Notice the last sentence, individuality becomes identical with the universal. So as much as the immediacy of “pure insight” cannot be denied, because it is posited as immediate, and it supports Hegel’s claim that “the particular is the general”, I think Adorno argues that it is nevertheless a faulty principle.

It is faulty because it produces “physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand”. The self apprehends itself as a sensory object. Therefore, contrary to Hegel’s intent, “pure insight” does the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do:

As the experience of that which has come to be in what presumably merely is, it would be almost the exact opposite of what it is used for: not the trusting acceptance of being, but its critique; the consciousness not of the identity of the thing with its concept, but of the rift between both.

@Jamal

The insight is the immediate apprehension in which the particular and the universal belong together in the judgement. This is what Husserl calls categorial intuition. The spontaneous and receptive are bound together in this insight, such that you don’t, as Kant believed, infer that the particular falls under the universal by comparing multiple instances of intuition, nor do you apply the categories via a separate non-intuitive faculty—you just see it directly.

Consider what you are saying here. The spontaneous and the receptive are bound together in insight, So we have three things here, three subjects, the spontaneous, the receptive, and the insight. The insight is said to be immediate, and it is supposed to be what binds the other two as mediated. What I think that Adorno is saying is that this is a mistake. It is the route that Husserl and phenomenologists took, but it leads to the problems described at the end of the chapter, referred to as “dogmatic scientificization”.

@Jamal

The problem is in what kind of apperception happens next, i.e., how the insight is taken up in consciousness, which is an act of hypostatization in Husserl and especially in Heidegger: treating that moment of seeing as self-grounding, as if it could stand on its own without mediation, that it really was immediate in an absolute sense.

Doesn’t this indicate to you that “insight” is a faulty concept? Any way that it is taken, it leads to problems.

[Jamal]

Reaching for Hegel to get clarity is never going to work. It’s better to look at what Adorno says himself. Hegel is mostly just noise at this stage.

@Meta_U

It is faulty because it produces “physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand”. The self apprehends itself as a sensory object. Therefore, contrary to Hegel’s intent, “pure insight” does the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do:

It’s not about the self apprehending itself. Step away from the Phenomenology now.

The physiognomic gaze is not bad in itself. The physiognomic gaze allows the thing to show itself—but Husserl took it as the necessary and universal ground of science:

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.

But the original immediate insight, that of categorial intuition, can contribute to the comprehension of the thing itself, not merely to the absorption of the thing into a system. This immediately follows the sentence above:

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

The orientation of classificatory preparation prepares the thing for the next step (systematization, argument—some sort of use), whereas the comprehension of the thing itself is an orientation to the thing as an end in itself.

Plainly, for Adorno, the comprehension of the thing itself is the good orientation and the classificatory preparation of the thing is the bad one.

@Meta_U

Therefore, contrary to Hegel’s intent, “pure insight” does the exact opposite of what it was supposed to do:

As the experience of that which has come to be in what presumably merely is, it would be almost the exact opposite of what it is used for: not the trusting acceptance of being, but its critique; the consciousness not of the identity of the thing with its concept, but of the rift between both.

Here Adorno contrasts (a) what Heidegger has done with the immediate insight, with (b) an orientation to it in which “the mediation stirs” in what was taken by (a) to be absolutely immediate (being). This (b) results in an experience “of that which has come to be in what presumably merely is,” i.e, a consciousness of the thing’s mediation. And the consciousness of the rift between thing and concept is what negative dialectics is aiming for—this is what it is to comprehend the thing.

So, to comprehend being, or Husserl’s essences, is to see them as second immediacies—congealments of historical mediations—not as self-evident primitives or foundations, i.e. first immediacies.

@Meta_U

Doesn’t this indicate to you that “insight” is a faulty concept? Any way that it is taken, it leads to problems.

Not if it’s taken critically, as a moment in a dialectic. EDIT: Or, in negative dialectical fashion, we might say that the problems are exactly what we’re looking for.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

It’s not about the self apprehending itself.

You are skipping a part of the chapter then, the part where Adorno talks about “reflection”.

Without hesitation it is maintained that thinking, inalienable activity, could have an object at large which is not at the same time something produced by being thought.

And, the “physiognomic gaze” is justified by this reflection:

That objectivity of the Spirit is adequate to the moment of the immediate gaze. As something already preformed in itself, it can look at itself just like at sensory things.

This is where the problem lies, which produces the need for something “receptive”. The thinking cannot be an object in itself because it requires that external input. This demonstrates the faultiness of Hegel’s “pure insight” which is the base for “categorical intuition”.

According to Adorno, phenomenological analysis was aware of this problem. Notice the type of judgement, to see the category “in the examples”, “not merely comparatively”. He is arguing that this is a faulty approach, and concludes the paragraph with:

Phenomenology since Husserl rescued it, albeit at the cost of its complement, of the reflecting element.

Notice, that to rescue it required sacrificing the primary premise provided from Hegel, “reflection”. But this only produced the “contradictions” which he goes on to talk about in the next paragraph.

@Jamal

The physiognomic gaze allows the thing to show itself

This way that the thing is supposed to show itself, is a misconception, based in Hegel’s “pure insight”. The thing does not really show itself as a universal, that is the mistake of categorical intuition, and identity thinking, whereby the thing is within the universal. The way Adorno has already described the particular, it extends beyond the universal.

@Jamal

The orientation of classificatory preparation prepares the thing for the next step (systematization, argument—some sort of use), whereas the comprehension of the thing itself is an orientation to the thing as an end in itself.

The orientation of classificatory preparation is what happens in the scientific dogmatics, and that is based in the described misconception of “the thing”, based in the self-reflection of pure insight.

However, Adorno does not provide “an orientation to the thing as an end in itself”, nor does he really say, in this chapter, that this is what is needed. He is criticizing the gaze at the thing, through insight, or categorical intuition, which identifies the thing as being a type, rather than as being a particular, as a faulty approach.

@Jamal

Plainly, for Adorno, the comprehension of the thing itself is the good orientation and the classificatory preparation of the thing is the bad one.

I think this is jumping to a conclusion. Surely there is much Kantian influence in Adorno, and Kant implies that we cannot have a “comprehension of the thing itself”. Perhaps, if he thought it was possible, a comprehension of the thing itself would be a good orientation, but if he doesn’t believe it’s possible then to think that you have such an orientation, or even that you should aim toward one, would always be a misunderstanding. I think this is why you describe his philosophy as radical mediation (I can’t remember the exact terms you used). If there is no direct comprehension of the thing itself, then all is mediated. And therefore we should not adopt as a goal, an understanding of the thing itself.

@Jamal

This (b) results in an experience “of that which has come to be in what presumably merely is,” i.e, a consciousness of the thing’s mediation. And the consciousness of the rift between thing and concept is what negative dialectics is aiming for—this is what it is to comprehend the thing.

I see this as inconsistency in what you are saying now. You argue above, that the “comprehension of the thing itself” is a good orientation, but at the same time now, we need to be conscious of the thing’s mediation. How would it be possible for one to believe oneself to have a an orientation toward the comprehension of the thing itself, while still being conscious of that mediation?

So if negative dialectics is aimed toward understanding the rift between the two, and “the concept” is the means of understanding the thing, then we cannot comprehend the thing due to the rift. We can only comprehend the rift, as what is immediate to the consciousness, and our only approach to the thing itself.

@Jamal

Not if it’s taken critically, as a moment in a dialectic. EDIT: Or, in negative dialectical fashion, we might say that the problems are exactly what we’re looking for.

I’m agreeing with the last part of this post, but I think it is inconsistent with the earlier. If negative dialectics is aimed at understanding the problems, then it is not aimed at understanding the thing itself. So we cannot say: “ the comprehension of the thing itself is the good orientation”. That is not the negative dialectics orientation, because negative dialectics leads us toward the problems in trying to understand the thing, the rift. And understanding the problems with trying to understand the thing is distinctly different from understanding the thing. Further, if it turns out that it is impossible for us to understand the thing itself due to the rift, or radical mediation, then trying to understand the thing is conclusively the wrong approach.

[Jamal]

@Meta_U

You are skipping a part of the chapter then, the part where Adorno talks about “reflection”.

Thinking about thinking, or thinking about concepts as they present their faces to you from out of “the collective life of the Spirit,” (like spiritual-intellectual-cultural objects)—this is not the self apprehending itself.

Reflection is what shows

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.

---

@Meta_U

Kant implies that we cannot have a “comprehension of the thing itself”

The thing itself is not the thing in itself. Die Sache selbst ≠ Das Ding an sich.

@Meta_U

I’m agreeing with the last part of this post, but I think it is inconsistent with the earlier. If negative dialectics is aimed at understanding the problems, then it is not aimed at understanding the thing itself. So we cannot say: “ the comprehension of the thing itself is the good orientation”. That is not the negative dialectics orientation, because negative dialectics leads us toward the problems in trying to understand the thing, the rift. And understanding the problems with trying to understand the thing is distinctly different from understanding the thing. Further, if it turns out that it is impossible for us to understand the thing itself due to the rift, or radical mediation, then trying to understand the thing is conclusively the wrong approach.

Now you’re just flatly contradicting me. It’s a fact, stated by Adorno many times in various ways, that negative dialectics aims at comprehending particulars by successively experiencing the rift between them and the concepts you apply to them, i.e, by paying attention to the failure of concepts.

Anyway, I’ve enjoyed this exchange, but I’ll move on to the next section now.

[Jamal]

ND I.I., Being Thesei

Link to online text

This is a fun one. First I’ll quote myself from an earlier post in this group, when we were at the “Qualitative Moment of Rationality” section of the introduction:

The physei/thesei distinction in Plato seems to be primarily about language, but Adorno is using it in a wider sense to connote modes of reason.

• Thesei (by convention): a mode of reason that imposes its theses on things
• Physei (by nature): a mode of reason which is open to that which is objective and other than thought (this is where the snuggling comes in)

Adorno claims that Plato is careful not to bypass or dismiss the physei, because he keeps the two in balance. One must divide up nature, but not however one likes, i.e., not the way necessitated by the system one happens to be committed to already (i.e., “arbitrarily”), but rather follow the joints (“snuggle up to the nature of things”).

— Archive post

So before we even read the section we might already suspect from the title, i.e, “Being according to convention” (with a bonus connotation of “Being as a thesis”), that Adorno is turning from the critique of Husserl and Heidegger to a more pointed critique of Heidegger alone. Maybe he will accuse him of deriving his concept by convention or according to a posit rather than, as claimed, intuiting something primordial and pre-reflective. And this would put more meat on the bones of Adorno’s ascription of idealism to Heidegger, since what he was saying earlier is that thesei was the paradigm of a top-down rationalism, characteristic of idealism.

So let’s see…

Heidegger’s claim that being is pre-conceptual

suppresses the fact that every immediacy … is a moment, not the entirety of the cognition.

Every immediacy is a second immediacy.

If cognition is an interweaving of the synthetic thought-function and what it synthesizes, neither of them independent from the other, then no immediate mindfulness, which Heidegger stipulated as the sole legal writ of a philosophy worthy of the name, can succeed either, unless by virtue of the spontaneity of the thought, which he spurned.

In the Kantian scheme, the spontaneity of thought refers to the faculty of understanding. Heidegger rejected the understanding’s role in the comprehension of being, claiming this comprehension was pre-intellectual.

But this cannot succeed, because the thing and the synthesizing function are interwoven; you can’t cleanly separate a receptiveness to being from the synthesizing activity of the understanding.

This of course rests on Adorno’s assumption, which he inherits from Hegel and never really argues for himself (except maybe in his lectures on Kant’s first Critique, if I recall correctly), that the two faculties are interwoven such that they are not really separable faculties at all. And to be quite honest, this assumption seems so reasonable and obvious a correction to Kant’s systematizing frenzy that I’m not inclined to push back against it.

If no reflection had content without something immediate, then it would pause noncommittally [unverbindlich] and arbitrarily without reflection, without the thinking, distinguishing determination of what the presumably purely demonstrative being meant to a passive, not-thinking thought.

I wasted time trying to untangle this before I turned to Ashton:

If there were no substantial reflection without immediacy, the immediacy would linger noncommittally and arbitrarily without reflection—without the thinking, distinguishing definition of what is meant by the Being that is alleged to show purely to a passive, nonthinking thought.

Much better. In my words: I grant that reflection always has something immediate in it, but the immediate needs reflection, i.e, the determinations of thought, if being is not to be just arbitrary and meaningless.

What follows? That being isn’t pre-conceptual after all. Heidegger’s aletheia, unconcealment or pure disclosure, is a fiction. Pure disclosure isn’t pure.

The artificial sound of pronunciamenti [Italian: pronouncements], that it deconceals itself or alights [lichte], is due to the fictional character of what is asserted. If the thinking determination and fulfillment of the presumed Ur-word, its critical confrontation with what it aims for, is not possible, then this indicts all talk of being. It is not thought, because in the indeterminacy which it demands it is simply unthinkable.

Heidegger’s pronouncements about being, using his novel terminology, sounds artificial precisely because what he’s saying and what he’s talking about is an artifice. And if you cannot in fact determine H’s being in thought, that’s not because it’s more profound than thought, but just because it’s meaningless.

Next, finally the gloves come off:

That however the philosophy of being turns unachievability into unassailability, the exemption from the rational process into transcendence in regards to the reflecting understanding, is an act of violence as clever as it is desperate.

And the paragraph goes on in that manner—very enjoyably.

At this point Adorno starts describing Heidegger as one of the attempted “breakouts”, which is the term he used in the lectures to describe Bergson and Husserl and their attempts to reach the non-conceptual. Now we see that Heidegger has failed as well, but much worse: he finds his non-conceptual being and declares success, while pre-emptively sealing himself off from questions.

Recalling the title, the through line of this section is, as predicted, that Heidegger presents thesei as physei, i.e., presents a fabrication of human thinking (a posit or thesis) and an inheritance of sedimented social practice (convention) as something natural or primordial.

The last paragraph in the secition distinguishes between philosophies that recognize the irrational while remaining rational themselves—like negative dialectics, which takes cognizance of the non-conceptual and the somatic (“The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth”)—and Heidegger, who goes full irrationalism.

Turning to Ashton for the last line:

Today as in Kant’s time, philosophy demands a rational critique of reason, not its banishment or abolition.

[Meta_U]

Jamal, I see this little disagreement as the continued manifestation of our difference in starting points, perspective. This is the fundamental problem we’ve had in understanding each other, from the very beginning. You come from a tradition of assigning objectivity to the collective, society, while my tradition is to question the validity of that supposed objectivity. So from the beginning you treated “society” as referring to an object, I’d say you took this for granted. I saw a bunch of individuals without the required principle of unity to treat it as an object, so I continually seek justification.

You appear frustrated, but I hope you’ll read my reply below. It will help you to understand that due to a difference in our base level understanding of things, we cannot follow one or the other.

@Jamal

Reflection is what shows

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.

Right, reflection shows the intellectual as objectively grounded in itself. This is the idealist principle stemming in it’s modern form from Descartes’ “I think therefore I am”, as produced from Aristotle’s ethical principle of thinking on thinking. It is then re-presented as Hegel’s pure insight. So at the base, thinking grounds existence, and things thought, by the individual (ideas, the intellectual) are given objective existence.

In religion this is extended, to hand existence to external sensible things through the thinking of God, as described by Berkeley. In phenomenology, the existence of other individuals is provided for by the concept of “Spirit”, which objectifies the collective. This is derived from Hegel’s representation of the state as being based in the Idea. The existence of the collective (as Idea) precedes the material collective (State). The Idea is modified to Spirit, and this supports as foundational principle, the objectivity of the collective. But this becomes problematic when we look at inanimate things which don’t partake in Spirit. Without some sort of panpsychism we have no grounding for the reality of those things.

Notice the beginning of the next paragraph:

That objectivity of the Spirit is adequate to the moment of the immediate gaze. As something already preformed in itself, it can look at itself just like at sensory things. But this intuition is so little absolute and irrefutable as that of sensory things.

The issue is, that when Descartes grounded being in thinking, “existing” was not as a sensory thing, but a thinking. So the reality of sensory things remained elusive. But the “objectivity of Spirit” as a collective validates the others which appear to me as sensory things. I’d call it a pseudo-justification. It validates others as thinkings, but they really appear to me as sense things, as their thinking appears to me through sense communication, and sense things are not properly validated. Therefore there is mediation with “Spirit” itself.

So this is the falsity of the categorical intuition, and how it provides foundation for dogmatic scientism which supports faulty generalizations. The “species” is a collection of individuals. That an idea, “spirit” or whatever could contain the entirety of the collection is a false assumption. In spelling out the definition, the generalization will always fall short. The particular cannot be adequately captured by the general. And this problem pervades science through set theory and systems theory. So in phenomenology, this sort of idea, “Spirit”, or “Being”, is always left very vague, undefined, to create the appearance that the idea does what it cannot do.

@Jamal

It’s a fact, stated by Adorno many times in various ways, that negative dialectics aims at comprehending particulars by successively experiencing the rift between them and the concepts you apply to them, i.e, by paying attention to the failure of concepts.

Well, I haven’t seen that exact statement yet, but maybe it will come up.

[Jamal]

@Meta_U

Jamal, I see this little disagreement as the continued manifestation of our difference in starting points, perspective. This is the fundamental problem we’ve had in understanding each other, from the very beginning. You come from a tradition of assigning objectivity to the collective, society, while my tradition is to question the validity of that supposed objectivity. So from the beginning you treated “society” as referring to an object, I’d say you took this for granted. I saw a bunch of individuals without the required principle of unity to treat it as an object, so I continually seek justification.

Well, fair enough, although we’re just trying to understand Adorno, and if Adorno assumes it, we have to too, while we’re in the exegetical mode at least.

@Meta_U

You appear frustrated

Maybe just impatient to move on. I’d like to finish the book before 2030.

@Meta_U

but I hope you’ll read my reply below

I read it. We are not on the same page. In fact it looks like we’re on different books.

But if you find your intellectual orientation illuminating for this reading, then that’s great and I’m very happy.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

In fact it looks like we’re on different books.

Not really. You’ll admit that we generally agree for the most part. It’s just when we get to basic ontological features, we each read in a different way, due to the presuppositions (ideology) which we’ve been trained under, and which we hold. In order to understand anything we need to apply these presuppositions.

It’s like the meaning of words, we can’t understand a sentence without having presuppositions about the meanings of the words. Looking up everything in a dictionary wouldn’t suffice. Sometimes looking things up helps though, and that’s why I looked up “insight” in Hegel, I was having difficulty with that concept. You think looking it up misled me.

I think it’s only in these basic ontological issues that you and I have a difference in our respective understanding capacities. Your capacity provides the interpretation which you take, and my capacity provides mine. The difference between us, between our presuppositions which create that capacity to understand, manifests in those points of the book.

@Jamal

I’d like to finish the book before 2030.

I’ve been involved in a number of these reading groups and we rarely finish the book. Maybe that’s my fault. The only one we actually finished, that I remember, was rather short, Derrida’s Voice and Phenomena, I think Streetlight was leading.

[Jamal]

OK, maybe I exaggerated. All is good.

Anyway, I do want to finish this year or early next. It’s taken us a long time so far partly because I’ve taken months-long breaks.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

Anyway, I do want to finish this year or early next.

OK, well I’m happy with a one chapter per week pace. Some chapters, like the last, are quite difficult for me, and I really appreciate the extra discussion. I don’t know if you noticed but I changed my interpretation about three times. I find good philosophy is like that, each time you read it over you catch something you missed the last time (it got skipped or glossed over), and this changes the derived understanding.

[Meta_U]

@Jamal

Much better. In my words: I grant that reflection always has something immediate in it, but the immediate needs reflection, i.e, the determinations of thought, if being is not to be just arbitrary and meaningless.

For me this is the key statement of the chapter, which elucidates why Heidegger’s “being’ cannot be what it is supposed to be. What Adorno says is that if something immediate is necessary for reflection (the immediate is logically prior to reflection) then the immediate would be prior to reflection, as a condition for it, and this would leave the immediate itself as noncommittal and arbitrary. It is such because it is prior to reflection and rational thought.

So I take this to be what is supposed as the basis of judgement, judgement providing the determinations necessary for synthesis. At the level which Heidegger is reaching for, prior to any synthesis, the judgement could not be guided by any concepts or thought, this form of “judgement” would create a thought, perhaps as a spontaneous thought. But since “judgement” implies decision under the direction of principles, this is not even a judgement at all, but I would call it some form of simple selection.

To me, this is like free will. It performs the selection, which may or may not follow the principles of reason, so it’s “free”, more fundamental than judgement because judgement requires reason. This is a level of pure indeterminacy. So putting a word to it, “being”, and talking about it as a determinate thing defeats the purpose. Fundamentally, the rational mind cannot apprehend the irrational.

It is not thought, because in the indeterminacy which it demands it is simply unthinkable.

This way of transcending the rationality of the reflecting subject, is said by Adorno to be a clever but desperate act of violence, as an attempt at “break out”. What follows, I believe is a description of how this is a mistaken direction because it neglects the importance of “the moment of the synthesis in the substrate”. And there is an inversion of reality implied, similar to looking into a mirror.

In the next paragraph, he explains how this mistake makes human relations into an intelligible world of “thought-forms”, instead of allowing them to be analysed as they are, as human relations. So by trying to get beneath thinking, thinking itself is taken to be the world, and that is reification. Therefore the attempt at breakout only enhances what it was trying to break out from, the world of thought-’forms.

The conclusion being that the necessity of the rational moment cannot be escaped in this way. To prioritize the irrational in the break out attempt is to assume a position beyond the subject/object separation, but this leaves no approach toward understanding that difference.

Heidegger evades what needs to be done, according to one of the motives of dialectics, in that he usurps a standpoint beyond the difference of subject and object, in which the inadequacy of the ratio to what is thought is revealed. Such a leap however fails with the means of reason. Thought cannot conquer any position wherein the separation of subject and object which lies in every thought, in thinking itself, would immediately disappear.

[Jamal]

We’re back to agreeing with each other now.

[Meta_U]

He’s very explicit here, in saying that this way of thinking, which prioritizes the subject, is missing something essential. So when Heidegger looks for the immediate which is logically prior to reflection, this is a false goal, and the immediacy assumed is equally false (perhaps secondary immediacy). it is an artificial immediacy, because we cannot in actuality, get beyond what has already been affected by the the “synthesis in the substrate”. This I assume is the referred “human relations”.

It’s very twisted. The prior chapter discusses the objectivity of the Spirit, where the subject, in reflection, is made to be the object. In this chapter, we find that the result of this is to actually suppress the subjectivity of the Spirit by creating an artificial, theoretical subject which cannot be consistent with the real subject, because it removes the basic rationality required for support of the substrate.

Without the substrate, the illusions of thought are reified as the only thing left to comprise reality. The thought attempts to get beyond the thought-forms in its search for something real to distinguish reality. It finds that it is impossible to go there, so it creates an artificial “there”. The artificial, theoretical “there”, then ends up supporting the entirety of the thought-forms, instead of real substance, providing nothing to distinguish reality.

By suppressing the subjective Spirit, and therein necessarily also the material, the facticity, on which the synthesis confirms itself; by pretending that what is articulated according to these moments is something unified and absolute, it becomes the reverse of “destruction”, of the demand to disenchant that which is artificial in the concepts of human beings.

[Jamal]

ND I.I., “Meaning of Being”

Link to online text

I won’t say much about this section as I think it’s fairly clear. The point is encapsulated in these quotes:

That the sense of the word being would immediately be the meaning of being is a bad equivocation.

This becomes possible through the iridescent shimmer of the word being.

That this concept is not supposed to be a concept but immediate, veils the semantic meaning in ontological dignity.

Adorno is accusing Heidegger of equivocating between (1) the semantic meaning of “being”, i.e., the word’s linguistic sense, and (2) the ontological or metaphysical meaning, i.e., what it means to be. Heidegger, whose work is full of etymologies with ostensibly ontological significance, dresses up the former as the latter.

This is like the distinction between real and verbal definition. In the Republic, Plato wants to know what justice really is, rather than what is commonly meant by the word—and unlike Heidegger, he ascribes no ontological weight to the latter.

(There is more nuance here than I’m describing—Adorno doesn’t think the two meanings of meaning can be cleanly separated—but I won’t be going into that now)

EDIT: It turns out that I have a bit more to say.

If true being is conceived of as radically chôris [Greek: separately] from the existent, then it is identical with its meaning: one need only cite the meaning of what is essential [Wesenheit] to being and one has the meaning of being itself.

Maintaining the “ontological difference,” distinguishing being from beings, Heidegger ensures that there is nothing left of being itself than its meaning: being = the semantic meaning of being. This represents a collapse of being into its concept and of the real definition into the verbal definition, and lo and behold, Heidegger has not left idealism behind after all.

[Jamal]

ND I.I., Ontology Suborned

Link to online text

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is reactionary. It wants to go back to the authoritarian order before Enlightenment exploded it.

Only as an act of violence against thought does it have a chance. For the loss which resonates in the kitschy expression forgetfulness of being was no stroke of destiny but motivated. What is mourned, the legacy of the early archai [Greek: ancient, old], melted away from the consciousness, which wrenched itself away from nature.

That said, Heidegger is responding to a real defectiveness:

The society, according to whose own concept the relations of human beings are to be founded in freedom, without freedom being realized to this day, is as paralyzed as defective. In the universal exchange-relationship all qualitative moments are flattened out, whose epitome could be something like a structure.

But although Heidegger’s philosophy is responding to this defectiveness, or in H’s terms this loss, its response is a bad one:

Even the ontological drafts feel this, projecting it onto the victims, the subjects, and frantically drowning out the apprehension of objective negativity by means of the tidings of order in itself, all the way to the most abstract one of all, the structure of being.

That is, the damage to human beings in modernity is blamed on human beings themselves, in their “forgetfulness of being” and the “inauthenticity” of das Man, thus obscuring the objective causes of alienation, anomie, etc.

Adorno ends by tying together the ideological function of Heidegger’s philosophy with Heidegger’s own political alignment. It’s notable that whenever he brings this up, he wants us to see that he has earned it. Here, he wants to show that Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies were not accidental and ugly excrescences on an otherwise innocent body of thought but in some sense constituted his thought.

[Meta_U]

Meaning of Being:

I think this chapter explains very well what I said earlier:

@Meta_U

The particular cannot be adequately captured by the general. And this problem pervades science through set theory and systems theory. So in phenomenology, this sort of idea, “Spirit”, or “Being”, is always left very vague, undefined, to create the appearance that the idea does what it cannot do.

So now we find that Heidegger wants to give “being” a meaning which is impossible for it to have. In a sense, he wants it to have the most universal meaning, applicable to everything as pure abstract thought, but without any specific content. This leaves it meaningless.

Concepts, instruments of human thought, cannot make sense, if sense is itself negated, if every memory of something objective, beyond the mechanisms of the formation of concepts, is driven out.

According to this scheme the breakout attempt out of idealism is imperceptibly revoked, the doctrine of being regresses into one of a thinking which removes everything from being, which would be different from pure thought.

That this concept is not supposed to be a concept but immediate, veils the semantic meaning in ontological dignity. “The talk of ‘being’ never understands these names in the sense of a species, under whose empty generality the historically conceived doctrine of the existent belongs as special cases.

In the end, “being” appears to have so much ontological dignity due to its historical significance, but under Heidegger’s usage it means nothing and this is equivocated with the historical sense of everything. So it seems like “being” has great significance in Heidegger, drawing on that “historically conceived doctrine of the existent”, when it really has none because it’s a thinking which negates all content.

Ontology Suborned:

I see this chapter as expounding on what was said concerning human relations in “Being Thesei”. The doctrine of being bases itself in subjective thought-forms rather than the true objective substrate of human relations, and this is very problematic. In “On Categorical Intuition” we saw the problems involved with the supposed objectivity of Spirit, now we see the problems with supposing the subjectivity of being.

The expression “draft” [Entwurf: draft, design, sketch] betrays its tendency to negate freedom out of freedom: trans-subjective committalness [Verbindlichkeit] is delivered over to an act of constitutive subjectivity.

In that so-called “draft”, being itself is thrown, instead of humanity being thrown, and this allows being (which is actually just a concept) to be portrayed as that which creates humanity, prior to humanity. I see this as a rehashing of the Hegelian ideal, that the state is derived from the Idea. “Being” is an idea, though it’s proclaimed as “Beyond” ideas.

Now, since being has been situated as apprehended within the thinking subject, this assigns the highest authority to the subject, “passing itself off as the voice of being”. The consciousness which does not experience this apprehension of being is disqualified as the ‘forgetfulness of being’”. So the subject who apprehends being as the highest authority, poses as the voice of authority in relation to the one with forgetfulness.

The claim of “forgetfulness” is nothing but a coverup for deception. This forgetfulness is supposed to be a “loss of being” which is a cause of suffering. The nature of the deception, I believe is revealed by Adorno as the defective concept: “the relations of human beings are to be founded in freedom”.

This is reminiscent of Plato’s noble lie. But Adorno proceeds to discuss the illusion of freedom.

By no means is the course of society anywhere so anarchic, as it still seems in the constantly irrational contingency of the individual destiny. But its objectified juridicality [Gesetzlichkeit] is the adversary of a constitution of existence, in which one could live without fear.

Social order has become a horror, though philosophies claim the opposite.

That freedom remained largely an ideology; that human beings are powerless before the system and are not capable of determining their life and that of the whole through reason; indeed that they cannot even think the thought of such, without suffering even more, ensorcels their rebellion into its inverted form: they invidiously prefer the worse to the appearance [Schein] of something better.