The question is, exactly how, in detail and in reference to Part I of the text, does Adorno get Heidegger wrong. If you’re not doing that, you’re off-topic.
I believe this is what Adorno is critical of. If “being” is “the being of all beings”, it is nothing but a general concept. To generalize about what all beings have in common, and name it “being” is to propose a general concept, the being of all beings. So Adorno argues that this is how Heidegger uses “being”, as a general concept.
Furthermore, he indicates that by insisting that “being” is something other than a general concept, Heidegger creates ambiguity which allows him to equivocate between “being” as a particular, and “being” as a general concept in his usage. An escape from these charges would be made by saying, as you do, that being is no-thing. But as no-thing, and not a concept, “being” is rendered as nothing more than a meaningless word.
I understand that. So the issue is finally personal. Can this or that person find this pointing legitimate ? Heidegger quotes Nietzsche, who long ago called being a vapor. And of course Heidegger knew what Hegel said. As Adorno himself indicates, Heidegger was already his best critic on this point.
If one insists that “being is really just a concept,” then one is “deaf” to what is indicated. There’s no “proof” available here. There is “no thing” to prove. It’s the emptiest of mysticisms. Sure.
My apologies !
I will withdraw from further participation on this topic.
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Everything understood is personal. Things are understood by the person who understands. However, we let other people explain and demonstrate things to us, and that may consist of a “proof”. This is known as justification, and justification may contain proofs, other forms of rhetoric, and evidence. Adorno has spent many pages approaching what Heidegger has provided, from many different angles.
Of course Heidegger’s use of “being” is intended to be such that there can be no “proof” against what he claims that “being” can signify. But Adorno has shown why he believes that Heidegger’s use of “being” does not suffice as justification for what he wants from “being”. So what you call “a vapor”, as the supposed meaning of “being”, Adorno believes is actually nothing.
Therefore this is not a matter of being deaf to what is indicated by Heidegger. It is a matter of a critical analysis of what Heidegger presents, and it’s a seeing through the smoke and mirrors, to apprehend it as mere deception. This is why @Jamal is telling you to address Adorno’s text. To simply insist that Heidegger successfully uses “being” to refer to something which is neither a particular nor a universal, but some kind of “vapor” which is assigned priority to both , without considering Adorno’s criticism, is off topic of the thread. The thread deals with Adorno’s criticism.
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I just had this exact thought in thinking about the question “So, the story so far… just what is Part I actually doing?”
I’m getting back into the swing of reading now.
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Yeah, I want to get back to it now too. Turns out I can’t do two reading groups at the same time after all 
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I don’t have as much time right now, but I’m still wasting time on other threads, so I could get back into it to some extent as well.
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I mean my motivation dips in and out all the time – no pressure.
ND Part II. Concept and Categories: Indissolubility Of The Something
This is the beginning of the core theoretical part of the book, and Adorno begins by taking on idealism, showing that thought presupposes what idealism claims it produces: real content.
“The Something” is the translation of “Das Etwas” from Hegel’s Science of Logic, but we don’t need Hegel’s apparatus here. Adorno is using it to mean the indeterminate residue of the “I think.” It’s the object as such, and not any determinate object. Another way to put it is that it’s the logical or grammatical position—but crucially, a position that cannot be just emptied out, as if there could be nothing there. Thought is directed outside itself.
And this is stronger than a merely psychological point. It doesn’t just mean that we can’t help thinking of a Something; rather, it’s that the position is constituted by its being occupied by something, such that thought must be always dependent on something outside itself.
That substantive which the form of what is at large [Ueberhaupt] in thought would like to shake off, the supposition of its absolute form, is illusionary.
The supposition that there is an absolute form of thought, i.e., thought purified of its content, is an illusion.
Constitutive to what is substantive [Sachhaltiges] for the form is above all the substantial experience of what is substantive. Correlatively, the pure concept, the function of thought, is not to be radically separated at the subjective counterpole from the existent “I”.
The first sentence states that you can’t have a form in which there is a place for something substantive, without there being an experience of something actually substantive. The second sentence makes the point from the other end of the subject-object polarity: the pure thought, the thought ostensibly purified of its content, cannot be separated/purified/abstraced from a real thinker, the “I”.
The prôtou pseudos [Greek: proto-falsity] of idealism since Fichte was that the movement of the abstraction would permit the discarding of what is abstracted from. It is eliminated from thought, exiled from the latter’s home domain, not annihilated in itself; the belief in this is magical.
So the original mistake of idealism is to think that in abstracting from the real, you can do away with it, and claim it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t follow from I’ve removed it from view, leaving only the form of thought that It doesn’t exist independently of thought.
So far this all looks like a flat denial, nothing close to a refutation of idealism. But Adorno is doing a bit more. He is performing immanent critique, showing that the abstraction performed in idealism already presupposes the content, i.e., things outside of thought. Thus, as Adorno sees it, idealism refutes itself.
Or rather, it creates a contradiction. Next he makes a point which I think is crucial if we want to understand where he is with respect to idealism and realism:
This would remain offensive to the logic of non-contradictoriness; solely dialectics can comprehend it in the self-critique of the concept.
The contradiction is in these two statements together: (a) the thought produces the something; (b) the thought presupposes the something. Adorno doesn’t just say that (a) is wrong, like a realist would. He believes that (a) is true, in a sense. This sense is what might be called a kind of correlationism, so it’s like Kant plus an awareness of the contradiction. The something in a sense just is the-something-as-available-to-experience, so there’s an important insight in (a), the idealist impulse.
But, you might object, this is just idealism. That’s the whole point of the term correlationism, to name the general class of modern idealism.
This is where the non-identical and the preponderence of the object come in. Since the substantive Something is presupposed, there’s always a remainder, where the concept cannot close over the object. And the remainder falls on the object side rather than the subject side because, while the subject is always an object too, the opposite is not the case. This means that the subject is also an object among objects, contained by objectivity. So although Adorno proposes mediation and a dialectical refusal to dissolve the contradiction, his answer is not just to sit in the middle: there’s an imbalance in the subject-object polarity. The object is more weighty. This, I suppose, is the root of Adorno’s materialism.
But the last paragraph issues a warning: don’t thereby install the non-identical, or the preponderence of the object, as the first principle of your system. That’s the hypostatizing, totalizing move that Adorno is against.
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The topic here is the content of thought. This is the “Something” which he starts out with. “The Something as the necessary substrate of the concept in thinking…” The idea of “content” in thought is extremely difficult to grasp, though it might seem to be quite straight forward.
Idealism is incapable of grasping the meaning of “content” because in idealism, all thought is reduced to, and dependent on ideas and concepts. In reality, this is only the formal aspect of thought though, so content escapes from the idealist, as unintelligible, therefore not possibly a part of thought. The idealist cannot allow content within thought without hypostasizing the concept of the nonconceptual. So content is “exiled”, but the belief in this exile, Adorno says is “magical”.
If we turn to Marx for reference, he inverted Hegelian idealism, and maintained the form/content distinction, as very important. This allows matter, as the material aspect, “content”, to be at the base of thinking. This supports Marxist materialism ontologically. Marx said something about inverting the dialectic, putting it back on its feet, and “discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell’”. I take the “kernel” to be the seed, or potential, for the concept.
So I might object to this, depending on exactly what is meant here. It appears like content is placed outside of thought here. But I think it is crucial to Adorno’s point to understand the content as something nonconceptual which inheres within thought itself. The ideas and concepts of idealism cannot come to be from nothing. Nor can the nonconceptual be a concept. So, there is an infinite regress of eternal ideas implied by idealism. To avoid this we can assume that the ideas, concepts, must come from something, the kernel of content, and this must be a nonconceptual part of thought itself.
The following is the end of the last paragraph. Notice that foundational philosophy requires that the concepts are identical with the thoughts. However, once we allow for the reality that there is content within thought, which is not conceptual (the material element), then that identity must be dismissed.
Foundational philosophy, prôtê philosophia [Greek: originary philosophy] necessarily carries the primacy of the concept with itself; what withholds itself from it, also departs from the form of a philosophizing allegedly based on a foundation. Philosophy could remain pacified by the thought of the transcendental apperception, or even by being, so long as those concepts were identical with the thought, that it thinks. If such identity is dismissed in principle, then it drags down the tranquillity of the concept as something ultimate in its fall. Because the fundamental character of every general concept dissolves before the determinate existent, philosophy may no longer hope for totality.
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Yes, I see. I think we’re both right. We each naturally emphasize different moments in a dialectic. You’re happiest with the mediation, I’m happiest with the preponderance of the object.
What I like about your position is that you maintain the immanence, resisting the temptation I always fall for, to separate the objects of thought (the nonconceptual) into another realm entirely.
But we don’t have to draw the conclusion that because the nonconceptual inheres in thought, it is not a real existent too. The nonconceptual as it inheres in thought is an index of the nonconceptual as something not produced by thought. Thus it has a dual aspect: how it is accessed and what it is. It is accessed only in thought, and “inalienably”; but what it is, is precisely that which thought did not produce.
By the way, I’m avoiding terms like “mind-independent” and “metaphysical status”, because they’re not granular enough in this context—they would claim more than can be legitimately claimed, namely a view of the thing apart from all access, which is exactly what inherence in thought rules out.
So, to say as I did that the content is “things outside of thought”—this is strictly speaking false, in that it is only half the story, too categorical to state carelessly. And yet, it’s also false to say the content of thought is entirely generated by thought.
Does that resolve things?
ND Part II / Necessity Of The Substantive
Adorno cites Kant as an instance of the idealist mistake, in his theory of the subjective constitution of the objects of experience.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation occupied the place of the indissolubly ontic as the something. However, sensation has no sort of pre-eminence of cognitive dignity before any other real existent. Its “my”, accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic conditions, is mistaken for a legal claim by the experience which is entangled in its reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself; as if what any particular human consciousness presumed as the ultimate were really an ultimate in itself, as if every other particular human and limited consciousness could not claim the same privilege for its sensations.
There is a lot going on here. In Kant’s philosophy, the Something takes the form of sensation, whereas the thing in itself is beyond our ken. So we have the active, spontaneous faculty of understanding, synthesizing a unity from the manifold of sensations impinging on us through the passive faculty of sensibility (under its forms of intuition, space and time, etc etc). The thickness and complexity here is all on the subjective side, but it amounts to judgement and knowledge only when applied to the sliver of the Something, what is given.
So the substantive in this philosophy is what is given to me, i.e., what is mine. Adorno is saying that just because it is mine does not justify my privileging it over any other real existent. Kant virtually says “Reality appears as my sensations, so (I have a right to say that) sensations are what count as reality.” But ownership is just an ontic accident.
It’s important that Adorno doesn’t qualify “existent,” as in “object of experience”. He doesn’t mean it in that Kantian manner; this would be to assume Kant’s whole system already. Rather, he (Adorno) starts with plain factual existents, which include tables and chairs, bodies, sensations, and subjects. Among these, he is saying, sensations have no “pre-eminence of cognitive dignity” just because they are given to me.
Thus Adorno refuses that initial Cartesian move of Kant’s—one that is unargued for, since it’s just built in to transcendental philosophy—of starting in the head, as if that’s foundational. Without this, the mineness of sensation is nothing special.
I’m quite familiar with Adorno’s attitude to Kant from his other work, and central to his critique is the objection that the a priori cannot be purified of the empirical. There is no pure a priori, no transcendental subject separable from the empirical subject. This view can be seen in the present section:
Its “my”, accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic conditions
The transcendental analysis, since it is universal and necessary, makes a point of getting by without any actual, i.e., ontic, mineness. The two sides have been separated from each other in Kant’s philosophy, not just methodologically but quasi-ontologically. Nevertheless, one is taken as a kind of starting point from which the other is abstracted: the immediately given “mine” serves as the launch-pad from which the universalizing rocket of transcendental subjectivity takes off. And Adorno’s point is that it cannot really serve as such. The very universalizing that builds the pure subject strips away the ontical mineness that made the given immediate and foundational in the first place. The “my” is left behind as something merely empirical: the foundation dissolves in its being built upon.
Next he looks at the other end, the transcendental subject.
If the form however, the transcendental subject, is supposed to strictly require sensation in order to function and thus to judge accurately, then it would be quasi ontologically attached not only to the pure apperception but just as much to its counterpole, to its matter.
It then follows that
The idea of something immutable, identical to itself, would also thereby collapse.
This is because
Sensations … have the character of that which is transient.
The argument here is that since the transcendental subject is in fact attached constitutively to ontic, transient, real sensations—and thereby to real existents—the idea that it’s a fixed point, immutable and self-identical across all my representations, collapses, dragged down to earthly reality by transient matter.
And rather than something derived from the world around us, it was a conceptual imposition all along:
It is derived from the domination of the concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter”, and for that reason is blind to such.
Thus the “I think” and the transcendental subject, as fixed, pure, a priori structures, belong not to real subjects but only to the concept. However, Adorno is not saying that the transcendental subject does not apply to real subjects at all. Rather, he is saying that it doesn’t apply as fixed and pure. We can legitimately refer to the “I think”, the form of understanding, and the a priori, so long as we remember that they are “contaminated with the existent” (a phrase he used in the Introduction: Privilege of Experience). In a word, mediated. The transcendental subject is embedded in the world, dependent on and constitutively involved with matter.
The question arises: If the transcendental subject is dependent on and reciprocally-constitutively involved with sensations, then in what sense is it transcendental? Surely to be transcendental it has to be prior? This takes us back to the previous section, where Adorno holds the contradiction open, refusing to come down on the side of realism against idealism, despite the preponderence of the object. Here, each side conditions the other. What Kant has called transcendental not only conditions but is also conditioned. Therefore “transcendental” loses its claim to purity and immutability.
As he says:
Sensations … are therefore the conditions of the possibility of cognition in their own right
But Adorno doesn’t just come out and say there is no such thing as the transcendental subject—that would be to remove the fertile contradiction entirely, cancelling out the real insight of the conditioning relation between subject and object—so much as downgrading and problematizing the transcendental.
The nonconceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy.
First of all, the nonconceptual is “inalienable from the concept” in that the concept cannot be purified of what it’s about, i.e., of the something it points to beyond itself. And as such, it’s not located in a hidden noumenal realm, separate from what thinks it.
Since the concept and the object are interdependent and interwoven, philosophy itself is not—despite various efforts in this direction—only occupied with the necessary and universal, the eternal and changeless. It is always through contingent particulars that it thinks what it thinks.
The last paragraph criticizes the division of labour between empirical particulars, which are thought to be the concern of science, and the “highest concepts” dealt with by philosophy proper. From this point of view, much of Adorno’s thought is not real philosophy, because it’s so immersed in history and society.
But it’s not just that philosophy has turned away from its substantive content:
Rather the philosophical analysis strikes immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences.
In other words, when you analyze things philosophically, right into the most abstract core of the concepts, you hit upon the ontic. This is what Adorno has been arguing in these first two sections: the Something and the substantive can never be expunged from thought, and thought never reaches anything pure and immutable. In the face of this [the ontic at the heart of philosophy], your analysis, when accompanied by the “claim of purity,” recoils from it and haughtily hands it over to science as merely factual and thus lacking the dignity of philosophy proper.
This is all nicely summarized at the end of the section:
Philosophical thinking has for its content neither the remainder after the cancellation of space and time, nor general findings about what is spatio-temporal. It crystallizes in the particular, in what is determined in space and time.
Philosophy is neither the idealist or ontological removal of real existents to reach pure forms or pure being, nor is it in the business of producing or discovering the general laws governing real existents. So he is not saying, abandon the purity of philosophy, roll up your sleeves, and join the scientists (including sociologists, psychologists, etc.). Philosophy is rather what can be seen in the particular, without necessarily jumping straight into abstraction or generalization. The content of philosophy takes shape in the particulars, so this is where the truth lies, since no higher law or abstraction, i.e., no concept, ever coincides with the determinate thing.
The last line seeks to protect the particulars from the temptation to install “the Something” as a foundation:
The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the shadow of the false one of being.
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This difference in our perspective has been evident since the beginning. I take the subjective perspective of personal experience, what Adorn calls, in the current chapter, “reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself”. From this perspective the substantial existence of “society”, and even in the skeptic’s eye, the existence of any external objects, cannot be taken for granted. But you seem to take for granted, the existence of society, as an entity which we can talk about. So I am always looking for justification.
I saw in the introduction how Adorno substantiates society with Aristotelian principles of matter and form. Society provides us with the formal aspect, the concepts which form ideology, while the individual subject as part of society provides the material aspect. As a whole, there is a unity of matter and form, substance.
In this chapter, “Necessity of the Substantive”, I see how the concept, as property of society, is itself substantive. This is an interesting inversion of idealism, which attempts to make the concept substantive, but doesn’t have the means to justify this. With Adorno’s approach, the nonconceptual, matter, or content, inheres within the concept, allowing for the unity of matter and form required for Aristotle’s “substance”.
I think we need to be aware of the consequences of this special inversion though, and that is that ultimately the true nature of the concept will now be as a particular. Having that aspect within it, the nonidentical, matter, content, assigns to the concept itself, the characteristics of a particular, substance.
So Adorno criticizes how Kant deals with the nonconceptual, as sensations. The issue is that sensations are particular to the individual subject, and this leads to a transcendental subject where matter is distinct, or separate from the subject while the so-called “pure apperception” must somehow still be attached to the matter. Now “matter” is also the sensations themselves, so there is a sort of dual meaning, or ambiguity to “matter”.
The nonconceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy. Whenever it was master of itself, it dealt with the historically existent as its object, not first in Schelling and Hegel, but contre coeur [French: against its own will] already in Plato, who baptized the existent as the non-existent and yet wrote a doctrine of the state, in which eternal ideas are closely tied to empirical determinations such as the exchange of equivalents and the division of labor.
It is this relation between the conceptual and the nonconceptual which produces the need for substantiality. Substance is the impurity of the concept. And he proceeds to describe how a philosophy which raises itself above other philosophies, by seeking the purity of the concept, is really misguided.
It is not merely that by belatedly trumpeting its purity, it turns away from everything in which it once had its substance. Rather the philosophical analysis strikes immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences. The smallest ontic residuum in the concepts, which regular philosophy stirs in vain, compels it to reflectively include what is existent there [Daseiende] in itself, instead of making do with its mere concept and believing itself to be safe there from what it means.
You’re welcome to take that perspective, that of the “reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself”—but since we are just trying to understand Adorno, it’s important to see that this perspective is precisely what he is criticizing in these sections.
Precisely this demand for justification, from the standpoint nearest to itself, is what Adorno is revealing as illegitimate (at least, that is his aim).
Things are becoming clearer: my objection to your interpretation is not that you take the perspective you take; it’s that you tend to resolve Adorno’s non-identities into identities, coming down on one side, in synthesis, ignoring the negative dialectical nature of his thinking. No doubt I tend to do the equivalent on the other end. You hypostasize the concept, and I hypostasize the object.
Obviously you don’t have to agree with Adorno; I’m just saying that understanding the book is not like “Go on, prove it” but more like “OK, let’s assume you’re right. How does that work, exactly?”
That’s right, but to have that perspective, is to know and respect it, and therefore to be capable of understanding the criticisms directed against it. So from that perspective, I can say that Adorno’s criticism is very good. That’s is why I persist with the reading.
If a person doesn’t understand the position which is being criticized, that individual is not in a good position to understand the quality of the criticism. So in a sense, one must adopt the position being criticized, to know and understand it charitably, as a rational and meaningful position, to be able to adequately judge any supposed refutation.
Did you read my entire post, where I talked about the section, “Necessity of the Substantive”? I interpret Adorno as not coming down on one side or the other, neither the side of the concept (formal), nor the side of the object (material), because “substance” in the traditional sense is a combination of both.
So the mistake which Adorno is pointing out, in this section, is the trend for philosophers to seek the purity of the concept. The idealists seem to think that this form of hypostatizing the concept could grant substantial existence to the concept. Kant does it by positioning the a priori intuitions of space and time as a medium between sense objects and conceptualization. This is a separation between object and concept, which effectively isolates the concept (formal aspect of the subject) from the object (material aspect of the subject, sensibility), producing the purity of the a priori, and the transcendental subject. But Adorno looks at this separation between the nonconceptual and the conceptual as a falsity. So he sees the necessity of the substantive, in the true Aristotelian sense of “substance”, the unity of both form and matter (content).
The nonconceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy.
OK, I agree, well put.
On the other hand, it’s worth being self-aware about it. I mean, I don’t think this wise interpretive practice licenses a persistent demand for justification from the first-person perspective.
I’m afraid I have little sympathy for the way you apply Aristotle to Adorno. For me, it makes an already difficult text far more difficult. I did not say you came down on either the formal or material side; I only mentioned concept and object. In Adorno, there is no Aristotelian substance resulting from their combination.
Form = society/ideology, Matter = the individual subject does not seem to be how Adorno is thinking at all.
And to say that Adorno anywhere points to a “unity of matter and form”—I don’t get that. There is no harmonious unity in Adorno.
The last line of the section would seem to rule out your interpretation:
The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the shadow of the false one of being.
The “existent pure and simple” is your substance, the self-standing hypostasization of the substantive/existent/something.
I continue to sip this expensive wine slowly.
I’ve been thinking: for an author who reduces the irreducible and practices positive dialectics, the best praise is obviously agreement with his assertions. Such an explicit confirmation of unity with his ideas.
Since negative dialectics is, as it were, the inversion of positive dialectics, here praise for the author (should) consist of silent disagreement with him.
But I think that would be too simple; let’s take one part here and the other there. So, the best recognition of Adorno’s achievements in philosophy (according to Astorre) would be an expression of criticism of him.
Today I’d like to dwell here (chapter: The Speculative Moment).
Freedom of thought is a consequence of the subject’s desire for expression. The need to free oneself from suffering by ‘speaking’ it away is the condition of all truth. For suffering is the objectivity that weighs upon the subject. What the subject cognizes as its most subjective, as its expression, is objectively mediated.
Let’s critique this in order.
- Freedom of thought, which, according to Adorno, arises in the subject’s desire for expression. “Speaking away” suffering is the condition of truth. Thus, the very striving for truth arises from the suffering of incongruity, where freedom is born.
All this is pure nonsense. Firstly, “freedom” is a dubious construct of idealists. Few people critique this concept, since it is the metaphysical core of much Western philosophy. Authors often compete with each other: “My freedom is the freest freedom.” Okay, let them chase their chimera; that’s acceptable in metaphysics. But if you could provide an example of the existence of “freedom” in the world, I’d be grateful.
Secondly, suffering from lack of reduction is proclaimed to be almost the sole source of the act of thinking. Where then is curiosity? Where is surprise? Where is play or excess (and not deficiency)?
Such totalization from this author seems dubious.
- The debunker of identity as violence suddenly organizes the “whole” around negativity (suffering). Isn’t the author driven by a desire to legitimize and privilege denial?
Okay, that’s the problem with all philosophies. They criticize the old, push their own, totalize, and profit. But why suffering, and not, say, love or joy? Okay. The reader of these lines will say that I don’t understand the context and the era in which the author lived. So why doesn’t anyone else suffer? Let’s all just suffer then! It’s absolute bliss
Why should the source of motivation lie there, and not (among other things) in the positive striving for dialectical reduction?
Or is this a way of giving oneself greater depth: “I suffer for the truth”?
I don’t think every irreducibility has to be traumatic. Difference without lack; multiplicity without wounds; expression without liberation—all of this is possible. Why cram everything into suffering?
- Finally. The internal contradiction of the entire phrase. Look at what he writes: “the subjective itself is objectively mediated.” Then where is the sought-after freedom in this determinism? But let’s go further and ask: is Adorn’s “objective” really so “objective”? What if he confused it with discourse?
Of course, as always, I misunderstood everything. I’d be interested to hear your objections, so I could cast them in metal and hang them above my bed.
But honestly, after this cultivation of suffering, I just want to close this book and forget it. However, I’ll continue reading and enjoying this irreducibility that lies somewhere deep within me and the author.
I disagree with this. Adorno is quite persistent in his discussion of substance. Look at the title of this section for example. And, I have read his “Metaphysics: Concept and Problems” which you referred to me. He is well educated in Aristotelian principles, of which “substance” is one. In Aristotle “substance” is the individual, the particular, what you call the object. And the particular (substance) is composed of both matter and form, that’s hylomorphism.
The “existent pure and simple” is the pure concept, and that is what he is dismissing in this section, as misguided, just like that pure concept “being”. The hypostasization which is being rejected is that of the pure concept.
It is not “substance” which is being rejected because substance is neither simple nor pure, it is a duality of matter and form. To the contrary, substance is being promoted. The title: “The Necessity of the Substantive”.
Please read the section again. Notice in the discussion of Kant, the primary form is the “transcendental subject” which supposedly has a “pure apperception” (a priori), which actually cannot be pure though, by Adorno’s reckoning, because it must be equally “attached” to its matter.
This faulty representation, the “pure apperception”, is derived from “the domination of the concept”, which is blind to its content, its matter. However, without sensations, which is the “Kantian matter”, the forms could not even be imagined. Therefore, in actuality, by Kant’s structure, the nonconceptual is “inalienable from the concept”. The pure concept, ‘the ideal’, is nixed because matter is inalienable from form. This necessitates the substantiality of philosophy.
Yeah, he uses the Aristotelian vocabulary and conceptual toolkit, but it just seemed to me that you were importing more than this. I don’t think the substantive is the same as what you or Aristotle mean by substance.
But maybe I misread you. In any case, I agree with all this:
