Perhaps, but I’ve been paying attention to his frequent use of “substance” and its derivatives through out the reading. It can be an ambiguous term, but Adorno seems quite consistent in demonstrating an Aristotelian foundation. I believe the Aristotelian base is standard in the principles of Marxist materialism.
Unlike modern idealism Marxism stays true to the Aristotelian concept of matter. It is idealism which creates a direct relationship between matter and substance, in its efforts to purify, and hypostasize “Form” as the ideal. But that distorts the concept “matter”. Both Kant and Hegel abused Aristotelian terminology (abuse of Aristotle was the trend at the time, consider Berkeley) and Marx attempted a sort of disabuse to provide “matter” its true status. So he provided a proper Aristotelian conception of matter. It is my opinion, that unlike other forms of materialism, it is this adherence to the Aristotelian concept “matter” (which was well thought out in the first place), that makes Marxist materialism very real and powerful.
Anyway, this little disagreement is probably not too important, because we both agree on Adorno’s focus on the particular. I’m just fussy to point out that the particular is not just matter (the nonconceptual), but a combination of matter and form, as substance.
subject and object do not firmly oppose one another, as in the Kantian outline, but penetrate each other reciprocally
The consequence of the Kantian firm opposition of subject and object is a degradation of the object into indeterminacy (because what is given is reduced to a non-qualitative multiplicity), resulting in a hollow victory for the sovereign subject, which now rules over nothing determinate.
At the same time, the opposition reciprocally results in an indeterminacy on the side of the subject, a shrinking down of the subject to pure abstract reason. This is because to determine the qualities of the object, the subject needs objective validity, which in turn requires complete generality, i.e., a stripping away of the particulars.
But in case we thought mediation was the answer, i.e., the reciprocal penetration he’s already recommended, halfway through the second paragraph we get this:
The dualism is already given in the philosophical thought and as inescapable, as the process by which it becomes false in thought. Mediation is merely the most general, itself inadequate expression for this.
The error is not confined to the history of philosophy, which Adorno has now solved—it’s built in to philosophy as such, and inescapable. It can’t just be fixed by calling attention to mediation. So once again, Adorno is careful to avoid setting anything up as a first principle or doctrinal foundation.
This is the most interesting passage:
[The object’s] denigration was the flip side of the triviality that everything existent would be coloured by the observer, its group or species. In truth the cognition of the moment of subjective mediation into what is objective implies the critique of the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself, which, forgotten, lurks behind that triviality.
Central to subjectivist metaphysics, including empiricist offshoots like phenomenalism and “indirect realism,” is a triviality, namely that everything is “coloured by the observer”. Adorno here points out something I used to spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out when I took part in the direct vs. indirect realism discussions on TPF: that this triviality presupposes a “glance into the pure in-itself,” as the ideal “perspective” of what things are really like. Thus, anti-naive-realist philosophies assume naive realism as the gold standard that our perspective fails to live up to (otherwise known as the view from nowhere, a divine glance). In fact, Adorno says, subjectivism and naive realism are the same dualism seen from different ends.
I think there’s an asymmetry here, a preponderence of the object in what Adorno says. “the moment of subjective mediation into what is objective,” is a translation of “des Moments subjektiver Vermittlung im Objektiven,” which literally means “the moment of subjective mediation in the objective.” He is referring to the fact that the subjective is a moment within the objective, saying that the cognition of this moment is what allows us to question “the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself”.
Anyway, note carefully that the critique is directed at the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself, not at the pure in-itself as such. Does he reject that too? Yes and no, I’d say. It is the in-itself as correlate of a possible glance and as separate realm that is criticized, i.e., the what-would-be-seen-without-seeing. So it’s an attack on dualism, and it still leaves space for the object’s in-itself in the sense of its irreducibility to the subject.
There follows a polemic against subjectivism, i.e., “peephole metaphysics”.
Western metaphysics was, except for heretics, peephole metaphysics. The subject – itself only a limited moment – was locked for all eternity in itself, as punishment for its deification.
And near the end he weighs the pros and cons of Kant:
One cannot see out. What would be beyond, appears only in the materials and categories within. That is where the truth and untruth of the Kantian philosophy would step out of each other. It is true, in that it destroys the illusion of the immediate knowledge of the absolute; untrue, in that it describes this absolute with a model, that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, were it merely the intellectus archetypus [Latin: archetypal intellect].
Kant is true in his takedown of traditional metaphysics, which assumed direct knowledge of God and the world as a whole and in itself. Kant was right to say that there is no divine glance.
But Kant is untrue in that he still effectively retains the notion of a glance into the in-itself, which features in Kant’s system as intellectual intuition, Kant’s description of direct knowledge of the in-itself that does not need to go through the faculty of sensibility. After all, although he said that there is no divine glance, he qualified it by saying “for creatures like us” (paraphrasing), thus holding open the divine glance as a possibility.
So, Kant writes of the object as it is apart from the conditions of experience, but even positing that is to posit the divine glance. There remains the dualism between appearance and in-itself.
That seems a bit unfair to Kant, but ultimately I can see Adorno’s point anyway. And it is certainly the case that the first Critique is full of phrases like “mere appearances”, so Kant was steeped in that dualism even if he went some way to dissolving it.
The next step, beyond Kant’s subjectivism, is German idealism: it is also both true and false. True in its critique of Kant’s dualism, but false …
in its equation of subjectively mediated truth to the subject, as if its pure concept were being itself.
That’s cute, but what you’ve shown is that in practice this just leads to misunderstanding and uncharitable interpretation, which you then merely hand over to us to correct for you:
I’m not sure it would be a good investment of our time to do so.
But if you are genuinely interested in what we think, we covered the “Speculative Moment” section last year. Here’s what I said about “the need to give voice to suffering” (which, incidentally, seems to have a different meaning in your translation).
The need to give voice to suffering is the condition of all truth.
This is not just a brilliant line and a stirring exhortation; it is also a radical challenge to standard theories of truth which is meant to be taken entirely seriously.
In the words of Ben Shapiro, facts don’t care about your feelings. Indeed, they don’t care about anyone’s feelings. And that’s the problem with facts, or rather with the Enlightenment rationality that takes facts as the be-all and end-all of truth (and therefore knowledge). Adorno wants a more expansive concept of truth, one that doesn’t submit to Enlightenment’s split between facts and values. (Another option would be to reject truth entirely, but to do so would be to embrace nihilism and to give up on critique).
Truth for Adorno is the reality and injustice of suffering. Since, where the most important matters are concerned, the real is unjust, truth should not be neutral.
Examples help. A factual report on the Holocaust that ignores witness testimony is not true in Adorno’s expanded sense. We could think of this as a lie of omission (which is not to say it’s intentional deception). And this is a signpost to another aspect, found in the work of Foucault: the idea that a truth that depends on the suppression of marginalized voices is suspect—and in Adorno’s terms, not really a truth at all. You might say, then, that facts are lies of oppression.
But it’s not just that facts are not enough; it’s that knowledge in the form of facts is already ideological, is value-laden without knowing it (or without saying so). To uncover the truth then is not just to add more, or different kinds of, information, e.g., including formerly marginalized voices, but to critique the facts themselves to reaveal the truth negatively. You can see this better with a fact like, workers are free in capitalist society because in taking jobs they voluntarily sign contracts. This fact can be criticized to reveal that the company and the worker are not equal parties except in a narrow legal sense, and that the choice between the burdensome job and destitution is no choice at all.
Adorno’s condition equally applies in art. Compare Goya’s Black Paintings and his Disasters of War series with propaganda art that glorifies war or labour. I don’t think I’m using a special notion of truth when I say that the former are truthful and the latter are not. And the former are truthful because they give voice to suffering, not only by actually depicting it but by explicitly going against both the style and the content of paintings that celebrate war.
For suffering is the objectivity which weighs on the subject; what it experiences as most subjective, its expression, is objectively mediated.
Suffering is not just a private feeling but is a material, social reality with real causes. The subject suffers under objective conditions. The inability of a South African miner to stay awake and concentrate for half an hour on the book he wants to read after a 12-hour shift in a gold mine, his fatigue exacerbated by his chronic silicosis, is both the most personal and private of problems and also an example of the economic injustice of capitalist society.
It’s funny: here I am offering an explicitly marginal view on Adorno, and following his own logic, dismissing it out of hand means avoiding the truth. But what’s even more interesting on a broader scale is how critique inadvertently legitimizes the assertion.
Regarding Adorno’s choice of suffering as the prime mover, I’d like to share an observation. I happen to know a pair of states where resentment—and second-order resentment—has been elevated to a state ideology. That very same suffering. If these wounds ever begin to heal and form scars, the ideologues consciously rip them back open. Suffering becomes their mode of being. Coincidentally, these two states are currently at war with each other.
There is also another state that has legitimized suffering to such an extent that it has unilaterally canonized itself as a global martyr. This status now allows it to wage wars of aggression in several directions at once, wiping entire cities off the face of the earth in the process. Well, I guess for the miner to retain his monopoly on truth, he must remain sick and oppressed. This seems to be the price of truth—but it also serves as the perfect fuel to make others suffer later on.
Perhaps I just wanted to remind everyone that the totalization of suffering is still a totalization.
I also apologize for my previous post. I won’t dare trouble the readers here any further, especially since the core substance of Adorno’s idea doesn’t actually develop from chapter to chapter; it just feels like the same thesis retold with a fresh coat of paint.
I interpret this “glance into the pure in-itself” as the subject being apprehended as the object. That’s what I take Kant’s process as, treating the subject as our object. But then the subject is taken to be a part of the “in-itself”, that’s the presupposed glance into the in-itself. You say it this way: “He is referring to the fact that the subjective is a moment within the objective”. Anyway, the result is that the subject, as object (or moment within the objective), cannot escape the indeterminateness which has already been assigned to the object.
In the categorical achievement it expended and impoverished itself; in order to be able to determine, to articulate what opposes it, so that it would become the Kantian object, it must dilute itself to the mere generality for the sake of the objective validity of that determination, amputate it from itself no less than from the object of cognition, so that this would be reduced to its concept according to program. The objectivating subject shrinks down into a point of abstract reason, finally into the logical non-contradictoriness, which for its part has no meaning independent of the determinate object. The absolute first necessarily remains as indeterminate as its opposite; no investigation of what is concretely precedent reveals the unity of what is abstractly antithetical.
I agree that the issue of the object itself, in its purity, is not addressed here. What is criticized is the idea of the subject as object, or the objectifying of the subject. I think Adorno says this is true in the sense that it destroys the illusion that we could have absolute knowledge of the object, by reducing knowledge of the object to knowledge of the subject, thereby imposing a significant restriction on the extent of that knowledge. But it is untrue because it casts the subject as our object, and this imposes an unreal restriction on the object.
The demonstration of this untruth is the truth of post-Kantian idealism; this latter however is in turn untrue in its equation of subjectively mediated truth to the subject, as if its pure concept were being itself.
I don’t understand this. Adorno is dealing with the Kantian subject-object opposition, which opposes the experiencing subject to objects of experience given in intuition via sensation, beyond which—the in-itself, i.e., things as they are in themselves—we cannot know. Adorno is saying that this dualism, though it denies that we can see the in-itself, posits a glance at it nevertheless.
Kant does have a place for the subject apprehended as an object, which he calls the empirical self, known to us through inner sense (and this is not the same as the transcendental subject). But this special case is not what Adorno is critiquing, because for Kant, the paradigmatic example of our knowledge is of external things given in intuition via sensation.
Your interpretation of the true half looks pretty close, but your untrue half diverges from what Adorno says.
It is true, in that it destroys the illusion of the immediate knowledge of the absolute; untrue, in that it describes this absolute with a model, that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, were it merely the intellectus archetypus [Latin: archetypal intellect].
An intellectus archetypus is the kind of mind that would know things by means of intellectual intuition—an immediate (non-sensory) apprehension of things in themselves. Adorno says it explicitly: Kant’s description of the mind that cannot know the absolute involves a model that would, if it existed, correspond to the kind of consciousness that intellectus archetypus has. In other words, Kant’s picture is false in that it posits the divine glance into things as they are in themselves.
This is a very good point, and I think it stabs right to the heart of this little ongoing difference between you and I. Let me see if I can explain the way I see it. It’s complicated so you may not follow, or you may simply disagree, but for what it’s worth, I’ll present it.
I’ll start with the ambiguity of “the content of thought”, and the difference which arose between you and I in interpretation of this. To me, “the content of thought” is internal to the thinking, and could be more clearly indicated as the “subject matter”. You placed the content of thought as external to the thinking, as “the object” which is thought about. This would be the in-itself. Notice the difference, with idealism “the object of thought” is within the thinking mind as the idea (intelligible object), though another interpretation would place “the object of thought” as external to the thinking, as the in-itself, the object which is thought about.
What I think Adorno is showing, is that this supposed difference, internal object/external object, which is the basis of dualism, is really irrelevant. No matter which way you go, how you position “the object”, it ends up being the same outlook anyway. He uses Kant to demonstrate.
In Kant, the object of thought must be internal to the thinking mind, because the object as in-itself has been excluded from thought. However, this does not relieve him of the need to account for the material aspect of “the object”, even as the object exists within the mind as an idea. This is where the Aristotelian terminology helps. An object, as an individual, substance, a particular, necessarily consists of matter and form. So Adorno indicates that the matter of the in-itself, is excluded from thought by Kant, but it is merely replaced by sensibility. Sensibility is the possibility of sensation, and “matter” is potential. This is why he said in the last section that the transcendental subject as “form”, requires “sensation”. Sensation is now the matter of the that subject, effectively negating the “transcendental” aspect. Adorno says:
Sensations, the Kantian matter, without which the forms could not even be imagined, which are therefore the conditions of the possibility of cognition in their own right, have the character of that which is transient.
How I interpret all this, is that in the traditional Aristotelian ontology, the thing-in-itself, what Aristotle called “the individual”, or “substance”, and what we call the particular, is defined as being a composition of matter and form (hylomorphism). So what does Kant do in the Critque of Pure Reason? He isolates the human mind from the individual object, thing-in-itself. But in so doing, he has to reconstitute the thing-in-itself, as the object within the thinking mind. So “matter” which defines the thing, in its independence from the mind, is simply assigned to sensation, and now is an essential aspect of “the object” within the mind.
Now the supposed transcendental subject, as the base for pure form, is really not separable from its matter, sensation. So what we have is the human subject being described on the model of Aristotelean hylomorphism, as a thing-in-itself. What Kant actually did was present us with a description of the human subject as a thing-in-itself, a composition of matter and form. This is just an extension of Cartesian dualism, body and mind. The subject is not the transcendent “thinking substance”, of Descartes, it is a combination of thinking aspect (form) and the sensing aspect (matter), and this is nothing other than a thing-in-itself under the traditional Aristotelian schema. So this is the glance into the thing-in-itself which Kant says we can’t have, but is actually already implied within his model.
I find this to be a difficult passage, and I don’t think that either you nor I have it quite right. So I’m going to take another stab at it.
The possibility of immediate knowledge of the absolute is what is destroyed as an illusion in the first part of the statement. That is the true part of Kant’s philosophy. So this “kind of mind” which Kant posits cannot be the kind which could grasp the absolute knowledge, that has been eliminated as impossible by what is claimed as the truth. Therefore, that the kind of mind which Kant describes could be the “archetypal intellect” is the falsity. We could say that the transcendental subject pretends to be the pure concept which is “being” itself, but this is a falsity, as it is actually united to its matter (sensations). And this means that Kant’s “subject” is really modeled after the Aristotelian thing-in-itself, as a unity of matter and form, an individual, which presupposes a glance at the in-itself as the basis of that model.
Well, I read it, and it doesn’t look as outrageous as your original formulation. And when you say…
… you’ve got to the same place as I have, just by a very circuitous route. I’ll pass over our differences in silence—except to say, I think you’re over-interpreting.
Adorno’s point is explicit and not even original or weird, so I don’t see the need for all this, which goes way beyond the text.
Adorno says that, like a lot of subjectivism, Kant’s dualism implicitly posits what it denies, in its very denial. We can probably agree on that.
These sorts of considerations seem to give rise to a paradox. Subjectivity, thinking itself, would not be explained by itself but rather by the factical, especially by society; but the objectivity of cognition in turn could not be without thinking, subjectivity.
To understand this paradox, it helped me to look back at the previous sections, because there’s a thread running through them.
Quoting myself for context
According to his denial of the self-standing priority of each pole of the subject-object opposition, there might seem to be a paradox, because it’s contradictory to say that x is based on or presupposes y and that y is based on or presupposes x.
But…
Such a paradox originates from the Cartesian norm that the explanation ought to ground what comes later, or at least logically later, in what comes earlier. The norm is no longer binding [verbindlich].
In Cartesian philosophy, grounding is always one-way grounding. What dialectics can handle easily—reciprocal dependency—Cartesian philosophy finds to be an unnaceptable logical contradiction, because it violates one-way grounding.
Adorno’s critique:
But the matter-at-hand is not to be explained according to a hierarchical ordering schemata, called up from outside.
Explaining the reciprocal relationship according to one-way grounding is an imposition of an external norm, applied without justification. It is not drawn from the matter itself. The hierarchy of one-way grounding is presupposed and laid over the matter at hand like a template. But this is to presuppose the very thing in question, and…
the explanatory attempt presupposes the explanation, which it first needs to find
Then he says something interesting:
In certain respects, dialectical logic is more positivistic than the positivism which condemns it: it respects the object which is to be thought as thought, even there, where it does not follow the rules of thought.
The first part of the sentence plays on positivism’s self-image as the approach to knowledge that respects the object for what it is and no more, i.e., without the additions and distortions of metaphysics. But ironically, dialectical logic, which positivism classes as one kind of illegitimate metaphysics, actually respects the object more than positivism does, because it doesn’t forget that it is a constituent of thought, and it allows it to be contradictory, i.e., “does not follow the rules of thought”.
The rest of the section argues, entertainingly and persuasively, in favour of dialectical reason, especially how it sidesteps foundationalism, the need for a first.
There is a part that stands out:
To be sure antagonism is no more limited to society than suffering. So little as dialectics is to be extended to nature as a universal explanatory principle, so little nevertheless are two kinds of truth to be maintained next to each other, the dialectical one inside society and one indifferent towards it. The separation of social and extra-social being, oriented to the compartmentalization of the sciences, deceptively veils the fact that blind natural-rootedness perpetuates itself in heteronomous history.
This is said kind of in passing, but if you combine it with what he says in the final paragraph about identity, you begin to see what he meant way, way back in LND, lecture 1:
To put it in a nutshell, in both cases we are dealing with the principle of mastery, the mastery of nature, which spreads its influence, which continues in the mastery of men by other men and which finds its mental reflex in the principle of identity, by which I mean the intrinsic aspiration of all mind to turn every alterity that is introduced to it or that it encounters into something like itself and in this way to draw it into its own sphere of influence.
— LND p.9
Here in ND itself he establishes the continuity implicit in this statement: mastery of nature, mastery of men, and identity-thinking all go together.
Sure, it would appear like something you might call “over-interpreting” to you, but that’s just the way I interpret. Like I said, I don’t take what is meant by the author for granted. Being skeptical I look for justification. If justification for a given statement cannot be found then the statement doesn’t “fit” in the context, and I find this to be a form of incoherency, as a blockage to any attempt at understanding.
But Adorno is very good at justifying what he says, and this is why your interpretation is generally quite consistent with my Meta-interpretation. If you take someone like Wittgenstein for comparison, interpretations are all over the place, because there’s a very noticeable (perhaps intentional) disjunct between what he states, and what he demonstrates.
Yes, what is said (the content, or subject matter) is not original or weird, but his way of saying it (the form) is original. And because “form” is the aspect of thought which is generally derived through culture, education, and society in general as ideology, a uniqueness of form is something very interesting to me, and deserving of analysis.
It’s analogous to an artist with a unique or peculiar style. A certain type of person will seek to understand how the artist came to develop that unique style. Then one might try to identify particular individuals who have influenced the artist while the artist avoided the trend toward institutionalized training. Such analysis is very speculative needless to say, so I posit it as opinion.
I think the object becomes the first grounder when we imagine a group of people looking at the same object. They each experience it differently, according to their own physical and psychological makeups.
If we inject dialects with a traveling ground, we might end up saying each person is seeing a different chair, or whatever it is.
Since our dramas, great and small, are arranged like a theatre, with a single, shared stage, and actors (subjects) which grapple with the same events, each from his or her own POV, we end up relying on the stage as the ground.
To leave that behind is disorienting, like cubism, expressionism, or surrealism. Maybe it helps to remember that the drama, which ordains the stage, is also made of interdependent parts. The drama is an arc.
Hegel’s philosophy was regarded by many or most Marxists as a philosophy that had been superseded in Marx’s own work. Marx began as a Left Hegelian alongside Feuerbach, but once he had come up with his original theory, he had—according to Marxists—progressed beyond that group, and Marxists later tended to think of the Hegelian vestiges in Marx’s writings as something that could be expunged from the theory proper. From this point of view—that of Karl Korsch and many others—Adorno and the other members of the Frankfurt School had regressed into Left Hegelianism, an essentially pre-Marxist theory.
And the gist of the criticism was that Adorno had retreated back into theory, ignoring the fact that the theory was finished already. The Marxist critique of philosophy said that the point is to change it, and this was taken by Marxists as a call to action. Thus, according to these critics, negative dialectics failed to make this move into praxis.
Adorno responds to these accusations in this section, and it’s a response we’re familiar with from the lectures, specifically lecture 5 (I posted about it here).
The overall point is that for Adorno, theory must remain independent of praxis and must not be expected to justify itself according to practical applicability, if it is ever to be of any use to praxis at all.
In lecture 6 he shows how serious he is about practical matters, despite the abstraction of his philosophy:
This fact of being thrown back onto philosophy has its real equivalent in the present situation. We find ourselves in a kind of historical breathing space. We are in a situation in which it is once again possible to give serious attention to thought, thanks to current material conditions and also to the relatively peaceful climate, at least in the Federal Republic. And the attempts to confuse us about this and to keep on crying wolf have become ideology at this moment in time because an analysis of con- temporary society suggests that in the long run a situation in which reflection is possible cannot last – so that we should seize the oppor- tunity while it is there. And I would say that this opportunity implies a kind of obligation for us all, and especially for you, to put in some serious thought and not allow yourselves to be diverted by the feeling that mental activity should be subordinated to the hectic bustle of everyday activity
LND, p.57
With the benefit of hindsight we may doubt the optimism of this assessment (though he was right that the peaceful and prosperous postwar situation wouldn’t last) but the basic point regarding the relationship of theory and praxis seems plausible enough.
In the present section of ND, Adorno is defending himself (and others like him) against critics and enemies on both sides of the Iron Curtain. In the East, dialectical materialism (Diamat) had hardened into an unquestionable dogma according to which the philosophy had been completed already, and it was now just a matter of allowing the Party to guide society towards communism. In the West, there were critics on the right, such as liberal positivists, and on the left, not only the official Communist Parties but also the anti-Stalinist groups who persitently demanded action.
The most interesting passage is this one:
Whoever scolds theory as anachronistic, obeys the topos of dismissing as outmoded what was thwarted and remains painful. Therein precisely the course of the world is reconfirmed, which it is the very idea of theory not to obey, and the theoretical target is missed, even when it is successfully abolished, whether positivistically or by power-decree.
What was thwarted and remains painful refers to the failure of socialist movements and continued suffering—whether in socialist states that hardened into authoritarian bureaucracies, fascist dictatorships, or in Western capitalism. He is saying that the attack on mere theory is tantamount to dismissing these realities, to accept what has happened and to paper over it—which is exactly what theory does not do.
Theory’s target, namely real injustice, is left untouched by the abolition of theory. You cannot pretend that the injustice has been banished by silencing the theory that criticized it.
Very interesting. The thing is, Adorno would ask why a shared object (or world) requires it to be the ground. In other words, it’s not the case that the only alternative to a foundational object is isolated private perceptions. I mean, isn’t this the false dichotomy that Adorno is criticizing? Mediation doesn’t rule out a shared world.
That said, I do recognize the vertiginous discomfort of losing the one-way grounding, given the strength of that philosophical tradition.
Anyway, if I’m not mistaken you move towards a more dialectical view at the end of your post.
Myths are very potent. They have a tendency to take over our minds. Dialectics has the potential to give us freedom from the pervasive organizing force of myths. Why?
First think about the way we generally treat the earth as if it’s stationary. Per Einstein, this is a fiat that we do subconsciously. We could pick some other point, but a life wrecking disorientation would result. So we just keep the fact that the earth isn’t absolutely fixed in our little cosmology closets. We take the fact out every now and then, if we’re thinking about why the temperate zone has seasons, and then we stuff it back in its closet.
It’s much more profound issue with objectivity (which also uses the xyz axes, but also treats the object as foundational). Why?
Think of the Trojans pulling the horse into the courtyard. They’ve been fooled by the Greeks. So the Greeks know something they don’t. The concept of Truth emerges. There is a Truth that the Greeks know, and they’re trying to keep it hidden until the big reveal.
The very idea of being fooled implies that the object is foundational. And if you think about it, this goes on and on in the way we picture ourselves in the world.
So we have common, everyday narratives, like eating breakfast. These little narratives are assumed to have their place in bigger ones. And the Super narrative is our over-arching myths.
So think about the myth of proletariat emancipation. This was no small myth. It was everywhere in the western world. In the US, it had invaded Christianity. And then we have the myths Heidegger followed. These myths also emerged from deep within the European psyche. What these Nazi myths (for lack of a better term) had in common with Marxism, is that they both foretold the advent of a new world. This myth is actually a couple of thousand years old. And it consumed Hegel. It consumed Marx. It definitely consumed Heidegger.
And each of these thinkers had the key to being released from the power of the myth: dialectics.
But just like realizing that the earth is only stationary by fiat, dialectics takes us out of all narratives and leaves us contemplating the very nature of the self. My dear self, great hero of my story, is one face of a double sided coin. Holy shit!
This ramble was inspired by Adorno, so thanks for introducing me to it.
I’m having some difficulty with this section. It seems fraught with problems and I think the problems stem from an attempt to support this principle you call “reciprocal dependency”. At first glance, I don’t see how this could be an acceptable principle because in the case of logical priority it will inevitably lead to a vicious circle of logic, and in the case of physical causation it will produce an infinite regress, if maintained. Furthermore, by the end of the section it is a little unclear as to whether Adorno intends to stay true to that principle anyway.
The issue is the relation between the subjective and the objective, and the proposed reciprocal dependence, which would appear to be a sort of paradox. The subjectivity of thinking depends on the objectivity provided by society, and vise versa. So the problem is described as follows:
But the matter-at-hand is not to be explained according to a hierarchical ordering schemata, called up from outside. Otherwise the explanatory attempt presupposes the explanation, which it first needs to find; presupposing non contradictoriness, the subjective thought-principle, as inherent to what is thought, to the object.
What I disagree with here is the way that he characterizes the “hierarchical ordering schemata” which is produced from the “subjective thought-principle”, as being “called up from outside”. He just rejected the transcendental subject in the last section, and portrayed the subject as attached to its matter. So the ordering schemata is not being called up from outside the object, if called up by the subjective thought-principle, but it inheres within the subject. And this implies that it is inherent to the object secondarily, when “object” is defined by the “objectivity of cognition” the facticity of society, due to the subject/object relation.
What is presupposed by the subjective, is not the explanation itself, but that there is an explanation. This constitutes the desire for an explanation which serves as the motivation for subjective thought. The true “object” of the subjective thought therefore is that goal, and that goal is defined by non contradictoriness. So the object, as goal, what Plato called “the good”, is inherent to the subjective thought-principle, but the issue is that it is not necessary. There is no particular goal which is necessary as object of thought, to the subjective thinking.
So it is only by associating “object” with facticity, the “objectivity pf cognition” which is proper to society, that the subjective thought-principle is said to inhere within the object. Notice that the subject is the medium between the two senses of “object”, the subjective goal, and the objectivity of cognition.
The issue may be a common equivocation with the term “objectivity”. Objectivity is assigned by Adorno to society, through “facticity”, but this does not equate with “of the object”, because it is described as the “objectivity of cognition”. “Cognition” itself is not necessarily an object of thought , and if we are to assign “cognition” to cognition, as an “object” it would have to be in the sense of a subjective goal, a good, an end, to cognize cognition. But the “object”, as goal inheres within the subjective aspect. Therefore the object (goal) of subjective thinking may be to understand thought and cognition, but as such an “object”, it is this desire, or goal, which presupposes that this is the thing to be understood.
So there is confusion between “the object” which inheres within the subjective thought-principle, as the goal, the desire for an explanation, and “the object” of the supposed facticity, which supports “objectivity of cognition” which I would say is ideology. There is an experienced interdependency between “the object”, as the goal which is “explanation”, and the subjective thought. However, “the object” of the “objectivity of cognition”, which is the facticity of ideology, is not necessarily consistent with “the object” as the goal of explanation, therefore the interdependency cannot be extended in that way.
That becomes evident in the confusion of the following statement:
Thought need not remain content with its own juridicality [Gesetzlichkeit]; it has the capacity to think against itself, without sacrificing itself; were a definition of dialectics possible, this might be one worth suggesting.
This is quite ambiguous. If we allow “thought” to be the property of the “objectivity of cognition”, the multitude of thinkers which constitutes “society”, then it is very evident that thought thinks against itself, as one person thinks in a way contrary to another. But if “thought” is an individuated property of one thinking subject, then we have a completely different meaning. This would describe how, in decision making an individual weighs two opposing propositions at the very same time. Considering opposing propositions appears like ot is thinking against itself. But this is not a paradox at all, “to think against itself”, it is simply what thinking is, to consider opposing principles at the very same time, to weigh them in decision making.
Now, that principle of interdependency is applied:
What is seemingly unbearable about this, that subjectivity would presuppose the factical, but objectivity the subject, is unbearable only to such delusion, to the hypostasis of the relationship of cause and effect, of the subjective principle which the experience of the object does not mesh with.
As described at the beginning of the paragraph, dialectics has made the object of thought, thought itself. This allows the thought which is the analysis of thought to run tangential to thought analyzed as object, thereby avoiding the rules of thought. It is those rules, logic, which make interdependency appear as unbearable, but this is delusional. It is delusional because it is based in the appearance that the thinking of the subject does not mesh with the object (the objective rules), forcing the appearance that the thinking subject must conform to the rule of logic, and the rule of logic makes interdependency unbearable. And this is because the desire to understand thought, which makes thought the object of thought, is by no means necessary, nor is following the rules of logic necessary.
That is an extremely difficult paragraph. I understand it in the way I described above. The object of the subjective thinking is the goal, the good. So I can draw an analogy with Aristotle’s distinction between apparent good and real good. The one is associated with subjective thought, the other with the objectivity of cognition (or God sometimes). The latter consists of ethical rules, or in this case logical rules, which the former is not necessarily bound by. To adhere to rules is a choice, and in the case of real vs apparent good, it is only when the two are consistent, that necessity is produced.
The thinking of the subject does not mesh with the object unless the real good and apparent good are one and the same. This is what supports logical necessity, as the above mentioned “desire for an explanation” would be consistent with the ideological rules of the objectivity of cognition. The subject however is between these two senses of “object” and has a different relation with each, therefore the mention of “two kinds of truth to be maintained next to each other, the dialectical one inside society and one indifferent towards it”. Here, “indifferent towards it” signifies the arbitrariness which I described as the lack of necessity.
This produces the requirement for the footnote on different senses of “identity” and the evolution of usage. Whether the principle of interdependency can actually be supported, and is not just a ruse of subjectivity, in its attempt to escape the ultimate preponderance of the object, I haven’t figured out yet.
You’ll be happy to hear that I have little to add concerning this section. I think the following line sums it up pretty well:
The liquidation of theory by dogmatization and the ban on thinking contributed to bad praxis; that theory should win back its independence is the interest of praxis itself.
That’s a substantial post. I’ll focus on just a couple of things that I think get to the root of our disagreement.
In the phrase “called up from outside,” outside is not outside the object, but rather, outside the matter-at-hand, where the matter-at-hand is the subject-object relation taken on its own terms rather than pre-formatted by one-way grounding (or another way to put it, the object as mediated by this relation and yet carrying the non-identical).
Adorno is saying that the demand for a one-way grounding is external to the thing being explained; it is indeed coming from the subject, imposed on the object, or to be more precise, imposed on the present subject-object relation, i.e., the one that matters.
I think Adorno would say that a circle is only vicious, and a regress only troublesome, if you already assume that explanation must ultimately end in a first—that grounding runs one way and has to bottom out. But that is exactly the Cartesian norm he says is “no longer binding.” (Identifying the circle in the logical case and the regress in the causal one are two aspects of the same demand)
So like I said, I don’t deny how binding it often does still feel, but it’s this intuition that is being singled out as a false legacy.
I think I addressed this in the post, or at least attempted to. If the one-way grounding is imposed on the subject-object relation from the outside, by the subject, then this presupposes the Cartesian-Kantian perspective of transcendental subject. But Adorno has already discredited this transcendental subject by showing how Kant’s subject as “form” is necessarily attached to its matter, as the sensation. Hence the presupposed glance into the in-itself, as the subject has actually been described as an object in the metaphysics of hylomorphism.
So Adorno cannot turn back to this Cartesian-Kantian claim of transcendental subject, to say that the demand for one-way grounding comes from outside the subject-object relation, because he has just shown how this perspective actually makes the subject into the object. I believe that this is why Kant’s metaphysics is equally supportive of transcendental materialism, as transcendental idealism. He defines the object, thing-in-itself, as transcendental, then he claims the subject to the transcendental. So both the subject and object can be taken as transcendental.
Notice though, that this one-way grounding is a rule of logic. And the idea that thinking must follow such rules is what is described as delusion. That is why the principle is not binding. Likewise, the rule of noncontradiction is not binding, and this is evident as thinking thinks against itself.
The problem I see though, is that the rules are the objective aspect, and now he is describing the subjective thinking as as not being bound by the objective. So now he is actually placing the subject as not bound by any specific subject-object relation, but as having choice to decide whether or not to be bound by the objective. This assigns logical priority to the subject, and reintroduces the on-way grounding. The subject in its logical priority is not outside the subject-object relation but already within.
I think it is indeed a paradox. We can decline rules of logic, and deny that one-way grounding is a logical necessity. But, in doing this we demonstrate the logical priority of the subject, thereby proving through a physical demonstration the necessity of one-way grounding.
I believe this is similar to what happens with mathematical axioms. Many mathematicians tend to believe in “pure mathematics”, where the logician (mathematician) is not bound by any restrictions of the physical world in designing axioms. However, it turns out that the axioms which are useful are the ones which have some form of correspondence with the physical world, so these are the ones which get accepted and become conventional. So “objective mathematics” is the principles that work in the physical world, even though the mathematicians insist that they are not bound by the physical world in setting the principles. Likewise, the subject may insist that one is not bound by one-way grounding, but in making this insistence, the priority of the subject over the object is demonstrated, making this paradoxical.
I expressed myself poorly and didn’t get my point across. I tried using the word “present” to convey it, but it doesn’t hit the spot.
imposed on the present subject-object relation
I’m referring here to the relation in a particular case, like looking at a table or thinking about the Roman Empire. In each case there is a particular matter-at-hand. To demand a one-way ground is to impose a conceptual scheme on the particulars of thought/perception/experience. It is not the subject-object relation as a whole or as such that one is imposing the hierarchy upon, but the subject-object relation as it constitutes the matter at hand.
It’s like imposing a method on given content. Maybe something I said in my post about LND Lecture 1 is relevant:
Adorno criticizes philosophical method “in the precise sense,” e.g., that of Descartes in his Discourse on the Method, as an attempt to force the world into a pre-established, abstract conceptual schema. As ready-made methodology applied to the matter at hand, it sees what it expects to see, because in its original formation it has been (a) abstracted too much from the real world and (b) ossified by its formalization. Not only that, but it elevates the rational subject, the philosopher, to the status of an arbitrating, neutral overseer. In contrast, dialectical thought emphasizes the entwinement of method and content, and of subject and object, thus of the philosopher and the world
So the point is that the subject isn’t a transcendental subject that exists prior to or above the relation; it’s the subject at one end of the relation, over-extending a pre-formed philosophical or methodological principle.
In a nutshell, outside is referring to a method external to the matter-at-hand, not a standpoint external to the relation in general.
On the other issue, maybe I can just say: the fact that one pole of the relation can refuse the hierarchical schema does not entail its (the subject’s) status as ground. This supposed entailment equivocates two senses of “priority”: spontaneity in the act of thinking (the subject isn’t entirely compelled by the rules) versus priority as in constitution or grounding (the relation bottoms out asymmetrically in the subject as a first). “Not bound by X” is not equal to “prior to X”.
EDIT: I sped through this section (NON-CONTRADICTORINESS NOT HYPOSTASIZABLE) fairly quickly and then moved on, but it’s worth pausing to consider that it might be as formal a statement as we will find in ND on exactly how identity-thinking functions, an explication of its mechanism. I.e., Non-contradictoriness is the logical form of identity-thinking.
