All reality is subjective private mental state — Corvus

It proves that Banno has never read Hume or Kant — Corvus

Kant wrote his massive tome to show this is wrong.

Mind in Life — Wayfarer

Sent me to sleep, that one. I may try again one day.

Yeah that's more like it :grin:

reason is just a tool — Tom Storm

As Wayfarer might be about to point out, this is the problematic Enlightenment notion of reason which is in question.

On the other hand, could you tell me if there will be a way to fine-tune the settings to hide topics I don't want to see (in case I want to create an echo chamber and not know what people think about certain things?) — Astorre

Yes, on the new platform you'll be able to mute topics and whole categories, so that they don't appear on the /latest page.

I also wanted to suggest, if appropriate, adding more sections—for example, metaepistemology or axiology—so that I could narrow my choices a bit more — Astorre

We can always make subcategories but I don't think those ones would be used enough to merit that.

I also thought the layout from the old site was better in certain ways (although it had countless bugs and unreliability problems) because it showed the categories and the posts by recency by each category and not just everything at once. What happens under our current system is that if 10 people come up with new religion posts (for example), the main board is overwhelmed with that and it looks like that's the ony thing being discussed. If posts are divided by category, that doesn't happen because you can just not pay attention to those categories you're not interested in. I don't know if the new software addresses that or not though. — Hanover

I've made the home page of the new site show topics from all categories ordered by most recent, just like here. But unlike here, if you go to the "All categories" page the categories are ordered by most recent—so that page would fit what you'd like to see as the home page (Philosophy of Religion would show at the top but wouldn't overwhelm the page). Personally I wouldn't want that as the home page. Maybe I'll do a poll.

On the old site I always went to /latest or whatever it was, which was the same as our home page here.

Anyway in Discourse it's all configurable.

Had some problem receiving emails from this site when changing passwords. If the move over to the new site requires an email invite for the current account, what happens if it fails? — Christoffer

It won't be invitation-only and you'll be able to just go to the site and sign up yourself. I'll be making an announcement when it's open for new sign-ups. As I say, around March.

Wouldn't there be an email list for all current members? So that taking that list into approved members for the new site will work and when signing up the email is already registered on an approved list there.

Meaning, using the email you registered on this site will let you into the door of the new site when registering. — Christoffer

It's essential that all users of the new site have read and explicitly agreed to the new Acceptable Use Policy. New users confirm that when they sign up. So there won't be any pre-approved accounts.

Also, what happens to stuff hidden on this site from people not logged in? Like the short stories? If there's stuff like that disappearing from view, maybe that should be moved over to the new site? — Christoffer

Since I have to write some code that turns the existing site into a static site (based on the data export), I can make everything visible (obviously not private messages).

EDIT: Actually you'll need to verify your email when you sign up. If emails from infoatthephilosophyforumdotcom are not reaching you, that will be an issue.

Even if they're on old-fashioned software I think we should celebrate the continuing existence of independent discussion forums. Not everyone wants to discuss everything on Reddit.

Yes, I had a look at that when I was researching NodeBB. To be fair—and because I'm reflexively argumentative—dull isn't necessarily bad for a forum, and NodeBB can be customized extensively. What matters more to me is how smoothly everything works. Discourse in my opinion just runs better, always looks nicer due to better all-round design and compatibility of themes and colour schemes, and setup is less of a struggle.

It sounds like there is not anything our current software can do that the new software cannot do. If that's correct, then we can not only fully replicate what we had, but we can also add to it.

I say this in response to Outlander, who is concerned that the Shoutbox as we know it will necessarily disappear with the introduction of a live chatbox. I would think (or suggest) that if there were a desire to start a thread that was lounge-like and not chat-like, that could be done?

If the two turned out the same, there'd be no need for both, but if there were an important difference, maybe have both, but that to be determined as we go along. — Hanover

Well, I'm planning on having a Lounge at the new place too, although I want it to be different:



NOTE: This is not final. It's also a bit confusing because it says "chat," and there's already live chat for that.

Otherwise, I'd like to know precisely what "lounge-like and not chat-like" means. For example, some people might not like chat because the textbox is so small: they might want a large box to compose a wee story with multiple paragraphs. They might be unaware that you can do paragraphs in chat using shift+return. In Discourse the textbox gets bigger when you do that. It never gets as big as the composer in the long-form discussions, but big enough for most Shoutbox posts, I would think.

Anyway, the community will decide. If a long-form discussion in the Lounge turns into an effective Shoutbox I might consider letting that continue. But I'm heavily into turning the Shoutbox into a chatroom so I'll resist such developments.

:cool: :up:

During the transition, is keeping the email info current critical to rolling over to a new account? I have just have been relying on messages once signed in to communicate. — Paine

You can use a new email address at the new site, and you can change your email address here as well if you like.

Out of curiosity, why did you opt out of your former idea of going with Communiteq hosting? — Leontiskos

Fair question.

I'm sure Communiteq is good but I think we're better off long-term with Discourse.org . My strategy is to go with the official premium product and see if we can afford it—we can always move to Communiteq or self-hosted later on if it proves to be too much. But I don't see why we couldn't cover $100/month. We've just been too relaxed about subscriptions—if we'd made a bigger deal about it I'm sure we could have got more members to subscribe.

This is a serious website and we want it to keep going for a long time. It deserves the real thing, not just a cheaper third party alternative. I realize this might seem shallow or impressionistic but I think it's significant nonetheless. Discourse.org seems like the professional option.

On Discourse.org we're dealing with the people who develop the software. They know what they are doing. Updates and plugin compatibility and what-have-you are handled by those who know the code most intimately. Support is fast and definitive, and the service is extrememely reliable.

It also has better performance due to differences in their server infrastructure, apparently.

Incidentally, I tried NodeBB for a couple of weeks and XenForo for a couple of days, and some other more Enterprisey things like circle.so . I was almost ready to go with NodeBB but then I tried Discourse again and the experience was substantially better than NodeBB.

Also, ↪regarding
"form and content in philosophy," I would suggest "zen mode reading" (and not just composing), where one can devote their entire screen to the topic at hand (example). Although I think Discourse allows this modification on a user level by default...? — Leontiskos

I can't see this functionality anywhere but I just tried the Firefox reader-view and it worked fine, so I presume other browsers can achieve the same thing. Anyway look:



When the sidebar is collapsed it's pretty distraction-free, no?

It's also worth noting that once web pages and forums became asynchronous the distinction between live vs. non-live chat was largely superseded. Older forum software which was not asynchronous (and required a page re-load after submitting a post or PM) is now gone. It was that page load that made it feel "non-live." Of course, that model was nice insofar as it felt more "long form" (like sending a letter), but the current Shoutbox is this weird amalgam between short-form and long-form media. An instant message style UI would simply be better for the TPF Shoutbox (although the non-paginated Discourse format is already more "live" than a paginated format). It would also help discourage short-form bleed into the main forum. — Leontiskos

Yes, good points. The difference is partly in how the functionality is presented: in the long-form discussion, the big serious composer window is obviously for long posts, whereas it's just a small bare-bones textbox in live chat. Also we can implement minimum post length in the discussions.

Relatedly, I would propose time limits on editing. The perpetual editing of TPF leads to careless composition, in my opinion. — Leontiskos

Yes, I'll be looking into that. I might make it subsciber-based. I'm pretty sure it can be implemented in Discourse anyway.

You can, but the search is wonky. It isn't thread-indexed, but rather functions via a search on common words in the thread title. So it will return results for any thread with similar titles. There are other problems too, such as the fact that threads containing special characters are unsearchable, and users with special name formats are not present in the mentions dropdown. — Leontiskos

Yeah, the search here is seriously defective.

In my experience a traditional Shoutbox or "live chat" is generally at the very top of the forum index (though this can—usually—be altered and even "collapsed" or outright hidden per user preference) and is roughly 5 - 10 lines of text "tall". Though it can be scrolled up. This discourages all but simple pleasantries and spontaneous "what's everybody up to" or perhaps the occasional "thoughts on today's topic of XYZ?", which is wholly sufficient, sure.. — Outlander

See the above. Chatrooms can be expanded to fill the main page panel.

As it is now, sometimes the Shoutbox takes a few days to reach a new page (10 replies), sometimes it creates more than one page in 15 minutes. From my experience live chat permanently truncates a certain number of older replies based on however many new replies are made. It's nice to be able to go back and see what was said a day or two ago. — Outlander

We can configure this. Right now I've got it saving the chat messages forever.

I actually only just realized that you can search within a discussion here on PlushForums, I mean without going to the Advanced Options page. Doh!

There are three Jamals. That's enough. — javi2541997

Yeah :grin:

Perhaps—another different feature I am thinking of—each thread would not be ordered with pages, as in PlushForums, but just a single page where all the comments and replies are posted. Then, if I wanted to reread a response from you, I would have to scroll until I found it; not go to page 261 as we do here. — javi2541997

Yep, no paging, either in chat or in regular discussions. But there are other ways of navigating within a discussion, and you can easily search within it too (for chat as well):

:up:

The Shoutbox won't be the same, but in my opinion it won't be worse. It never really belonged among the discussions, and this has caused problems.

Here are some screenshots of the Shoutbox, one expanded and one floating in the bottom right corner.





As you can see, it's pretty lonely there at the moment.

You're probably right. But even what's his name likes the idea of a "community posting room", likely for the reasons I've suggested. — Outlander

I don't get it. How could a live chat not function as a "community posting room"? Granted, I don't really know what it means.

I want the sites to be separate so I'll transfer thephilosophyforum.com to the new site and use something else for the archive.

The number of posts will be visible on the user's profile, but not within discussions.

Incidentally, aside from the number of posts we will have other things like badges, trust levels, and upvotes, though I'm not sure how we'll use them yet.

Understood. I appreciate that you will keep the site as a read-only archive. There are many memories here, and it would be a pity to lose them forever. — javi2541997

Indeed :up:

I guess we have to wait until you set up the new TPF to create our profiles in this new software, right? — javi2541997

Well, I've made progress in setting it up already, but unfortunately I can't open it up until everything is sorted out legally, I have a business bank account connected to the subscription system, and stuff like that.

I'm in. I hereby agree to the costs, investment and other features to keep things going. — javi2541997

Thank you for the support Javi. :up:

I wonder what some folk are going to think about having their post count reset to 0. Will that happen? How "fresh" will the new start be? Don't want to clutter up the public thread with my idiosyncratic bouts of curiosity.

Will we have to sign up again as if joining a new site? Or will we just load up TPF one March day and be on an empty new forum? Will new membership admittance be the same as it is now (ie. no temporary "open enroll" to get the initial numbers up, etc.)? — Outlander

Existing members will have to sign up to join the new site. This is essential for legal compliance, because this is where you will agree to the new Acceptable Use Policy.

So far I don't have a definite plan for how to get existing members over to the new site. Probably I'll make a list of members who have been active over the past year or so, and send an email. Otherwise, there will probably be a permanent announcement on the archive site.

And yes, I think we should probably open up the new site, to allow anyone to sign up, though with admin approval to activate accounts.

And so, what are we to make of this concept of philosophical responsibility? — Pussycat

An interesting question, PC. Maybe you could start a dedicated discussion topic.

This is quite nice, more ... humane than ND, meaning Adorno there speaks like a normal person, unlike the convoluting language employed in his theoretical work, I can actually understand him on first reading! — Pussycat

Yes, I find all his lectures are like that.

Do you think it is because he only wants to be critical that he doesn't develop his philosophy into an ontology and epistemology? Wouldn't the development be ideological, or lead back to ideology via reification? — Pussycat

Yep. Being critical or negative is a necessity, not just an evasion of philosophical responsibilities.

There are around 270 million citizens of countries with a king, and this is an international site. Please do not presume that your "we" covers everyone here.

EDIT: I promise I'm not anti-American, but this habit of Americans of assuming everyone is American is infuriating.

We have a climate change thread on the front page which tends to degenerate into personal attacks. Maybe it's a topic that would be better suited to the Lounge? — frank

Yes, we already closed the Politics & Current Affairs category and moved the active discussions to the Lounge, so to be consistent we should do the same with the thread in question. I'll move it.

:up:

If you're interested, there's a book of his 1965 lectures on metaphysics, which seems to be mainly about Aristotle: Metaphysics: Concept and Problems.

Good stuff. Since Adorno believes that in the interdependent subject-object relation, the interdependence is asymmetrical—the object has primacy, in that it always exceeds the subject logically and historically—you might say that his philosophy implies an ontology, because this priority is simultaneously an ontological one, establishing the irreducability of the object to the subject and the condition for the possibility of the subject.

The trouble, from your point of view, will be that refuses to develop this into a positive ontology, instead using it as part of a critical move to reveal the shortcomings of all ontology ever attempted.

And there's also the fact that his materialism, like Marx's, is not a metaphysical materialism, so it doesn't really concern itself with the ultimate nature of reality.

But let's see how it goes. :up:

Yet what I see in Adorno is a form of systematization around an opposition to "identity-thinking." I want to say that there is no thought that is not susceptible to systematization, and that every thinker is more or less systematic. But the curious question asks whether a thinker like Adorno who is emphatically opposed to "philosophical systems" in a thoroughgoing way could ever himself avoid a system erected around this goal—a goal that he energetically devotes himself to.

System-thinking is a form of monomania, and therefore anyone who is especially devoted to a singular cause will tend to be a system-thinker in one way or another. I would argue that the only way for the devoted person to avoid this is by devoting themselves to a cause that is not singular, and this is what the analogia entis or the coincidentia oppositorum attempts to provide. Causes which are negative and therefore act in opposition have an especially difficult time avoiding monomania. Adorno's cause is not only negative, but the thing that he opposes (identity-thinking) itself strikes me as being singular. At the same time, it does involve a certain ambiguity and subtlety which makes it vaguely familiar to Przywara's or Rommen's approach, but I think it will fail to avoid systems-thinking precisely because it is insufficiently ontologically grounded.

But again, I think the ultimate test here has to do with the way of life of the philosophers in question. Figures like Przywara or his student, Josef Pieper, intentionally lived lives that were resistant to systematization. Their activities, engagements, readings, and relationships were all significantly varied, which is what ultimately leads one away from monomania. Supposing that Adorno desperately wanted to oppose the Holocaust and its (logical) pre-conditions, the point here is that one can actually want to avoid the Holocaust too much, strange as that may seem. One can be led into a form of monomania even in their project to oppose pure evil (and this is a basic reason why evil is so pernicious). In order to avoid systems-thinking one is required to engage systems and even evil systems in paradoxical ways (e.g. Luke 6:29). Totalitarian thinking is very likely to breed totalitarian thinking, either by propagation or, more likely, by opposition. When one says, for example, "This must never happen again!," they inevitably commit themselves to a coercive and systematizing approach. They are forced to offer a program which will guarantee a certain outcome, and guarantees require systems. — Leontiskos

Thanks Leon, this is beautifully expressed, erudite, full of interesting ideas, and fundamentally misguided.

I'm reminded of the famous charge that relativism is self-refuting, which Adorno criticized:

The popular argument ... that relativism presupposes an absolute, namely its own validity and thus contradicts itself, is wretched. It confuses the general negation of a principle with its own ascent to an affirmation, without consideration of the specific difference of the positional value of both. — Negative Dialectics Against Relativism

In other words, this popular argument against relativism mistakes a critical stance for a positive, universal proposition. Similarly, in your criticism of Adorno you mistake his critical focus on identity thinking for some first principle or originary ground—something that might function as the foundation of a system. But it's not that, and I don't think your performative-contradiction gotcha works. (It's not a temperamental fixation either, and I might come to that)

1. Adorno is not anti-system in any simple way. He regards system as a necessary or inevitable moment in, or element of, all significant philosophical thought, one that he has to pass through himself. Relatedly, he is not simply against identity thinking or classificatory concepts. These are all part of a process. Note that I do not mean that he uses them just to later on throw them away like Wittgenstein, rather that he uses them dialectically, such that they are always in play. Used like this they articulate what they cannot capture alone. The "system" of negative dialectics, if you want to call it that, is not a positive edifice but a set of critical movements designed to fail productively so as to demonstrate the priority of the object negatively, i.e., not by stating it but by showing the failure of the subject to fully constitute it.

2. System is not best characterized psychologically as monomania, but as a form of thought, one that tends to comprehensiveness and closure, synthesis and reconciliation, and the subsumption of the non-identical under identity. System, Adorno might say, is a conceptual expression of the social compulsion towards unquestionable authority. Reducing it to temperament misses its historical and structural character, basically that it's philosophical and sociological rather than psychological. The question is not whether a thinker is devoted or balanced, but whether their thought fits the conditions and reproduces or resists the social compulsion.

3. Adorno himself is not monomaniacal. His focus on identity thinking is not a singular fixation or cause that he is devoted to above all else. Identity thinking isn't just one thing among others or, quoting myself from above, a first principle or originary ground. Rather, it's the general form of conceptual thought in its historical actuality—the way of thinking, under concrete conditions, which assimilates the object to the subject. His critique is not pushing a specific doctrine but is focused on this tendency, which he analyzes from within rather than opposing from without.

4. Your comments about the Holocaust don't do justice to the role it plays in his thought. To say it must never happen again is not a moral program or the foundation of a system, but the basic condition under which philosophy can still justify its existence, given the new conditions. For Adorno, the Holocaust reveals a basic defect in the Enlightenment and modernity, one that cannot be ignored. Thus he refuses to prescind from Auschwitz and carry on philosophizing as though it were just an aberration or temporary setback. To accuse him of monomania is therefore to miss the point entirely: what looks like obsession might in fact be philosophy's overdue awareness that it can no longer prescind from the catastrophe that defines the modern age. (I should also note that when Adorno mentions "Auschwitz" he means it to stand for all instances of industrial mass-slaughter, not just the Holocaust).

As for totalitarianism, I think it's too easy, or perhaps superficial, to say that an anti-totalitarian philosophy might itself become totalitarian if it goes too far. I just don't agree that Adorno's focus is unhealthily obsessive or that it risks trampling over reality on the way to the guaranteed outcome of a program. The more common complaint is that Adorno doesn't offer anything at all that can function as a program, nor any projected outcome beyond the minimal hope of an end to suffering and domination. On the contrary, he is painfully aware of how the revolutionary program led to totalitarianism in the USSR and in his own country (I mean East Germany).

Your suggestion that philosophers ought to live lives of variety and balance, and stop making such a fuss about the Holocaust, reminds me of something Terry Eagleton wrote:

Those who speak of harmony and consensus should beware of what one might call the industrial chaplain view of reality. The idea, roughly speaking, is that there are greedy bosses on one side and belligerent workers on the other, while in the middle, as the very incarnation of reason, equity and moderation, stands the decent, soft-spoken, liberal-minded chaplain who tries selflessly to bring the two warring parties together. But why should the middle always be the most sensible place to stand? Why do we tend to see ourselves as in the middle and other people as on the extremes? After all, one person’s moderation is another’s extremism. People don’t go around calling themselves a fanatic, any more than they go around calling themselves Pimply. Would one also seek to reconcile slaves and slave masters, or persuade native peoples to complain only moderately about those who are plotting their extermination? What is the middle ground between racism and anti-racism? — Why Marx Was Right

I suppose, as I said, this is the point where I disagree with Adorno. That's not to say that I am judging either one of our perspectives to be true or false, in any absolute sense. I think that I simply believe that "ontology" has a different nature from what Adorno believes. Since, as I said, ontology is speculative, I cannot claim to be confident that I am right.

However, as I said a few days ago, I believe that the goal of ontology is to determine the immediate. True certainty can only be produced in this way. So to insist that there is mediation all the way down, I believe would be a self-defeating ontology. It's like saying that we might as well stop seeking certainty because we can never have it. — Metaphysician Undercover

Thank you MU, this is very good and clear. You and Adorno certainly disagree here, but I'd like to emphasize some things about his position with a view to achieving general agreement of interpretation. His "mediation all the way down" as I called it is not nihilistic. It's not saying we can never reach the truth, but proposing a search for truth which is very different from first philosophy, of which Heideggerian fundamental ontology is a newer version, according to Adorno. In a nutshell, he is against ontology as such. Now, I can respect that you cannot accept his position here, but maybe we can agree that this is what he thinks.

Not that it will change your mind, but I think the key might be to see that for Adorno, mediation is not an obstacle to truth, but rather its constitutive condition. This way of putting it is structurally similar to one of the ways I used to argue against indirect realism, phenomenalism, etc (BTW I haven't changed my mind about it, just left behind the debate): the sensorium is not a distorting medium between ourselves and the world, but is the condition for the world to appear to us at all, and is the means through which we are engaged with it. Just as indirect realists seem to regard only a suppositional perception without the senses as allowing us to get beyond ourselves to apprehend the Real, so ontologists in their own striving for immediacy regard only a non-sensory "intellectual intuition", a pure grasp of being, as sufficient for attaining the truth of what is.

So that's just an important reframing, away from mediation as distortion/contamination/corruption and towards mediation as constitution. The upshot is that truth is found in the totality of mediations. Or maybe better put: an object's truth-content is found in the totality of its mediations.

In terms of the history of philosophy Adorno goes something like this:

He is against all first philosophy, the traditional search in metaphysics for a foundational principle. He sees this as the paradigm in philosophy of coercive identity thinking. He therefore accepts Kant's verdict on metaphysics and the limits of reason, while rejecting the details of his system as hypostatizations of the bourgeois subject. He then embraces Hegel's dialectical method while rejecting his totalizing system, the synthesis of the Absolute, and so on.

Heidegger and others—Adorno uses "neo-ontology" to group them—attempted to find a way between German idealism, which they saw as another flawed philosophy of consciousness, and positivism, which they dismissed for its reductionism and scientism. The crucial way through was to accept Kant's critique of the attempt to know things-in-themselves while arguing that Kant had totally ignored a deeper question, that of the Being of those things. Adorno saw this as regressive, an escape from concrete mediation into a new mythology, another pre-critical first philosophy in disguise.

Regarding certainty, it would be interesting to examine Adorno's attitude to it. I expect it would look a bit like Wittgenstein's, insofar as it would reject absolute certainty but also avoid total relativism.

I think I see the point, I just don't agree. I think the nature of ontological questions is such that they transcend all social and historical conditions. That's why I said the same questions are asked throughout history and by every different culture. What varies is the formulation of the question. So the questions appear to differ but they really ask the same thing, i.e. how do we approach the unknown. The unknown has a different appearance depending on the social historical mediation, therefore the question has a different formulation depending on these factors. — Metaphysician Undercover

What did you think of my proposal of how to make my perspective consistent with Adorno's? If we recognize that since the formulation of the question is always going to be mediated by social and historical conditions, and we know that this is going to make the question asked, the wrong question, then we can conclude that the answer is always already within the question. The answer being that the question itself is mistaken, or the wrong question. — Metaphysician Undercover

My perspective is that the reason why the question is more important than the answer, is due to the need to determine the appropriate question. To be consistent with Adorno, maybe that's the answer which inheres within the question, that the question itself is wrong. — Metaphysician Undercover

I appreciate the effort, but since you still adhere to the promise of a transcendently correct question, I don't think it works. This implies that concrete conditions merely contaminate an attempted purity, whereas Adorno's point is that they're constitutive, that it's mediation all the way down.

I noticed that Pieter R van Wyk’s account has been deleted. Are you deleting all accounts for banned people now or was that a request by him? — T Clark

I don't usually do it unless I'm asked to do so but on this occasion I wanted to remove as many traces of him as possible without actually removing his posts, which woud be unnecessarily destructive.

Jamal...so if i'm understanding you correctly, you don't tolerate any type of self-promotion? Could you be more specific about the self-promotion you can't deal with? — ProtagoranSocratist

For example, if you fill your posts mainly with quotations from a book you have written, and mention that book in every post, that counts as self-promotion. But in fact, Pieter was banned not just for self-promotion but also for evangelism and crackpottery, since he appeared to believe that his book held all the answers.

Generally, putting links to your work in every post is the main thing we don't allow.

Site guidelines

I do see that he is proposing some form of empiricist perspective — Metaphysician Undercover

It's not anything I recognize as empiricism. The idea is rather that questions are socially and historically mediated, never completely separable from their formation. And they are also mediated subjectively in the intellectual experience of the philosopher, whose thinking is shaped by their situation. The concrete social and historical conditions produce certain questions, so we understand and attempt to answer the questions partly through understanding these conditions.

The person asking the question may not know the answer, but the question itself is not a blank slate. A question like What is freedom? asked in 5th century Athens and 18th century France are different questions. The historical context, the social struggles, the available language all mediate the question and pre-structure the field of possible answers.

Anyway, I know that many philosophers would object to this approach, but that's what Adorno is saying.

I think I'll be staying in the Shoutbox for a while. Juust in case — Outlander

You have one thing the crackpots don't have, which is humility. You don't claim to have all the answers, so don't worry.

I banned @Pieter R van Wyk for self-promotion and crackpottery.

Although I think he wants to target all phenomenologists including Husserl with this, just to make that explicit (not that you said otherwise), and not just Heidegger -- but Sartre, and Bergson, and anyone who might lay claim to "the things themselves" absent ratio: this being a sort of "flip side" to Hegel who claimed everything is "analytic" --- the idea goes from one to the next as any philosopher could judge -- where now by looking to the non-identical we are trying to set aside our desiderata in favor of the things where we cannot do so without some sort of ratio for the things themselves to be mediated by.

EDIT: I finished Being, Subject, Object and see I was following along with the general pattern of thinking -- he notes the difference between these thinkers there while grouping them. — Moliere

:up:

Yes, totally. It's not just about Heidegger, but he is in a way paradigmatic.

I'm still struggling slowly through "Question and Answer".

I'm totally on board with what Adorno is saying in this section, so maybe I can explicate it. For the moment I'll just address the bit about answers being included in philosophical questions.

Adorno is accounting for the ontological need, the dissatisfaction with neo-Kantianism and positivism that prompted the creation of philosophies such as Heidegger's:

That is why ontology has surrounded itself with its miasma. In keeping with an old German tradition, it considers the question more important than the answer; where it owes what it has promised, it has raised its failure for its part to a consoling existential.

So one reason the need continues to be felt is this idea in philosophy that the question is what is most important. You often see this even today, and not just in this German tradition: the fetishizing of the question.

BUT!

In fact questions [ do ] have a different weight in philosophy than in the particular sciences, where they are abolished through their solution, while their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting. This does not mean, however, as in the constant parroting of Kierkegaard, that the existence of the questioner would be that truth, which searches in vain for the answer. Rather in philosophy the authentic question almost always includes in a certain manner its answer. It does not follow, as in research, an if-then pattern of question and answer. It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it. Its answers are not given, made, produced: the developed, transparent question recoils in them.

I've added the bolded "do" to make it clear what Adorno is saying. He is saying that the idea has some truth to it.

First, I think we can all agree with Adorno that philosophical questions are generally/often not "abolished through their solution." That is, what appear as solutions are not really solutions at all, and the questions become reformulated or perhaps discarded as uninteresting, never solved with the gathering of data as in science. This is why "their rhythm in the history of philosophy would be more akin to duration and forgetting." The rhythm is not question -> data/proof -> solution.

Now, the way that a good philosophical question "almost always includes in a certain manner its answer" is that a good philosophical question already shows us what we are looking for; it tells us the kind of answer that will satisfy us—but unlike science this is not external. The question embodies a particular experience, one rooted historically and socially. So the answer is not external to the question, as it is with empirical data in science, but immanent to the genesis of the question. This is the meaning of "It must model its question on that which it has experienced, so that it can catch up to it."

None of this is meant to imply that we can immediately read off the answer straight from the question. Nor does it mean that the answer can be deduced in the manner of mathematics or formal logic, as if all philosophical questions implied the whole philosophical system of the world in microcosmic tautology.

Take for example this question: "How do body and soul interact?"

Descartes had a hypothesis:

The part of the body in which the soul directly exercises its functions is not the heart at all, or the whole of the brain. It is rather the innermost part of the brain, which is a certain very small gland situated in the middle of the brain’s substance and suspended above the passage through which the spirits in the brain’s anterior cavities communicate with those in its posterior cavities. The slightest movements on the part of this gland may alter very greatly the course of these spirits, and conversely any change, however slight, taking place in the course of the spirits may do much to change the movements of the gland. — The Passions of the Soul

If you can imagine this role of the pineal gland having been empirically confirmed, the question would have then disappeared. It would have turned out to have been a scientific question.

But as a philosophical question—which we now see that it is—it expresses the conditions of its genesis, defining a horizon of meaning. It presupposes that there are two distinct things and that they are problematically related. This expresses a worldview which is already part of the kind of answer that might satisfy the question. The answer would be the answer it was owing to its dualism, and this was in the question already.



The situated experience that constituted the genesis of the body-soul or mind-matter question would be one of feeling divided. I won't fill in the details but one can see how this feeling could be a result of social forces: we experience ourselves as thinking and willing agents, but also as objects in a world of mechanism and calculation; and because of the division of labour we see manual and intellectual work as entirely distinct. Adorno and Marx might put this in terms of alientation.

So Adorno isn't saying that asking a question magically gives you the answer, rather that in philosophy, the way a question is framed already expresses an insight into what it seeks. The question is not a neutral, disinterested request for information but the expression of an experience. Thinking it through, not importing information, is what brings answers to light.

So for Adorno, philosophy's task is to make questions transparent enough that they reveal their own truth-content.

EDIT: This is related to what I was saying elsewhere on TPF recently about genesis and validity. In a nutshell, the validity of a philosophical idea is never entirely unrelated to its genesis.

The Ontological Need: QUESTION AND ANSWER

The ontologies in Germany, particularly the Heideggerian one, remain influential to this day, without the traces of the political past giving anyone pause. Ontology is tacitly understood as the readiness to sanction a heteronomous social order, exempted from the justification of consciousness. That such considerations are denied a higher place, as misunderstanding, a falling astray into the ontic, and a lack of radicalism in the question, only reinforces the dignity of the appeal: ontology seems all the more numinous, the less it solidifies into a definite content, which the impertinent understanding would be permitted to get a hold of. Intangibility turns into unassailability. Whoever refuses to follow suit, is suspected of being someone without a fatherland, without a homeland in being, indeed not so differently from the idealists Fichte and Schelling, who denigrated those who resisted their metaphysics as inferior. In all of its mutually combative schools, which denounce each other as false, ontology is apologetic. Its influence could not be understood, however, if it did not meet an emphatic need, the index of something omitted, the longing that the Kantian verdict on the knowledge of the absolute ought not to rest there.

Adorno, here very much on the side of reason, begins by attacking Heideggerian irrationalism and accusing it and other such "fundamental ontologies" of tacit complicity with fascism.

For Heidegger, asking for justification for his ontology is already to have gone wrong. Thus he sets up his ontology as exempt from justification, and this is presented as proof of its profundity.

Notice Adorno says that Heideggerian philosophy exempts itself not just generally from justification, but specifically from the justification of consciousness. The point here is to assert consciousness against Heidegger's rejection of consciousness-centred philosophy and thus to emphasize that justification, and therefore also reason and critical autonomy, is constitutively subjective—or is always subjectively mediated. In all of modern philosophy it is from consciousness that reason arises and from there is imposed intersubjectively to achieve objectivity. Every philosopher in his own subjective reasoning must submit to the agreed rules of justification—but after all it is the subject who reasons. This attitude is most obvious from Kant through to German Idealism, in which the subject is elevated to a universal "I".

The appeal to unmediated access to Being is irrational because only through subjective mediation is reason applied, and in asking us to deny our own conscious reason Heidegger clears the ground for an uncritical acceptance of heteronomous authority, i.e., the social order imposed from outside consciousness in the name of "Being".

Moving on from his cursory assertion of neo-ontology's ideological function as fascist apologetics, he considers why this philosophy seems so attractive. It would not have been so influential, he says, had it not met a need.

But before I continue, I'm going to do this:


Heidegger's fundamental ontology & what Adorno doesn't like about it

I only know Being and Time from secondary literature and lectures; I have not read the work itself. What follows then is at best a rough sketch, but I think it'll be enough for an understanding of Adorno's casually delivered accusation of support for fascism, if not for an adequate assessment of it.

Heidegger in B&T begins with a revival of the question of the meaning of Being. Philosophy has spent most of its time investigating beings and their properties, not Being itself. This is the ontological difference; the investigation of beings is concerned with the ontic, whereas Being itself is ontological.

To begin his investigation of Being he focuses on the one particular being for whom Being is an issue, namely the human being. His name for this being is Dasein, which means "being-there". This analysis is entitled "The Analytic of Dasein".

Dasein is special because it already has a direct, pre-theoretical familiarity with Being. So instead of building a theory built on justification, Heidegger lays out the structures of Dasein's existence, giving us an "existential analytic". That this is all beyond the reach of rational critique is the central problem for Adorno.

EDIT: To be more precise, the central problem is that Heidegger's ontology is based on or consists of a rejection of rational critique. The traditional language of justification and the subjective is held to be superficially ontic. Since the ontology is therefore exempt from intersubjective reason, what you end up with is a new dogmatic philosophy.

According to Heidegger the nature of Dasein's existence means that the subject-object framework is wrong. Dasein is not a detached spectator but is rather characterized by being-in-the-world, where Dasein's world is a context of significance. Heidegger's account of being-in-the-world describes two ways Dasein encounters things: ready-to-hand, meaning they are made use of practically as familiar unquestioned parts of our world; and present-at-hand, meaning things are observed in a detached, theoretical manner, as in science.

Also part of what it is to be Dasein:

- Care: Dasein's basic structure, the condition of being concerned with its own being, projecting itself towards the future.
- Thrownness: Dasein always finds itself thrown into a context it didn't choose.
- The They: the conformist public which blocks Dasein's authentic potential.
- Authenticity: via anxiety and confronting one's own mortality one can act independently of The They.

These structures, the Existentialia, are presented by Heidegger as neutral insights which apply transhistorically to human existence. But for Adorno, rather than the eternal truths of Being, they grew out of a specifically German and conservative context and played an ideological role. And they were able to do this, and to pose as eternal and natural, because they were from the outset abstract, drained of substantive content: what does Dasein care about, and why? Into what kind of society is it thrown? Granted that Dasein's existence is one of being-in-the-world, but why should we just accept the given state of that world? Heidegger brackets the social and material conditions that shape it, treating them as ontologically neutral, so as to get at Dasein's being. But Adorno points out that this very effort and this crucial bracketing is to abandon the central philosophical task of critiquing all that exists. The result can only be social conformism and ideology, no matter how appealing and partially true Heidegger's analysis is.

But the real ideological danger is that the Existentialia are not as abstract and empty of content as they pretend to be. Although they're presented as formal structures, they're actually saturated with conservative, specifically German content: Thrownness implies Volk, Fatherland, and destiny; The They is part of an anti-Enlightenment critique of liberal modernity; etc. This move allows Heidegger to universalize what is actually a particular German Romantic worldview, giving it the authority of ontological necessity.

This is just self-promotion. I'm closing it.

I'm really enjoying the first section of "The Ontological Need". It's Adorno as we don't often get to see him so clearly, as staunch defender of the Enlightenment. He pretty much comes out and says it in the first few lines: Heidegger's ontology is philosophical support for fascism.

I'm still working through it though.