NEGATIVE DIALECTICS (1)

[Ralph Dumain]

I don't know if we are all on the same page, but I assume we're all using
the same edition.  Mine is the paperback NEGATIVE DIALECTICS by Theodor W.
Adorno, translated by E.B. Ashton (New York: The Seabury Press, 1973).  The
translator's introduction did not help me out too much, least of all in
explaining just what the term negative dialectics means.  Adorno's
introduction, however, is most enticing.

Before I continue, some words of my own on Adorno.  I'll leave the negative
aspects of my evaluation of him out for the time being.  I think what I find
most essentially admirable about Adorno is that he has the courage to be
unabashedly theoretical while being uniquely open and above-board in dashing
the pretensions of the self-sufficient theoretical intellect.  Indeed, like
Feuerbach and young Marx, Adorno is acutely aware that philosophy is not
identical with itself; its explanations cannot be digested merely on the
basis of its pretensions, on what it is, but it must ultimately be
understood in terms of what it is not, what is outside of philosophy and
engenders it.  This is the insight that Feuerbach brought to the table, a
promise for a new practice of philosophy, which he could not himself carry
through to a satisfactory conclusion.  Because we think we know what Marx
had to say about Feuerbach and the alleged primacy of praxis, we ourselves
are abysmally ignorant of the true significance of the Feuerbachian moment,
having been misled by a near-century of Stalinist misunderstanding of the
meaning of unity of theory and practice.  I cannot know without further
study if Adorno operates with the same implicit understanding I do, but I
read him from the first sentence as re-entering and then departing that
historical moment backward from his present moment, haunted by the ghosts of
Feuerbach and the screaming millions of Auschwitz.

My method of presentation will be unconventional.  For each idea that
intrigues me, I will cite only one sentence (well, sometimes two) out of a
stream of related sentences that most haunts me, with a page number, and
perhaps with a few remarks.  These I hope to be springboards for further
commentary.

(1) "Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to
realize it was missed." (p. 3)  

(2) "Once upon a time, compared with sense perception and every kind of
external experience, it was felt to be the very opposite of naivete; now it
has objectively grown as naive in its turn as the seedy scholars speaking on
subjective isolation seemed to Goethe ..." (3)

(3) "Hegel, despite the doctrine of the absolute spirit in which he included
philosophy, knew philosophy as a mere element of reality, an activity of the
divison of labor, and thus restricted it." (4)

(4) "No theory today escapes the marketplace." (4)

(5) "Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity." (5)

(6) "Still, in the administered world the impoverishment of experience by
dialectics, which outrages healthy opinion, proves appropriate to the
abstract monotony of that world." (6)