Maverick Philosopher

An excellent observation, first published in 1967. What would Adorno have to say about the situation now, almost forty years later? In particular, what would he have to say about cage fighting? I don't watch this trash, but a chess partner told me about a match (if that is what they call it) he had seen on TV recently.

An Hispanic and a white guy were in the cage, and the Hispanic's trainer was egging him on with cries of por la raza, for the race. Now what would liberals and leftists say about this? Would they celebrate the 'diversity' of it? And if the white man's trainer had urged the honkie to stand up for the white race, what would they say? They would scream 'racism' of course. But it is not racism when an Hispanic does it. This is one of the standard double standards of the Left. Jesse Jackson spouted similar nonsense a while back. According to Brother Jesse, it is not racism if a black does it. Is rational debate possible with people as benighted as this?

I am not saying that Adorno would apply such a crude double standard. He is a thinker of power and subtlety. But I could be wrong.

It can no longer be asserted that the true is the unchangeable while the mobile and mutable is mere appearance, or that eternal Ideas and the temporal realm are indifferent to each other . . . .

So what is our man saying? He is saying that after Auschwitz — where 'Auschwitz' collects all the genocidal and totalitarian horrors of the Third Reich — one can no longer take Platonism seriously, or the people's Platonism either, Christianity. And indeed most traditional philosophy, consisting as it does, in Whitehead's phrase, of a series of footnotes to Plato. The old metaphysics is dead, the metaphysics according to which Being itself has a positive and hence affirmable character. Cf. here. An experience has refuted the old metaphysics, the experience of Auschwitz.

But if it can no longer be asserted that that the true is the immutable, then it once could be asserted. And indeed, by 'assert' is intended assert with truth or at least justification. Note the ambiguity of 'assertible' as between capable of being asserted and worth of being asserted. And make a meta-note of how a broadly analytic thinker like me pedantically points out something like this whereas your typical Continental head would find my procedure boorish or somehow gauche. "How low class of you to be so careful and precise!"

But I digress. My point, again, is that if a proposition can no longer be asserted and believed, then it once could be asserted and believed. But if a metaphysical proposition was once true or believed with justification, then it is now true or believed with justification. For a metaphysical assertion is necessarily true if true at all. The structure of being cannot be contingent upon our contingent experiences, even experiences as shattering as that of the Nazi horror. (It is telling of course that Adorno does not mention the Stalinist horrors which were known since 1956 — but that is a separate post.)

What I am objecting to is Adorno's apparent historical relativism. By this I mean that view that truth itself is historically conditioned and thus capable of being different in different historical epochs. Metaphysical conceptions are of course historically variable, but not their objects, the structure of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again.

More fundamentally, what I am objecting to is Adorno's lack of any argument for his view that historical experience can refute a metaphysical thesis and his lack of consideration of the sort of (obvious) objection I am now raising.

The Continental 'trope' or 'move' — such-and-such can no longer be believed --ought to be defended or dropped. Why, for example, should it no longer be possible to believe in God after the horrendous events of the 20th century when people believed in God at the time of the Lisbon earthquare and the time of the Bubonic plague? What is so special about these 20th century horrors? The fact of evil may well rule out the existence of God, or more generally, the affirmability of Being. But if it does, this is surely no recent development.

Doctor, that is kind of you. – Nothing is harmless anymore. The small joys, the expressions of life, which seemed to be exempt from the responsibility of thought, not only have a moment of defiant silliness, of the cold-hearted turning of a blind eye, but immediately enter the service of their most extreme opposite. Even the tree which blooms, lies, the moment that one perceives its bloom without the shadow of horror; even the innocent “How beautiful” becomes an excuse for the ignominy of existence, which is otherwise, and there is no longer any beauty or any consolation, except in the gaze which goes straight to the horror, withstands it, and in the undiminished consciousness of negativity, holds fast to the possibility of that which is better. Mistrust is advisable towards everything which is unselfconscious, casual, towards everything which involves letting go, implying indulgence towards the supremacy of the existent [Existierende].

After Auschwitz, nothing that exists can be simply enjoyed with a good conscience, not even a tree in bloom. Everything lies under a shadow of horror. Adorno intends this in a quite radical sense: after Auschwitz, the very Being (Sein) of beings (des Seienden) can no longer be credited with an affirmative character as metaphysicians traditionally have done from Plato and Aristotle on: nothing any longer has "a positive meaning or purpose." (Cf. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, Polity Press 2000, p. 101.) For the medievals, for example, ens, verum, bonum were convertible notions: ens et bonum convertuntur. In other words, every being qua being is good. Beings are good just insofar as they are. To exist is good. Evil is privatio boni. But after Auschwitz, Adorno opines, no one can take this seriously. Indeed, anyone who does and adheres to "old-style metaphysics" is "inhuman." "To assert that existence or being has a positive meaning constituted within itself and orientated towards the divine principle . . . would be, like all the principles of truth, beauty and goodness which philosophers have concocted, a pure mockery in face of the the victims and the infinitude of their torment." (101-102)

There is a strange historicism at work here: the very structure of being has suffered an alteration due to an historical event. How is such a thing possible? The structure of being is arguably invariant. So either it was either always the case that being had a positive meaning, despite horrendous events (which did not first surface during the 20th century) or it was always the case that being lacked a positive meaning. Adorno needs to explain how the structure of being itself can suffer historical alteration. The mere fact that people like him can no longer believe something does not make what he no longer can believe false. Shades of what I earlier satirized as the Continental Shuffle, the confusion of the epistemic/doxastic with the ontic.

But let's proceed with Adorno's text:

The malign deeper meaning of comfort, which at one time was limited to the toasts of cozy sociability, has long since spread to friendlier impulses. When in the chance conversation with a man on the train, one acquiesces, in order to avoid a quarrel, to a couple of sentences which one knows ultimately certify murder, [it] is already an act of treachery; no thought is immune against its communication, and uttering it at the wrong place and in the context of a false agreement is enough to undercut its truth. Every visit to the cinema, despite the utmost watchfulness, leaves me dumber and worse than before. Sociability itself is a participant in injustice, insofar as it pretends we can still talk with each other in a frozen world, and the flippant, chummy word contributes to the perpetuation of silence, insofar as the concessions to those being addressed debase the latter once more as speakers. The evil principle which has always lurked in affability develops, in the egalitarian Spirit [Geist], into its full bestiality. Condescension and making oneself out as no better are the same. By adapting to the weaknesses of the oppressed, one confirms in such weaknesses the prerequisite of domination, and develops in oneself the measure of barbarity, thickheadedness and capacity to inflict violence required to exercise domination. If, in the latest era, the gesture of condescension is dispensed with, and solely adaptation becomes visible, then it is precisely in such a perfect screening of power that the class-relationship, however denied, breaks through all the more irreconcilably. For intellectuals, unswerving isolation is the only form in which they can vouchsafe a measure of solidarity. All of the playing along, all of the humanity of interaction and participation is the mere mask of the tacit acceptance of inhumanity. One should be united with the suffering of human beings: the smallest step to their joys is one towards the hardening of suffering.

Note the exaggeration and the universal quantifiers: "no thought," "every visit," "always lurked," "only form," "all of the playing along," "all of the humanity," "the smallest step." This is typically Continental excess.

But more importantly, there is the stock leftist attitude that what actually exists and provably works is valueless, oppressive, rotten to the core, ignominious, treacherous, something sinister despite its deceptive appearance, false, phony, a mask of hidden interests, 'ideological,' in no sense or aspect worthy of preservation or loyalty or respect or reverence -- but exists only to be transcended, aufgehoben, smashed to pieces, 'liberated.'

But for what? For some utopian state that people like Adorno never manage to articulate. This inability to articulate is of course installed as the very essence of the emancipatory, and so a virtue is made of impotence.

I would also draw your attention to the quasi-religious totalitarian character of this sort of atttiude. Nothing can be enjoyed with a good conscience, everything is to be totally rejected, because everything is a 'moment' -- that's Hegelian jargon -- of the same rotten whole. Nothing escapes this totalitarian negative dialectic in which everything is internally related to everything else.

Wenn Wittgenstein erklaert, man solle nur das sagen, was sich klar sagen laesst, dann klingt das zwar sehr heroisch und hat womoeglich noch einen mystisch-existentiellen Oberton, der sehr erfolgreich an die Menschen in der gegenwaertigen Stimmung appelliert. Ich glaube aber, dass dieser beruehmte Satz Wittgensteins geistig von einer unbeschreiblichen Vulgaritaet ist, weil darin vorbeigesehen wird an dem, worauf es allein in der Philosophie ankommt: das ist genau das Paradox dieses Unterfangens, mit den Mitteln des Begriffs das zu sagen, was mit den Mittlen des Begriffs eigentlich nicht sich sagen laesst, das Unsagbare eigentlich doch zu sagen.

It no doubt sounds very heroic when Wittgenstein declares that one should say only that which can be said clearly. It also conveys a mystical-existential aura that many today find appealing. But I believe that this famous Wittgensteinian proposition is of an indescribable spiritual vulgarity inasmuch as it ignores the whole point of philosophy. It is precisely the paradox of this enterprise that it aims to say the unsayable, to express by means of concepts that which cannot be expressed by means of concepts. (tr. BV)

The proposition of Wittgenstein that Adorno finds indescribably vulgar is the one that ends the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darueber muss man schweigen. "What one cannot speak about one must pass over in silence."

As I read Wittgenstein, this bifurcation of the Sayable and the Unsayable is the central negative theme of his thinking both early and late. Much in the Tractatus he came to abandon, but not this radical separation of the effable and the ineffable. That which can be said can be said clearly and meaningfully, and all the rest is Unsinn, nonsense, except that within the realm of the nonsensical is to be found all that is most important to us. Thus Wittgenstein is only superficially related to the (superficial) Logical Positivists. For the latter, nonsense is just nonsense and can be dismissed. For Wittgenstein, however, there is such a thing as important nonsense. In a November 1929 lecture, Wittgenstein said:

My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on ethics or religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolutely valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.

Although I am very critical of Wittgenstein, I am also very critical of Adorno: they both go off the rails. But on the question of the crude dichotomizing of the Sayable and the Unsayable, I am with Adorno.

As the above quotation suggests, Wittgenstein thinks that language has fixed boundaries, that language is a cage in which we are imprisoned against the walls of which we run hopelessly. Words get what meaning they have from mundane contexts of use, and any extraordinary use of words, any analogical extensions of their meanings, or any alteration of their sense by their embedding in theories is branded as meaningless. But why should we acquiesce is this philistine refusal to go beyond ordinary usage?

After all, Wittgenstein himself never stopped scribbling, and what he scribbled does not count as ordinary language.

Adorno is right: to philosophize is to attempt to articulate something that is not articulated, or poorly artiuclated, something that may even in the end be inarticulable. The project is to say -- not the strictly Unsayable: here Adorno's formulation is needlessly paradoxical -- but the Unsaid. The project is to bring into the light the dimly discerned. One cannot do this without moving away from the particulars of ordinary usage.

For example, I want to know what it is for an individual to exist. If you ask what an individual is, I can give an example such as this table or that tree, but in the end the only way to clarify my use of 'individual' is by connecting it to other terms in a systematic theory, a theory in which the various terms acquire their meaning in part from their Stellenwert, their 'positional value.' Thus I say that an individual is an unrepeatable entity. From there I explain my use of 'entity' and 'unrepeatable' and 'repeatable,' and so on. In part what I am doing is creating a language in which to think thoughts that I could not think if I kept my nose to the grindstone of ordinary talk.

But why should I keep my nose to the grindstone of ordinary talk? Why should I be a philistine who refuses to philosophize? Why should I take Wittgenstein's quirky obsession with ordinary language seriously? Why should I pay attention to this vulgar engineer who "ignores the whole point of philosophy"?

In order to pray, it is said, the disciple must close the door of his cell, place himself in a state of quiet, sit down, rest his chin against his chest, look towards the middle of his stomach, restrain his breathing, and make a mental effort to find the "place of the heart" while repeating all the time "the epiclesis of Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

Of course, the term 'navel-gazing' is almost always used in a deprecating manner by the worldly to refer to any sort of idle practice of 'philosophizing' whether discursively or non-discursively, and when Adorno refers to a man who gazes at his navel, ein Mensch der seinen Nabel beschaut (Philosophische Terminologie I, 142), he shares in the deprecation.

A central concern of Theodor Adorno in Philosophische Terminologie, lectures he delivered in Frankfurt am Main in 1962-63, is to explain his concept of philosophy. Since philosophy is the love of wisdom, and since the wise man is apt to be viewed as a navel-gazer, Adorno is led to the question of Kontemplation and Versenkung, which latter term renders graphically the process of meditation, suggesting as it does a sinking down into the depths of one's inwardness, a moving from the superficies of consciousness to its source. Philosophy is supposed to be something 'deep,' and one way depth gets understood is in terms of inwardness and subjective reflection.

But as one might expect, the depth to which meditation leads is judged by Adorno to be a false depth, something deceptive and 'abstract' (in the Hegelian sense) and therefore unreal. Still, Adorno is nothing if not dialectical, and so he grants some merit to the process of subjective immersion. The idea that the Absolute is to be found by the inward path, an idea common to all mystical traditions and to all religious traditions (e.g., Eastern Orthodoxy) whose connection with mysticism has remained vital, ist nicht ganz grundlos, (142) not entirely without basis. For if philosophy is to exist at all, the subject must differentiate itself from the object by turning within and realizing its own existence as a subject.

So Adorno grants that subjective reflection is essential to philosophy. But when subjective reflection becomes Versenkung it leads to illusion, not truth, to an abstract inner emptiness, to something merely tautological along the lines of 'I am I' or the Heideggerian "Being is Itself." Mystical depth is a false depth. The true depth of the subject is constituted when it seiner selbst entaeussert, das heisst, aus sich hinaus und in die Andersheit hineingeht (143), "externalizes itself, that is, comes out of itself and enters into otherness." The language is of course Hegelian.

Adorno asserts (143) that the subject has no content except insofar as it is referred to something external. A subject by itself, sunk into itself, is contentless, a mere abstract emptiness. Subject and object mediate each other. The subject is what it is only in relation to the object. Since neither can exist without the other, both are mere abstract moments when considered separately. It follows that a subject who ruthlessly excludes all otherness, all that is objective, ends up with merely the concept of the subject, not its concrete reality. He ends up with a mere abstraction. So no true depth can be attained in this way. True depth, and genuine concretion, is to be had only by the subject caught up in and constituted by its social relations. (144)

I of course reject this notion that we are constituted in our true selfhood by social relations, and with it, the notion that meditation is a deceptive practice that leads us into a false depth. I would say that it is precisely our social existence that is our false existence (for the most part) and that our true life is the life of inwardness.

Adorno's thought is totalitarian and denies all Transcendence: the true Absolute is the social whole of which we are 'moments' (in the Hegelian sense). Das Wahre ist das Ganze as Hegel says in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Nothing within the whole has any substantial being: everything is mediated (vermittlelt) by everything else. One problem is how anything can be constituted by its relations which other things. The very notion of a relation presupposes that which stands in the relation, and it is difficult to see how the being of these relata can reduce to their being-in-relation.

But more on this later.

I will explain one aspect of Heidegger's notorious Seinsfrage, an aspect centering on the role of the copula in predicative sentences/judgments. True-blue Heideggerians may not recognize much of their Master here, but I'm a thinker not an exegete. I will also consider what Adorno has to say in criticism of Heidegger in the section on the copula in Negative Dialektik.

1. Consider a simple predicative sentence such as 'The sky is blue,' or simpler still, 'Al is fat.' The sense of the sentence is built up from the senses of its constituent terms: 'Al' and 'fat' clearly play a role, but what about 'is'? Is 'is' perhaps redundant?

Instead of writing 'a is F' one could write 'Fa' as one does in standard symbolic logic. And there are natural languages in which there either is no copula or in which the copula can be omitted. In Turkish, for example, one can say Deniz mavi thereby expressing what we express in English by 'The sea is blue' but cannot express (in standard adult English) by 'The sea blue.' But of course Turkish does have a copula. Since Turkish is an agglutinative language and makes heavy use of suffixes, the copula is appended to the adjective mavi as a suffix thereto. Thus, Deniz mavidir. And in the case of substandard English — 'Me one bad dude,' 'Coffee hot' — the copula is implied. There are also cases in which copulation is expressed by a word that grammatically cannot be a copula: 'He be stoned.'

In the case of 'Fa,' the natural thing to say is that the sign for the copula is the immediate juxtaposition of 'F' and 'a' in that order. So there is a copula in 'Fa,' though there is no separate sign for it. The copula is the juxtaposition. I conclude that the word 'is' is redundant, but that what it expresses, the copulation, is not. Copulation can be expressed in different ways, or even left unexpressed but implied; what is impossible is that there be no copulation. For without it there are no complete thoughts and no declarative sentences.

It follows that the problem of copulative being cannot be dismissed by saying that there are natural or artifical languages in which there is no separate sign for the copula.

2. But it doesn't follow from the necessity of copulation that there is a problem of copulative being: copulation might be purely logical or semantical rather than ontological. In 'Al is fat,' 'Al' refers to Al, all 250 lbs of him, and 'fat' refers to the property of being fat. Does 'is' have a referent as well? Are there three things in the world: Al, fatness, and the copulative link? This leads to trouble very quickly. If the copulative link is a tertium quid, a third thing, then what will link it to Al and fatness? After all, the fact of Al's being fat is not a mere sum of Al + copulative link + fatness, any more that the true sentence 'Al is fat' is a mere list of 'Al,' 'is,' and 'fat.' If the copulative link is a tertium quid, then we are embarked upon Bradley's regress.

The copula 'is' is not a stand-alone expression like 'Al.' Traditionally, this is expressed by saying that 'is' is not categorematical but syncategorematical: its meaning is a co-meaning, a meaning together with, and only together with, the expressions flanking it. No doubt the copula 'is' has a meaning; but it would be a mistake to hypostatize or reify it, to make of it a separate entity.

3. That Heidegger is guilty of a hypostatization and ontologization of the copula is essentially Adorno's charge:

In every predicative judgment, 'is' has its meaning, as have the subject and the predicate. But the state of affairs is a matter of intentionality, not of being. The copula is fulfilled only in the relation between subject and predicate. It is not independent. Heidegger, in misplacing it beyond the sole source of its meaning, succumbs to that reified thought to which he took exception. (Negative Dialectics, p. 101. I have slightly emended Ashton's trans.)

Adorno's main point is that the copulative 'is' is syncategorematic or synsemantic. It does not have meaning independently or on its own in the way a proper name does. It welds subject and predicate together into a state of affairs (Sachverhalt) that subsists merely on the intentional plane, as an object of thought, or content of judgment, but not in reality. Thus there is nothing in reality corresponding to the copulative 'is.' There is no Being (Sein) to which 'is' refers. Heidegger's talk of Being (das Sein) as different from beings (das Seiende) is due to illicit reification or hypostatization. Not only is this reification illicit, it contradicts Heidegger's constant insistence that Being is not itself a being. Adorno speaks of Heidegger's extrapolation from the copula to Being and considers this to rest on a confusion of the general meaning of the copula 'is' with the specific meaning it acquires in particular judgments.

The copulative 'is,' Adorno claims, is like an "occasional expression." In contemporary Anglo-analytic terms, it is like an indexical such as 'I,' 'here,' or 'now.' The first-person singular pronoun has a general meaning: 'I' said by me has the same general meaning — the same Kaplanian character — as 'I' said by you. But when I say 'I' I refer to me, while when you say 'I' you refer to you. From the fact that 'I' has a general meaning, it does not follow that every use of 'I' has the same referent. Similarly, from the fact that the copulative 'is' has the same general meaning in each predication, it does not follow that the 'is' in each predication refers to one and the same entity, Being. There is no Being in distinction from beings, any more than there is a Universal Ego distinct from particular egos.

4. Can Heidegger be defended against Adorno's charge that his Being is nothing but a reification (Verdinglichung) of the copula? Well, Heidegger himself insists that Being is not a being. Being is neither a being nor a property of beings. Nor is Being a concept. If it were, it would be the emptiest of empty abstractions. Being is a Third that mediates between concepts and beings, but is not itself something mediated. It resembles a metaphysical Absolute as Adorno suggests. So Heidegger would plead innocent to the charge of reification. For Adorno to make the accusation stick, he has to prove that there is no Third possible between concepts and beings. If he simply assumes this, he begs the question against Heidegger. Similarly, if he simply assumes that everything is mediated, that there is nothing that is not a member of the all encompassing system of intermediating entities, then he begs the question against Heidegger. For Heidegger's whole project is to think Being in its difference from beings. This implies that Being is transcendent of beings.

5. My own view is that there is plenty to criticize in both Heidegger and Adorno. But on the topic of the copula, something like Heidegger's position is defensible. Let me try to argue this out.

It is quite clear that 'is' in 'The sky is blue' does not designate some separate individual being, whether it be a predication relation or anything else. Still, the copula plays a role and does a job: it expresses the linkage of subject and predicate. After all, Al is fat. And even if he is not in reality fat, he can be (falsely) thought to be fat, and the propositional content of that thought, his being fat, is not the mere sum of the sense of 'Al' and the sense of 'fat.' So the linkage is not nothing. It is what transforms items not capable of having a truth-value into a structure that is capable of having a truth-value. Neither Al, nor the sense of 'Al,' has a truth-value. But 'Al is fat' has a truth-value. So the copulative 'is' plays a crucial role even though it lacks a specific referent. The problem is to understand that role.

We seem to face an aporia. On the one hand, the copulative link, or predicative tie, is not an entity in addition to Al and fatness, on pain of Bradley's regress. (Adorno does not mention Bradley's regress, but it could be taken as a manifestation of the illicit reification which Adorno does allege.) On the other hand, the link is not nothing. If it is not something and not nothing, then we have a contradiction.

Should we just accept this contradiction? Let us explore the contradiction of copulative being a bit further. Suppose 'Al is fat' is true. Then the state of affairs, Al's being fat, obtains. But analysis reveals only an individual and a property, but no being. Yet without the copulative link there would be no state of affairs at all. On the one hand the state of affairs is just its two constituents; on the other is it more than its two constituents.

As far as I can see, Adorno offers us no solution to this contradiction at all. He speak of a general meaning of 'is' common to all predicative states of affairs. But this cannot be what binds together the constituents of any particular state of affairs. Adorno glides right past the problem amd leaves us with the contradiction.

One way to avoid the contradiction is by saying that the copulative link is made by the mind: the linking of subject and predicate representations in a judgment derives from mental synthesis. In Kantian terms, the representations are combined in the unity of one consciousness. A judgment is a unity of constituents, not a mere sum of constituents. But the ground of this unity cannot be located within the judgment as a further constituent. Otherwise we get Bradley's regress. One solution is to locate the unifier outside the judgment as the synthesizing mind whose combinative activity creates a sense-structure capable of being true or false.

Now suppose the judgment is true. If it is true that Al is fat, then fat Al exists, and indeed exists outside the mind of the judger. In that case, pace Adorno, the state of affairs is not merely a matter of intentionality; it is also a matter of being. But the existence of fat Al cannot depend on the subjective synthesizing of an empirical judger. It is an objective fact, true of all actual and possible judgers. In Kantian terms, the 'is' therefore points back to the transcendental or objective unity of apperception. Now if we think of Heidegger's Sein in analogy to Kant's transcendental (objective) unity of apperception, then we can see how it escapes Adorno's charge of hypostatization.

Being is not a being, but a transcendental condition of the manifestation of beings; it is also not a concept or category, but the vehicle of all concepts. As such it is aThird that mediates between subject and object, but is not itself mediated by anything. And of course this is why the neo-Hegelian Adorno objects it it. For him, nothing escapes mediation, Vermittlung, as we shall see in future installments.

Although there is plenty of need for further explanation, what I have said suffices to show that Adorno's charge that Heidegger hypostatizes the copula fails. Hiedegger is on to a genuine problem the solution to which is by no means obvious.