Category: Adorno

Grok on Vallicella on Adorno

I put the following question to Grok: What does Bill Vallicella say in critique of the work of Theodor W. Adorno? Here is the answer it spit out in a few seconds, and though it did not dig up everything I have written about Adorno online,  it ain't bad.  It's a brave new world, kiddies. Future shock is upon us. Fasten your seat belts.  

William F. Vallicella, in his Substack post "Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy" (published February 27, 2021), offers a critique of Theodor W. Adorno’s philosophical approach, focusing specifically on Adorno’s views on subjective reflection, contemplation, and the relationship between subject and object as presented in Adorno’s *Philosophische Terminologie* (lectures from 1962–63). Below is a summary of Vallicella’s key points of critique, grounded in the provided source:

1. **Critique of Adorno’s Rejection of Contemplation (Versenkung)**:
– Vallicella highlights Adorno’s dismissive attitude toward *Versenkung* (meditative contemplation or "navel-gazing"), which Adorno associates with an illusory, tautological, and contentless form of subjective reflection. Adorno argues that such inward focus leads to an "abstract inner emptiness" and fails to engage with external reality, producing statements like "I am I" or Heidegger’s "Being is Itself." Vallicella finds this dismissal problematic, suggesting it unfairly caricatures meditative practices and overlooks their potential for genuine insight. He defends contemplation by referencing historical practices, such as those attributed to St. Symeon the New Theologian, which involve focused introspection that Adorno might have reductively labeled as navel-gazing.[](https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/contra-adorno-a-preliminary-plea)

2. **Subject-Object Mediation and Hegelian Influence**:
– Vallicella critiques Adorno’s Hegelian framework, particularly the idea that the subject has no content except through its relation to external objects, and that subject and object mediate each other. Adorno posits that a subject sunk into itself is "contentless," and true depth arises only when the subject "externalizes itself" and engages with "otherness." Vallicella challenges this view, arguing that it risks reducing the subject to a mere function of its relations, a position he sees as rooted in Hegelian monism. He questions how entities can be constituted solely by their relations, noting that relations presuppose the existence of relata with some intrinsic being. This, Vallicella argues, reveals a flaw in Adorno’s (and Hegel’s) relational ontology, which he sees as anti-personalistic and overly abstract.[](https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/contra-adorno-a-preliminary-plea)

3. **Totalitarian Denial of Transcendence**:
– Vallicella’s most pointed critique is that Adorno’s philosophy is "totalitarian" in its denial of transcendence. He interprets Adorno’s thought as aligning with Hegel’s dictum "Das Wahre ist das Ganze" (the true is the whole), where everything is mediated by the social whole, and nothing possesses substantial being independently. Vallicella argues this view eliminates any possibility of transcendence or individual autonomy, trapping the subject within a monistic system where all meaning derives from social relations. He sees this as a denial of personal identity and spiritual depth, contrasting it with philosophies that affirm individual or metaphysical transcendence.[](https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/contra-adorno-a-preliminary-plea)

4. **Philosophical Implications**:
– Vallicella suggests that Adorno’s rejection of subjective depth and transcendence reflects a broader materialist and collectivist bias, influenced by Marxism and Hegelian dialectics, which prioritizes the social whole over individual or metaphysical realities. He argues that this approach undermines the possibility of authentic philosophical inquiry into the self or ultimate truth, reducing philosophy to a critique of social structures. Vallicella’s defense of "omphaloscopy" (navel-gazing) is a provocative counterpoint, advocating for the value of introspective practices that Adorno dismisses.[](https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/contra-adorno-a-preliminary-plea)

### Context and Limitations
Vallicella’s critique is narrowly focused on Adorno’s treatment of contemplation and subjectivity in *Philosophische Terminologie*, rather than engaging with Adorno’s broader oeuvre, such as his work on the culture industry, negative dialectics, or aesthetics. The critique is also shaped by Vallicella’s own philosophical commitments, which lean toward defending individual transcendence and contemplative practices, contrasting with Adorno’s critical theory and its emphasis on social critique. The source does not indicate whether Vallicella addresses Adorno’s specific works like *Dialectic of Enlightenment* or *Minima Moralia*, so the critique may not fully capture Adorno’s complex views on modernity, capitalism, or art.

### Conclusion
William F. Vallicella critiques Theodor W. Adorno for rejecting contemplative introspection as illusory and for adopting a Hegelian framework that denies transcendence and reduces the subject to its social relations. He sees Adorno’s philosophy as totalitarian, monistic, and dismissive of individual depth, arguing that it overlooks the value of subjective reflection and relational autonomy. This critique, while sharp, is limited to a specific aspect of Adorno’s thought and reflects Vallicella’s defense of contemplative and transcendent perspectives. For a deeper understanding, readers may consult Vallicella’s Substack post directly or explore Adorno’s primary texts to assess the fairness of these criticisms.[](https://williamfvallicella.substack.com/p/contra-adorno-a-preliminary-plea)

If you’d like me to search for additional sources or analyze specific works by Adorno or Vallicella in more detail, let me know!

Kimball on Kolakowski on Marxism as a Bogus Form of Religion

I have argued time and again that Marxism is not a religion. But many have a burning need so to misunderstand it. What the great Kolakowski says below reinforces me in the correctness of my opinion.  As for Fredric Jameson, whom Roger Kimball discusses in his Guilt of the Intellectuals, I haven't read him and never will. Theodor Adorno, on the other hand, I have read with care.  I rate him higher than Roger Kimball does, who is more of a public intellectual (a very good one!) than a philosopher. (PhilPapers lists only seven works of his.) I consider Adorno worth reading and evaluating, as I do in Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy.

Kimball:

Whatever Professor Jameson’s personal commitment to Marxist doctrine, there can be little doubt that his habits of thought were deeply tinged by the gnostic contempt for everyday experience and faith in a secular apocalypse that has characterized Marxism from the beginning. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski noted in the third volume of his magisterial study Main Currents of Marxism, this is the ultimate source of Marxism’s Utopian dreams and its great seductiveness for suitably disposed intellectuals. “The influence that Marxism has achieved,” Kolakowski wrote,

far from being the result or proof of its scientific character, is almost entirely due to its prophetic, fantastic, and irrational elements. Marxism is a doctrine of blind confidence that a paradise of universal satisfaction is awaiting us just around the corner. Almost all the prophecies of Marx and his followers have already proved to be false, but this does not disturb the spiritual certainty of the faithful, any more than it did in the case of chiliastic sects. … In this sense Marxism performs the function of a religion, and its efficacy is of a religious character. But it is a caricature and a bogus form of religion, since it presents its temporal eschatology as a scientific system, which religious mythologies do not purport to be.

That the Marxist apocalypse is declared to be the inevitable result of inscrutable “scientific” laws only means that its partisans are potentially as dangerous as they are mystifying: the revolutionary is one whose possession of “the truth” is impervious to experience. For him, “History” speaks with a voice beyond contradiction or appeal.

By the way, 'magisterial' is exactly the word to describe Kolakowski's Main Currents of Marxism. It is the work of a master, a magister. But would it have killed Kimball to provide a page reference? If he had, the editors would probably have deleted it.  Why do you think that is?

Vermittlung Über Alles?

Nothing finite is self-contained: it refers beyond itself for its determinations, for its being what it is, and for its existence.  Nothing finite.  This is true. A thing is what it is by not being what it is not.  Omnis determinatio est negatio. (Spinoza)

Theodor Adorno (Negative Dialektik, Suhrkamp Verlag, S. 109), however,  removes the qualifier: he thinks this reference beyond itself is true of everything and that Vermittlung is dafür lediglich ein anderes Wort, that "Mediation is just another word for it."

Nothing is immediate.  All is mediated.  But what about the system of mediating items?  What mediates it?  Or is it absolute?

Hegel begat Marx, Marx begat the Frankfurt School which begat cultural (as opposed to 'classical' economic ) Marxism which begat or perhaps is the mess we are now in.

Metaphysically, our mess results from the denial of the Absolute.

What is Cultural Marxism?

Despite the febrile complaints of some leftists, 'cultural Marxism' is a useful term that picks out a genuine cultural phenomenon. It is no myth. Nor is it an anti-Semitic or a racist 'dog whistle.'  It is alleged by leftists  to be an anti-Semitic conservative slur because the members of the Frankfurt School were mainly Jews, even Adorno.  Adorno's original name was not 'Theodor W. Adorno,' but 'Theodor Adorno Wiesengrund.'  

But what is cultural Marxism?

For Karl Marx, the history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class conflict. In market societies the two main classes in conflict are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, which stand to each other as oppressor and oppressed. This is not a conflict that can be mediated: it can be overcome only by the defeat of the oppressors. Herein lies an important difference between (classical) liberalism and Marxist leftism.i For the latter, politics is war, not a process of bargaining and accommodation on the basis of mutually accepted norms between parties with common interests and a desire to coexist peacefully. Cultural Marxism, retaining both the oppressor-oppressed motif and the belief in the intractability of the conflict, moves beyond classical or economic Marxism by widening the class of the oppressed to include blacks and other 'people of color,' women, male and female homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals, Muslims, immigrants legal and illegal, and others deemed to be victims of oppression.

Correspondingly, cultural Marxism widens the class of oppressors to include potentially all whites, males, heterosexuals and religionists, Christians mainly, regardless of their economic status. Thus within the ambit of cultural Marxism, a working-class Southern white male heterosexual Christian ends up among the oppressors. Such are Hillary Clinton's deplorables and irredeemables, and those about whom Barack Obama said, “They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”ii

___________________________

i cf. Ralph Miliband, Marxism and Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 17.

ii https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/apr/14/barackobama.uselections2008. Read the sentence carefully. It makes no sense.

Marxism cultural myth

Against Historical Relativism: Adorno on What is No Longer Believable After Auschwitz

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter; indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, he is someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of façade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Suppose we focus on just part of one of Adorno's serpentine sentences. This is from Negative Dialektik (Suhrkamp, p. 354):

Dass das Unveraenderliche Wahrheit sei und das Bewegte, Vergaengliche Schein, die Gleichgueltigkeit von Zeitlichem und ewigen Ideen gegeneinander, ist nicht laenger zu behaupten . . . .

Adorno is telling us that

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 . . . .

Adorno GedenktafelSo 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.  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 believable 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, good man of the Left that he is, 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 the 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 structures of being. Adorno is doing the the Continental Shuffle, sliding from the epistemic/doxastic to the ontic and back again.  That views of truth are historically conditioned is trivial and scarcely in need of being pointed out; but that truth itself is historically conditioned is incoherent.

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 earthquake 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.

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Adorno on the No Longer Believable

Theodor Adorno is exasperating but exciting. Although as sloppy as one expects Continental thinkers to be, he is nonetheless a force to be reckoned with, a serious man who is seriously grappling with ultimates at the outer limits of intelligibility. Derrida I dismiss as a bullshitter, indeed, to cop a line from John Searle, as someone who "gives bullshit a bad name." But I can't dismiss Adorno. I confess to being partial to the Germans. They are nothing if not serious, and I'm a serious man. Among the French there is an excess of facade and frippery. But now let's get to work — like good Germans.

Continue reading “Adorno on the No Longer Believable”

Adorno on the Ambiguity of Sport

Theodor W. Adorno, "Education After Auschwitz" in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (Columbia UP, 1998, tr. Pickford, pp. 196-197):

Sport is ambiguous. On the one hand, it can have an anti-barbaric and anti-sadistic effect by means of fair play [Adorno employs the English phrase], a spirit of chivalry, and consideration for the weak. On the other hand, in many of its varieties and practices it can promote aggression, brutality, and sadism, above all in people who do not expose themselves to the exertion and discipline required by sports but instead merely watch: that is, those who regularly shout from the sidelines.

An excellent observation, first published in 1967.  As valuable as participation in sports is, spectatorship often demeans, brutalizes, levels, reduces individuals to members of  a mob, while elevating worthless thugs to the level of heroes.   What would Adorno have to say about the situation now,  over 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.

Adorno the Clean-Shaven on the Beard

Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 123:

The beard is the oppositionist costume of juveniles acting like cavemen who refuse to play along with the cultural swindle, while in fact they merely don the old-fashioned emblem of the patriarchal dignity of their grandfathers.

It seems fair to observe, however, that Adorno and the men of his generation were just as oppositionist in refusing to sport the beards that graced the jowls of their fathers. 

The Copula: Adorno Contra Heidegger

Adorno Time was when I was much interested in the philosophers of the Frankfurter Schule.  That was in the 'seventies and 'eighties. Less interested now,  I am still intrigued by Adorno's critique of Heidegger. Is it worth anything? For that matter, are Heidegger's ideas worth anything? Let's see.

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.

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Contra Adorno: A Preliminary Plea for Omphaloscopy

Adorno5

The Greek Omphalos  = the German Nabel  = navel. So omphaloscopy is navel-gazing, and an omphaloscopist is one who 'scopes out' his navel. But have there ever been practioners of meditation (Versenkung) who literally gazed at their navels or who came close to doing such a thing? A little gazing at my well-stocked library reveals that something like this practice is recommended in the Method of Holy Prayer and Attention, which tradition attributes to St. Symeon the New Theologian (949-1022), abbot of the monastery of St. Mamas in Constantinople. Referring to the central passage of the Method, the anonymous author of The Jesus Prayer reports:

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 epiclesisof Jesus Christ." (p. 47)

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After Auschwitz: Adorno’s Leftist Sensibility Illustrated from Minima Moralia

A correspondent from the Netherlands sends this passage from Theodor W. Adorno's Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben. It is from the short essay, "Herr Doktor, das ist schön von Euch."

Noch der Baum, der blüht, lügt in dem Augenblick, in welchem man sein Blühen ohne den Schatten des Entsetzens wahrnimmt; noch das unschuldige Wie schön wird zur Ausrede für die Schmach des Daseins, das anders ist, und es ist keine Schönheit und kein Trost mehr außer in dem Blick, der aufs Grauen geht, ihm standhält und im ungemilderten Bewußtsein der Negativität die Möglichkeit des Besseren festhält.

Here is the essay in toto in Dennis Redmond's translation. The italicized portion is the translation of the above German. I have interrupted the flow of the text with some comments of my own. I want to use this text to convey to you something of the mentality and sensibility of an extremely erudite and sophisticated leftist and of leftists in general. It helps to bear in mind that Minima Moralia was published in 1951.

Continue reading “After Auschwitz: Adorno’s Leftist Sensibility Illustrated from Minima Moralia“