Date: Sat, 3 Feb 2001 12:12:58 +0000
From: Mervyn Hartwig <mh-AT-jaspere.demon.co.uk>
Subject: Re: BHA: Delivered up to the world


Dear Martti,

As my post which crossed with this makes clear, I think you are
absolutely right that Adorno doesn't espouse a stratified ontology and
is not a transcendental realist, and perhaps I have not made enough of
this difference. For that reason it is perhaps possible to argue that
Adorno's position is (subjectively) idealist and identitarian in some
ultimate sense - in spite of his best efforts, of course, because he
insistently espouses materialism and non-identity.

>When Adorno could not have differentiation of occultism and other 
>structures, his solution is so far from Bhaskar. This you seem to 
>neglect.

OK, but I don't think this affects my main point that for both
occultism, like other phenomena, is relational through and through. As I
quoted DPF:

'To grasp totality is ... to see things _existentially constituted_, and
permeated, _by their relations with others_; and to see our ordinary
notion of identity as an _abstraction_ not only from their existentially
constitutive processes of formation (geo-histories), but also from their
existentially constitutive inter-activity (internal relatedness)....'

I don't see that viewing occultism as emergent would entail that it is
not related to commodity production in the way Adorno theorised.

As for idealism, as we know Bhaskar's transcendental realism (in which
the categories apply to things-in-themselves, not just to our mode of
apprehending them - DPF104), in the event has led to objective idealism.
Gary says this is OK because it's 'in the family' (Hegel), but it has
arguably led to a position in ethics that, unlike Adorno's, is too
'fully formed', as Alan Norrie has put it to me.

Mervyn




Martti Puttonen <maputto-AT-saunalahti.fi> writes
>
>Hi Mervyn, Jan, and all,
>
>One issue in dialectics related to and apart from occultism: 
>
>Mervyn, in my mind you elaborated quite accurately Adorno's main 
>attept to have 'realist philosophy' , but your elaboration seems to 
>me to be quite an idealist one. That is so, because you very nicely 
>posed Adorno's attempts to  overcome subjective and objective  
>idealisms and to avoid transcendental idealism. In negative 
>dialectics Adorno mainly has a search whether realist philosophy  
>is possible at all. And Adorno did not have it because of his 
>dialectics, as very broad and narrow at the same time, that is 
>under confusion.  
>
>When Adorno could not have differentiation of occultism and other 
>structures, his solution is so far from Bhaskar. This you seem to 
>neglect. Adorno did not accept transcendental realism, quite a 
>contrary, when this is the basics in DCR.  
>
>I am pondering quite a lot, how to take Adorno's dialectics, 
>because he did not had ontological world in Bhaskar's terms. This 
>is required in philosophy in order to evaluate, is Adorno's negation 
>radical, transformative or subject negation. Without these 
>differentiations it is not possible to have absence, and Adorno did 
>not have it as a primary category of the world.
>
>When reading Adorno it seems that he implicitly changes his 
>conception about dialectics. One my attempt to understand 
>Adorno's dialectics of subjective and objective is to have a reflective 
>'process': at first ontic (or factual) and its negation in concepts as 
>radical differentiation (negation) in thinking, then to that concept in 
>mind subject negation (negation's negation), which is constellation. 
>And this whole selfreflection is somehow latently under 
>transformative negation but only in mind. Somewhat like 
>transcendental silent argument, without having transcendental 
>argument at all. 
>
>But Adorno did not had any process in DCR sense at all. Adorno 
>could not get rid of identities although he tried that very hardly. 
>
>I am pondering is this thinking above philosophically relevant in 
>some sense?
>


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