So, this is great, but the translation is *horrific*. I'm not sure you can read this translation and have any idea what Adorno was getting at. Instead, try this free version:

http://www.efn.org/~dredmond/ndtrans.html

which works well enough as is.

Adorno's basic insight isn't even that hard to grasp, though: philosophy fails because it assumes the world must be consistent. But the world is 'contradictory,' or 'antagonistic.' We live in a social world which has been built up to provide humans with what we need, but over time that world itself has come to be an end, rather than a means. Hence, no matter how rational we make things (thankyou, econometricians) the whole is irrational, hence, 'contradictory.' So when philosophy claims that it has understood the consistent world, it is just covering up the antagonism. And this is bad. But it's also good, since it suggests that the world doesn't *have* to be antagonistic.

There's much more to it I guess, but that's good enough for one lifetime. Thankyou, Theo. ( )

This hard-as-hell philosophical work is a meta-critique of Kant and Hegel. Hegel explains in the Phenomenology of Spirit and throughout his body of work that anything that is real can be said or expressed in some way. Anything that is beyond the scope of logos, or reason, is therefore a non-entity. Adorno has problems with enlightenment reason in this form--it has taken instrumental and oppressive forms in modern history, particularly in the 20th century. He critiques here and elsewhere the basic tenets of the enlightenment project, that reason can achieve identity between subject and object, that words can express anything that is real, that the real is only that which can be expressed, that nothing is beyond the scope of reason so long as someone can conceive it, think it, interrogate it. Adorno "opens up" Hegel and says, no, reason is and must remain indeterminate. It must maintain a status of indeterminacy by undermining its own dialectical movement towards identity, and this is what Adorno calls 'non-identical thinking'. This is a philosophy which holds that there are things in the world that are beyond the scope of reason. There are things in the world which cannot be expressed yet still exist firmly in the universe and within us. Those things are "made known" to us through human suffering. It's not the same as Kant's "thing-in-itself" which is made known ultimately through the subject. Adorno will even deny the subject such status. Radically speaking, even the subject must be indeterminate, incomplete, "negative". The end of Negative Dialectics reminds me of Beckett's philosophy of art which is that the creative process is driven by perpetual failure on the part of the artist to express what he means; however, the writer, the artist, the narrator, must continue to express if it is expected to survive albeit negatively : "Yet the need in thinking is what makes us think. It asks to be negated by thinking. It must disappear in thought if it is to be really satisfied; and in this negation it survives." Unfortunately, without a so-so understanding of Hegelian dialectics and Kant's metaphysics, this concept of non-identity would be impossible to understand. Adorno is not trying to negate (as in do away with) a philosophical tradition that essentially began flexing its reason muscles since Descartes. He is trying to save it. In truth, my mind can barely grasp the concept of the non-indentical thinking because of the inherent aporia or logical impasse of its formulation. It might give you a headache. It's the hardest book I ever read. ( )

For Adorno, the horrors of World War II (the Holocaust, the fire-bombing of Dresden, the atomic bombs in Japan, etc.) represented a kind of "rupture" in history. He thought the Hegelian idea of history as a kind of "progress" was no longer tenable, given the viciousness and destruction to which science and politics had brought western civilization. Thus this book is a kind of reaction to the failure of history to lead to progress and an attempt to rescue the Hegelian idea of dialectic in history from its teleology of progress. For Adorno, one must work dialectic backwards--splitting ideas up into their constituent parts--in order to recover any older or originary ideas which might still be salvageable for the contemporary world. He also has another definition for "negative dialectic" in mind--more like Socrates' method in Plato's dialogues: he means to use dialect to show what "is not" the truth, even if/when he does not claim himself to know what is the truth. The book is difficult to read, but rewards patience and re-reading. Despite Adorno's reputation for austerity, there is often humor in the book--especially when he disagrees or argues with his mentor Heideggger or Heidegger's mentor Husserl. The concluding section of the book is lyrically beautiful.