Mental Twinges

Lecture 4 - The Concept of Mediation In this lecture, Adorno discusses the universal as existing systems working through (mediating) particular events. He uses academics and the French Revolution to explain how the particular , a specific event, is often erroneously taken as a cause rather than a side effect of the workings of universal processes. He claims that once we acknowledge the workings of the universal in the particular we can see the "spirit," the real underlying cause of the event. Facts as Cloaks of Illusion A fact (a particular) acts as a cloak when we mistake it for a cause rather than a secondary effect, creating the illusion that we know what really happened. The better we become at recognizing the universal's effect on the particular and the particular's inability to have a like effect on the universal, the better we will become at recognizing that a particular is not a cause of an event but a byproduct of the universal process or "conte...

Lecture 3 Constitution Problems In this lecture, Adorno makes the point that individual discontinuous [random] events are not  destiny but occur logically within the context in which they manifest and he identifies the "problem of the philosophy of history" as one of determining how to blend the "unity" [context] and "discontinuity" [random events] into a working theory of history. (28) The Truth of Facts Adorno begins by defining a fact as the individual experience of a random event which is "immediate knowledge" only for the person undergoing the experience (20) The truth of the event, the way in which it is experienced, depends largely on the person's  knowledge of the times in which it occurs. A fact..has a greater immediacy for the knowing subject than...the so-called larger historic context to which only...theory can give us access....This immediate knowledge...is no more than immediate knowledge for us ....[I]ndividual fact...