To cut through the confusions of theorizing our world, messy as it is, philosophers strip – they remove features of the object of inquiry until they reach some essential kernel. These kernels offer enough meat for substantial conclusions and generalizations, without the mess of irrelevant contingency to hamper philosophical progress. Indeed, on some conceptions this just is what philosophy amounts to: stripping down and generalizing based on what’s left. For example, in discussions on ethics, one might treat human beings as moral agents insofar as they possess the capacity for rationality. All of those other features about human beings – their bodies, preferences, emotions, and what have you – are set aside by the ethical theorist for the purposes of their analysis.

Typical objections to the stripping method rely on the notion that something is lost when a thing is considered in terms of its particular essential kernel. When we take human moral agency to consist in the capacity for rationality, our account is defective insofar as we have left other things out of the picture. Stripping, in other words, is inherently reductive. Perhaps the most dedicated critique along these lines is Theodor Adorno’s negative dialectics, which argues that thought always fails to do justice to its object. Whenever we conceive of a particular object (or set of particular objects) under a concept, our conception necessarily fails to encompass the whole of that object (or set of objects).

For example, suppose I conceive of my feline companion, Bashir, as a cat. I will (quite accurately) capture the fact that Bashir is a four-legged, furry felis catus whose ancestors were quite revered in Egypt. But, I’ll fail to capture his propensity to beg for food by standing on his hind legs, as well as his particular sort of mercurial disposition toward baths. And, even the brief description I’ve just provided of those particularities invariably comes short of describing exactly who Bashir is.

For Adorno, the failure of our concepts to make good on their promises of rendering the whole of the world intelligible gives us a duty to engage in ongoing self-critique. Our failed conceptualizations produce suffering: first, of the sort that comes intrinsically from the inability of our conceptualization to make good on its implicit promise to adequately think the object of thought; second, of the sort that arises from the consequences of acting on such a failed theorization of the world. Though Adorno rejects the notion that we’ll ever reach a state of identity between thought and world (in which, as Hegel says, the real is the rational, and the rational the real), he does take it that we can move toward progressively less inadequate understandings. Indeed, such is the progress of philosophy.

(part 2 here)