Thought’s very unconditionality binds it more tightly to the world it denies.

Evidence

It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 268

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The paradox that the more thought pursues the unconditional the more blindly it falls to the conditioned — ‘its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible’ — is the density of Adorno at maximum intensity, a genuine core of the book.
• APHORISMS: A live directive: radical honesty about one’s own conditionality is itself the path to whatever possibility remains.
• XREF: connects to: The very composure of reflection secretly colludes with a world thought opposes. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 113; Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 289; Objectifying thought severs us from the world it claims to survey. — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 856

Broader Connections

• Uninterrupted thought is itself resistance and holds possibility open #expands (0.82) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 289
• Objectifying thought severs us from the world it claims to survey. #expands (0.78) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 856