Truth depends on patient lingering with the particular rather than violent short cuts

Evidence

But everything depends on the manner of transition. Perdition comes from thought as violence, as a short cut that breaches the impenetrable to attain the universal, which has content in impenetrability alone, not in abstracted correspondences between different objects. One might almost say that truth itself depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular: what passes beyond it without having first entirely lost itself, what proceeds to judge without having first been guilty of the injustice of contemplation, loses itself at last in emptiness. — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 87

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is Adorno stating his own method’s core precept — truth as tempo and lingering rather than abstraction. A paradigm-statement of negative dialectics as practice.
• APHORISMS: Actual advice for how to think: linger with the particular, be guilty of contemplation before judging, judge only after losing oneself.
• BMF: The demand that one must ‘first entirely lose itself’ before passing beyond the particular evokes the meditative self-immersion in We (Zamyatin), where the single self must dissolve into the collective before it can be rebuilt.
• XREF: connects to: Psychoanalytic truth remains alien because the patient cannot derive it from his own situation — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 282; Truth about persons is grasped a priori, not discovered by empirical search — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness: An Essay on…, 1336; Truth serum torture destroys victims’ capacity to distinguish true from false (+2 more)

Broader Connections

• Truth about persons is grasped a priori, not discovered by empirical search #contradicts (0.95) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 1336
• Truth serum torture destroys victims’ capacity to distinguish true from false #contradicts (0.85)
• Truth emerges only after doubt makes information improbable #expands (0.82) — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 605