Positive and Negative- Negations of Negations

There are 2 ways to understand positive

1.) What is given. "when we speak of positivism as the philosophy that sticks to facts"
2.) The Ideal, the approvable, the good.

Identity thinking - characterized as the positive (+), meaning progressive in terms of society.
Identity thinking usually has to do with ideology and identity that is cooptable by capitalism.

"Now, when I speak of 'Negative Dialectics' not the least important reason for doing so is my desire to dissociate myself from this fetishism of the positive, particularly since I know full well that the concept has an ideological resonance that is connected with the advances made by certain philosophical trends"

To Adorno, what appears to be the positive is actually the negative, or "the thing that is to be critiqued" (-) and that is essentially Adornos reason for the creation of the negative dialectic.

Negative Dialectics criticizes Hegel and his philosophy and "the quintessence of all the negations it contains- not just the sum of negations but the process that they constitute- is supposed to culminate in a positive sense, namely in the famous dialectical proposition with which you are all familiar that 'what is actual is rational'. "
Adorno has a problem with totality being seen as rational even in the specifics, which in many cases seem to him as quite irrational...WWI, WWII, Auschwitz, etc. Through this, he questions the meaning of life...