system
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human
What does Adorno mean when he says "to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional"?

I'm reading a collection of essays on the Culture Industry by Adorno. It's pretty confusing. Here's the full quote from the book:

>‘Astrology’, Adorno contends, ‘presents the bill for the neglect of
interpretive thinking for the sake of fact-gathering.’ Astrology, we
might say, is the ‘social bad conscience’ of critical theory; its blind
synthesis of different domains responds to the same division of intellectual labour and opaqueness of the totality that animates critical
reflection.
The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness. **This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure
the conditional.** Instead of defining both, in their unity and difference,
by conceptual labour, it mixes them indiscriminately. The unconditional becomes fact, the conditional an immediate essence.
What holds for astrology exemplifies the culture industry generally
from advertising to film and television.
gpt
To understand the quote, as you acknowledge, some context is required. The ideas on astrology and occultism have been explored in his essay “The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column” (1974) and his book _The Stars Down to Earth, and Other Essays on the Irrational in Culture_ (2001). Astrology, for Adorno, bears the mark of the culture industry (which is always authoritarian in nature) in that it seeks to propagate certain ways of categorising and reifying - especially in a Marxian sense - experience. 

By providing a message that appears specifically tailored to you (read: the Barnum effect), astrology rides on the coattails of “critical reflection”.  Astrology hence has a bad habit, in Adorno’s opinion, of presenting itself as “fact” without the need for “interpretive thinking”. It also tends towards the prescriptive, all the more to produce types of lives that are easily harnessed by late-capitalist societies.

Because Astrology operates along the logic of an arbitrary system (but still a system, nevertheless) in which star constellations are brought to bear on our lived experience, it appears to be both factual, essential, and totalising on a cosmic scale. The unconditional, then, lies beyond astrology and its reification of lives under capitalism: it cannot be reduced to a fact (which merely describes, and upon description, enters the economy of information-exchange; also, facts can change over time, which is the entire basis of daily, monthly, and yearly astrology readings). The unconditional, in this context, seems to be a way of thinking beyond the ways in which the culture industry dictates. 

On the flip side, the conditional - that which is subjected to conditions or pre-requisites - becomes intolerable to people who have been imbibing on palliative predictions and advice. We want to know our futures and we want the solutions _now_: these have to be in terms of the absolute (absolutely no terms and conditions allowed here!). The uncertainty that accompanies conditions and circumstances (which are all too vulnerable to chance and accidents) is unendurable, and indeed need not be endured because there is astrology and other occultisms like advertising, film, and television to pre-empt any existential discomfort. 

TLDR: we can no longer think beyond the reified ways of life under late-capitalism (this is a power that we possessed prior to this economic system) and thinking of uncertainty and chance has become unendurable because of how the culture industry distracts us from having to deal with that.