ND I.I. Affirmative Character
negativedialectics.org/#affirmative-character
In this section Adorno shows that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, despite appealing to the authority of Kant as a precursor, fails to face up to Kant’s critique. Although Heidegger registers what’s missing, the solution he is affirming, i.e., Being, is a false one.
The abolition of human beings
But first I want to pick up on this:
Society has become the total functional context which liberalism once thought it was; what is, is relative to what is other, irrelevant in itself. The horror of this, the dawning consciousness that the subject is losing its substantiality, prepares it to listen to the assertion that being, covertly equated with that substantiality, survives as something which cannot be lost in the functional context.
(my bold)
This is what he was talking about in lecture 10 of the Lectures on Negative Dialectics (LND):
It follows that since the immediate consciousness of human beings is a socially necessary illusion, it is in great measure ideology. And when I said in my lecture on society […] that I regarded it as the signature of our age that human beings were becoming ideology, then this is precisely what I meant. If anyone objects that I am lending support to the claim that in a sense this would mean the abolition of human beings, I can only reply by saying in good American: that’s just too bad.
— LND p.100
Back in the discussion I said this about it:
Human beings have the potential to be spontaneous, to be free, to question prevailing beliefs, and to resist compulsion—and to some extent they have at times realized these potentials. But now, subjectivity is a standardized construct of ideology rather than the source of freedom and independence as it sometimes was in the Enlightenment era.
[…]
If the human being had once been the authentic, autonomous individual of the Enlightenment and the classic era of the bourgeoisie (which despite everything was a promising avenue for human development), then such a creature was going extinct, replaced by administered puppets with manufactured desires, their resistance pre-emptively co-opted.
— Jamal on LND Lecture 10
As @Moliere put it more succinctly:
So he is critical of Heidegger’s project but sees how the subject is becoming lost in a series of functional, rather than substantive categories – into the liberal managed state.
— Moliere
The reason it’s here in the section on the ontological need is that this withering away of the subject makes the need more strongly felt, and makes Heidegger’s philosophy particularly appealing—fundamental ontology reassures us that because Dasein is the privileged site of Being’s disclosure, there is something deep in us and at the same time fundamental to reality that cannot be absorbed by the administered society, or “lost in the functional context” as Adorno puts it. His claim here is that despite Heidegger’s assertions to the contrary (his anti-subjectivism and anti-consciousness-philosophy), his Being is “covertly equated with that substantiality” of the subject that is withering away. Heidegger’s association of Being with authenticity would further support this claim.
In those categories to which fundamental ontology owes its resonance and which they for that reason either deny or so sublimate, that they can no longer give rise to unwelcome confrontations, is to be read how much they are the imprints of something missing and not produced, however much they are its complementary ideology.
The big puzzle here is what “those categories” refers to. He might mean the everyday categories of human experience that Heidegger denies or sublimates with his own categories of anxiety, thrownness, care, and so on. Heidegger’s ontology can seem to satisfy the ontological need because it resonates with categories that are the “imprints of something missing” in modern life.
@Moliere again:
This is the false affirmative. Social production and reproduction hollowed out what ontological philosophy attempts to awaken.
— Moliere
Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant
What ontological philosophizing attempts to awaken, to conjure, as it were, is however hollowed out by real processes, the production and reproduction of social life. The effort to theoretically vindicate humanity and being and time as Ur-phenomena does not halt the destiny of the resurrected ideas. Concepts, whose substrate is historically passed by, were thoroughly and penetratingly criticized even in the specifically philosophical area as dogmatic hypostases; as with Kant’s transcendence of the empirical soul, the aura of the word being-there [Dasein: existence], in the paralogism chapter; the immediate recourse to being in the one on the amphiboly of the concept of reflection.
I think @pussycat is right:
Adorno is simply using Kant to reject Heidegger’s claims: “An ontology of Being was thoroughly and penetratingly shown to be impossible by Kant, a dogmatic hypostases, what on earth is Heidegger blabbering about? He should have at least made an effort to respond to Kant’s critique!”
— Pussycat
In other words, Kant already criticized the aura of “Dasein” in the Paralogisms, and Heidegger is thus effectively a regression to a pre-critical philosophy, once again hypostasizing the logical-grammatical I am/I think into a real essence.
Similarly, Kant’s Amphiboly argument can be applied to Heidegger, as Kant applied it to Leibniz, to imply that in going directly to Being with no thought or concern about mediation, i.e., without considering the conditions under which we can think about it, he is suffering under an illusion. For Leibniz, the intellectual objects were monads, projected into reality as things-in-themselves; for Heidegger, it was Being, another uncritically projected concept.
I like the conclusion of that argument:
Modern ontology does not appropriate that Kantian critique, does not drive it further through reflection, but acts as if it belonged to a rationalistic consciousness whose flaws a genuine thinking had to purify itself of, as if in a ritual bath.
Heidegger acts as if Kant’s philosophy is the thing that he is moving beyond, the thing that genuine thinking has to purify itself of—with its representations, its subject-object basis, its “rationalistic consciousness”. But this is philosophical fraud, giving the impression of having good reason to reject Kant so as to dodge Kant’s critique of dogmatic concepts.
And yet, Heidegger does look to Kant for support.
Despite this, in order to rope in critical philosophy, an immediate ontological content is imputed to this latter.
In his “Kantbook” Heidegger turns Kant into his precursor, a proto-fundamental-ontologist, hesitantly inaugurating a grand task that would have to wait for Heidegger himself to take up in earnest.
The main point to know about Heidegger’s interpretation of Kant is that he denied that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason is doing epistemology, as commonly thought, arguing instead that it’s actually doing ontology.
Morganna Lambeth describes Heidegger’s interpretation of the question, how are synthetic a priori judgments possible?
According to Heidegger, inquiring into the universal and necessary judgments that we make about objects, this question asks about an ontology: the ontology of those objects that we encounter when we observe the world around us. But, moreover, in asking about the possibility of an ontology, this question, per Heidegger, asks after another ontology: the ontology of the human knower, who makes synthetic a priori judgments,and whose constitution indeed allows for the making of such judgments. Kant, therefore, in Heidegger’s view, seeks a fundamental ontology, where one ontology (the ontology of the human being) explains the possibility ofanother (the ontology of observed objects). Though Kant does not complete this task – he hesitates to specify the ontology of the human being, failing to recognize that his characterization of our cognitive capacities gives insight into the sort of beings that we are – his inquiry provides direction on how to do so. Spelling out the interconnections at which Kant hints, between the cognitive faculties that Kant identifies, provides the ontology of the human being who forms a basis for other ontologies.
— Morganna Lambeth, Heidegger’s Interpretation Of Kant, p.193
And according to Adorno, Heidegger is not entirely wrong:
Heidegger’s reading of the anti-subjectivistic and “transcending” moment in Kant is not without legitimation. The latter raises the objective character of his mode of questioning programmatically in the preface to the Critique of Pure Reason and left no doubt of it in carrying out the deduction of the pure concept of understanding.
Kant sets out his program in the preface to the CPR, hoping that, in spending so much time on subjective faculties, he has cleared the ground for a later “Metaphysics of Nature.” His most basic aim is towards the objective, and to ensure metaphysics has a future.
But according to Adorno:
By no means however is this objective interest to be equated with a hidden ontology.
And this is because Kant reaches the objective only through the subject. There is no direct acquaintance with Being, but rather a subjectively mediated relation to objects. And the irony is that since this subjective mediation constitutes all knowledge of objectivity, Heidegger, in rejecting the route to Being via intuition and the understanding, does a lot worse than Kant in reaching it.
Adorno concludes by summarizing the argument: Kant’s ontological tendency was a moment of his thought, but was not its deep central significance.
