ND I.I., Protest Against Reification
He begins with more description of the way in which “the ontologies” are reactionary, not merely ideologically but as if expressing fascist domination in the form of thought.
Then it’s on to reification:
The philosophical need has passed over imperceptibly from one of substantive matter [Sachgehalt] and solidity into one of evading the reification of the Spirit which was carried out by society and categorically dictated by its members, through a metaphysics which condemns such reification, delimiting it through the appeal to an original which cannot be lost, and thereby does so little harm to it as ontology does to the scientific bustle.
Part of the “ontological need” that the first half of Part I is examining is a need to resist “the reification of the Spirit” that has happened in modernity. Heidegger’s response to this need was “a metaphysics which condemns such reification, delimiting it through the appeal to an original which cannot be lost, and thereby does so little harm to it as ontology does to the scientific bustle.” In other words, Heidegger goes to find what he thinks is safe from reification rather than tackling it head-on. As a protest against reification, Hedidegger therefore has no teeth. It’s a gesture, which represents itself as satisfying the need without really doing so.
In the absence of the old hierarchies and spiritual certainties that cannot be openly or seriously praised any more, there is only the recourse to being:
Nothing remains of the compromised eternal values except confidence in the sanctity of being, whose essence is prior to everything thingly.
The actual reified world is considered not worth changing:
For the sake of its contemptible inauthenticity in view of thingly being, which is supposed to be dynamic in itself, to “occur”, the reified world is considered unworthy, as it were, of transformation; the critique of relativism is exorbitantly raised into the denunciation of the progressive rationality of Western thought, including subjective reason.
So alongside the continuation, virtually uncritiqued, of the reified world, we have the denunciation of “progressive rationality of Western thought, including subjective reason”. The result is Heidegger condemns the critical rational power of the subject while leaving reification untouched. Reification, which in its social reality is part of the same process of excessive subjectivization that he notices, is considered beneath contempt, while subjective reason and therefore also critical rationality come in for all the criticism.
The paragraph that begins, “The reduction of the object to mere material”, describes exactly how reification and subjectivization are correlated. I won’t unpack it; others are welcome to do so.
Next bit:
Only, Heidegger’s critique of reification summarily charges the reflecting and realizing intellect of what has its origin in reality, which is itself reified along with its world of experience. What the Spirit does, is not the fault of its irreverent presumptuousness, but it gives back, what it is compelled to by the context of reality, in which it itself forms only a moment.
If Heidegger really wanted to critique reification and subjectivization, he’d critique the forms they take at the societal level, which imposes itself on individuals. Those individuals are not to blame.
To slide back reification into being and the history of being, thereby mourning as fate and consecrating what self-reflection and the praxis it can spark would perhaps like to change, is solely untruth.
Heidegger treats reification as destiny rather than as something caused by contingent conditions that could be changed.
Next Adorno credits Heidegger for understanding that …
the dualism of the inner and outer, of subject and object, of essence and appearance, of concept and fact are not absolute.
But Heidegger’s reconciliation of those dualisms …
is projected onto the irretrievable origin and thereby the dualism itself, against which the whole was conceived, is hardened contrary to the reconciling impulse.
Since the origin is irretrievable, there can be no reconciliation after all and the dualisms—which for Adorno lie at the root of, or are part and parcel of, the contradictions that characterize the damaged life of modernity—become permanent.
Thus:
The dirge over the forgetfulness of being is the sabotage of reconciliation; the mythic impenetrable history of being, in which hope still clings, denies this. Its fatality is to be broken through as the context of deception.
Thus the lament for the loss of the meaning of being, since it represents itself as the only possible reconciliation of those bad dualisms, functions to sabotage all efforts at actual reconciliation.
Incidentally, as we near the end of “The Ontological Need” and the beginning of the more detailed immanent critique of Heidegger in “Being and Existence”, I thought I’d brush up on my Heidegger by reading Richard Polt’s Heidegger: An Introduction and William Blattner’s Heidegger’s ‘Being and Time’: A Reader’s Guide—or at least parts of them. I’ve partially read them before and can recommend them. If anyone wants to read them but is unable to access them, PM me.