ND I.II., Copula
I’ve skipped the first section of this part of the book, “Immanent Critique of Ontology”, just because I started reading the “Copula” section and got hooked. I’ll go back and read the first section later; it seems to be introducing and justifying the method he begins to use here.
Though it’s quite difficult, this section was like a breath of fresh air. After all the polemic about ontology’s ideological functions, its underlying fascist sympathies, and so on, it was a relief to get substantive analysis, and a masterclass in the method of immanent critique. @Meta_U I expect you find this section particularly interesting, especially the bit about subject and object, which I seem to recall you’ve been waiting for.
Adorno of course doesn’t refer to any specific passages, so here’s one from Heidegger’s Basic Problems of Phenomenology.
We have already repeatedly met with being in the sense of the copula, being as the “is,” in our discussions. We referred to it once when it was necessary to point to the fact that in our everyday existence, without actually conceiving being at all, we nevertheless always already understand something like being, since we always use the expression “is,” as well as verbal expressions with various inflexions in general, with a certain understanding.
— Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology
Thus according to Heidegger, our use of “is” implies that we already have a tacit understanding of being.
Adorno says no. I’ve labelled the following passage so I can refer to the crucial distinction he makes:
“Is” establishes [A] the context of the existential judgement between the grammatical subject and the predicate and thereby suggests something ontic. At the same time, taken purely by itself, as the copula, it means [B] the general categorical matter-at-hand of a synthesis, without representing something ontic. That is why it has no qualms about adding itself to the ontological side of the ledger. Heidegger draws the ontological purity from the logicity of the copula, thus suiting his allergy against the factical; from the existential judgement however the memory of the ontic, which then permits it to hypostasize the categorical achievement of the synthesis as a given fact.
“Is” has two aspects:
- [A] As it is actually used, it establishes the content of a judgement. That is, the assignment of a property to a thing. This makes it ontic.
- [B] Abstractly, as copula, it establishes the form of the judgement. That is, the purely logical function of sythesis, which is the “general categorical matter-at-hand”.
Heidegger generates the ontological by taking the memory of the ontic from [A] how it is used in ordinary language, through [B] its isolation and logical purification, to produce a standalone abstract being.
But that’s not all:
To the “is” there does indeed correspond a “matter-at-hand”: in every predicative judgement the “is” has its meaning just as much as the subject and the predicate. The “matter-at-hand” is however intentional, not ontic. The copula fulfills itself according to its own meaning solely in the relation between the subject and the predicate. It is not independent.
The implication here is that Heidegger finds the ontological via another route: by mistaking the intentional relation of subject and predicate in consciousness for the ontic—in other words, reifying the relational act as a thing—and then taking this ontic to be ontological, as before. You can’t just tear out the copula and treat it as an independent thing.
Incidentally, in formal predicate logic the copula isn’t symbolized. Instead we use predicate expressions, e.g., \text{Red}(x). So “The apple is red” can be represented as
My attempt to apply this to Adorno’s critique failed miserably. He is using an entirely different framework—Kant, not Frege—and there is no one-to-one mapping between the two that I could work out.
The following two paragraphs are mostly just elaborations, making the point that Heidegger’s central mistake is to conflate form with content. Adorno elsewhere says that form and content are inseparable, but he never says that they are indistinguishable.
There is one thing I found quite interesting, because I didn’t know what he meant:
the “is” could be compared to occasional expressions. Its generality is a promissory note on the particularity, the general form for the consummation of particular judgements.
It turns out that “occasional expressions” are now usually known as indexicals—context-sensitive linguistic expressions such as “I”, “here”, and “now”. Adorno is saying that just as the form of indexical sentences remains the same while the specific referents vary (depending on the who, where, and when of their utterances), so the form of a predicative judgement is constant while the subject and predicate vary.
The point is that Heidegger’s error is to take the grammatical form itself as the specified content, before any actual content has been specified in the only way it can be, in predication. Heidegger acts like the form already brought with it the substantive disclosure that in fact only particular judgements can deliver.
Next, Adorno complicates the picture by granting that Heidegger has genuinely seen something important:
The word being has an overtone, which only the arbitrary definition could fail to hear; it lends the Heideggerian philosophy its chromata [Klangfarbe: tone-color]. Every existent is more than what it is; being, in contrast to the existent, is a reminder of this.
So it turns out there’s more to being than is found in the logical function of “is”. We knew that Adorno thought so: existents are not exhausted by their determinations, and what escapes them is the non-identical. But being isn’t the non-identical, just a reminder of it. Heidegger can see it but he misnames and misconceptualizes it.
Then there’s an interesting comment:
Because nothing is existent, which does not, by being determined and itself determining, require an other, which it is not itself – for by itself alone there would be nothing to determine – it points beyond itself. Mediation is simply another word for this.
I hadn’t really connected mediation with the non-identical before; Adorno does it here. Since things are constituted relationally, in the abstract Hegelian sense in which objects are objects only in relation to subjects and things are what they are because of what they are not, etc., they will always escape conceptual capture, because they are not fixed and self-identical.
Heidegger however seeks to rein in that which points beyond itself and reduces what it points towards to rubble. For him imbrication becomes its absolute opposite, the prôtê ousia [Greek: primary substance]. In the word being, the epitome of that which is, the copula is concretized.
An imbrication is a pattern of overlapping scales or tiles. He is using it as a metaphor for the existent’s mediation, the manifold of its relations to what is not itself. Being is a clue to this, but Heidegger promotes it to a standalone thing instead of following it to find the imbrication.
Adorno then goes on to say that “being” points to …
the objective moment, which conditions the synthesis in every predicative judgement, in which it nevertheless first crystallized.
“Being” points to that which objectively conditions the synthesis. But this condition crystallizes in what it conditions. In other words, the condition and that which it conditions are interdependent. The condition only shows up as a condition through what it conditions. It’s a bit like Kant’s categories, which are conditions for the possibility of experience that are empty without experiential content. In the present case, the condition is objectivity itself, which doesn’t show itself except through the subjective act of synthesis in any predicative judgement.
To be sure the appearance [Schein] of what is ontologically pure is reinforced by the fact that every analysis of judgements leads towards two moments, neither of which is to be reduced to the other – no more so than, metalogically, subject and object.
Every such judgement can be analyzed into an objective moment and a subjective moment, and this is what gives the appearance of a pure being.
There’s a long footnote for “subject and object”, distinguishing between the logical subject-object relation and the epistemological subject-object relation: they shouldn’t be conflated, but they parallel each other. This parallel isn’t a coincidence: the logic of subject and object condensed out of the real subject-object encounter. But I won’t say any more about that.
Next Adorno says that Heidegger even seems to be hypostasizing the irreducibility of subjective and objective moments:
The thought fascinated by the chimera of an absolute first will eventually be inclined to claim even that irreducibility itself as that which is ultimate. In Heidegger’s concept of being there are echoes of the reduction to irreducibility.
Sometimes it seems like he’s trying out an endless string of different concepts and frameworks to account for Heidegger’s hypostasization of being, but it’s more that he’s trying to set out all the mutually reinforcing ways in which the hypostasization happens. As we know, there can be no single, final answer to the question as to how and why. This section is a classic instance of Adorno’s method of circling around an object with a shifting constellation of concepts.
Anyway, the upshot of turning the irreducibility of the moments, a mere negativity, into ontological priority and ground, is a paralogism, a fallacious argument:
The paralogism lies in the transformation of that negative, that no single moment is to be reduced to the other, into something positive.
The conclusion:
Heidegger reaches the very borders of the dialectical insight into the non-identity in identity. But he does not carry through the contradiction in the concept of being. He suppresses it.
As I described above, Heidegger is very close to seeing the non-identical, which would be to “carry through the contradiction”. The contradiction in this case is between being as self-sufficient and pure, and being as mediated—completely dependent for its disclosure on the judgements it was meant to ground.
The rest of the paragraph describes being as a constellation of moments that only reaches a stable unity when you stop thinking it through. If you then say that this is because being is unanalyzable, this amounts to placing a taboo on trying to analyze it:
If the analysis of being itself becomes taboo, then the aporia passes over into subreption.
The aporia is the point at which being as a stable unity becomes no longer thinkable. In truth this points to the fact that it isn’t a stable unity at all, such that thinking it through reveals a constellation of moments and being itself dissolves. But if you say instead that its unthinkableness is as it should be, what you’re really doing is subreption: hiding the truth by rebranding the difficulty of thinking being as the ultimate profundity.
And this explains its appearance of absoluteness:
In being, the absolute is supposed to be thought, but only because it is not to be thought, would it be the absolute; only because it magically blinds the cognition of the moments, does it seem to be beyond the moments; because reason cannot think its best, it becomes, to itself, the worst.
Immanent critique
I’d like to look back over this section and work out exactly what I meant when I used the term—when I said that this section is a masterclass in the method of immanent critique. What makes it immanent, or is this just a fancy term for regular analysis? Reading the previous section would probably help, but I’ll go ahead anyway.
The point of immanent critique is to turn a position against itself, to use its own commitments, premises, and motivations to reveal errors in its arguments and conclusions. So, can we identify them in this case? Often it just looks like Adorno is revealing fallacious argumentation. For example, the first paragraph aims to show, by analysis, that Heidegger equivocates.
But later in the section, as it becomes more and more complex, Adorno brings in Heidegger’s premises and goals. Every time he concedes that one of them has something going for it—that marks an instance of immanent critique. The first comes in the second paragraph, embedded within regular analysis:
Heidegger is overcome by that thingly [dinghaft] thinking, against which he rebelled
It turns out that the foregoing analysis has revealed that Heidegger has done exactly what he criticizes the entire history of metaphysics for: treated being as ontic, as a thing. Specifically, his purportedly ontological ground is the result of the memory of the ontic in the ordinary use of “is”, plus the interpretation of the intentional function of the copula as ontic.
Here’s another example, a bit later in the section:
Language, which Heidegger correctly takes for more than mere signification, testifies by virtue of the dependence of its forms against what he squeezes out of it.
Taking Hediegger’s view of language seriously, that it’s more than signification, we can see that linguistic forms don’t just point to referents but also relate to each other, such that they are always bound up with each other and together disclose things. Adorno concludes from this that there is no special term that can be pulled out of context and purified, thus Heidegger’s own premise has undermined the crucial move.
I think there are several other examples, but I’m done for now.