ND I.II., No Transcendence of Being
Much of this section is an elaboration of the “Copula” section.
In truth all particular concepts are, contrary to the linguistic atomism of Heidegger, the faithful believer in the whole …
It is indisputable, that being would not simply be the epitome of what is, of what is the case. Such an anti-positivistic insight does justice to the surplus of the concept over facticity. No concept could be thought, indeed none would even be possible without the “more”, which makes language into language.
The “more” is mediation, the web of relations between words/concepts—I think Adorno conflates them—which is distinctive of and immanent to language.
Heidegger’s transcendence is absolutized immanence
But Adorno wants to explain…
how it is that the purely deduced, the mediated, being, can hijack the insignia of the ens concretissimum [Latin: most concrete being]
In other words, how it is that the product of abstraction and mediation can appear as something immediate. Adorno explains it first by saying that both poles of traditional epistemology are in fact abstract. Not only the abstract concept but also the given is abstract, because the posited particular is already, as posited, bound up with other concepts in a web of meaning, i.e., mediated by conceptual and linguistic relations.
Thus they become indistinguishable, and this means that Heidegger can substitute one for the other. Recall that according to Heidegger, being is the ultimate given, not an abstract concept but an immediacy that we comprehend tacitly.
So it goes both ways. First, the immediate existent can borrow the dignity of the abstract concept so as to be presented as pure being:
The concept of the existent pure and simple, according to its ideal without any categories, in its complete lack of qualifications, need only delimit itself to nothing existent, and can thus call itself being.
Second, pure being can be dressed up as the immediate existent:
Being however, as absolute concept, does not need to legitimate itself as being: with every circumscription it would delimit itself and violate its own meaning. That is why it can be garbed with the dignity of the immediate as much as the tode ti [Greek: individual thing, this-here] with that which is intrinsic [Wesenhaften].
Heidegger’s entire philosophy plays out between these two extremes, indifferent to each other.
But this doesn’t quite work, because immediate givens are in fact always ontic, so what strives to be ontological always collapses into transient particularity.
But against his will the existent ends up prevailing over being.
As soon as the talk of being adds anything at all to the pure invocation, it stems from the ontic.
ND I.II., Expression of the Inexpressible
Lying beneath all the ontology is the philosophical urge to express the inexpressible. And the more that philosophy, since Kant, has attempted to suppress this urge, the more it leads to attempts to shortcut the rejected metaphysics by jumping straight to the inexpressible without the work of building a system.
He makes a categorical statement:
Philosophy consists neither of vérités de raison [French: truths of reason] nor of vérités de fait [French: truths in fact]
Philosophy can’t be “nailed down” as one or the other—neither logical nor empirical truths. Philosophy doesn’t consist of truths at all, but is generally oriented towards truth, and has its own kind of rigour or “stringency”, which consists of reflection on appearances and presuppositions.
Philosophy keeps things in suspense, refusing definitiveness. And in the end, this is because of philosophy’s somewhat paradoxical position:
What is suspended is nothing other than the expression of the inexpressible in itself. Therein it is truly the sibling of music.
And notice that both philosophy and music are not complete failures: they do express or touch upon truths, and they do illuminate reality.
In the last paragraph, Adorno turns to the way Heidegger treats the inexpressible. The gist is that he simultaneously valorizes the inexpressibility and also expresses it…
By treating the inexpressible of philosophy as immediately thematic
By making being the postive subject matter of his philosophy, he neutralizes the truth of the inexpressible.