Question of Being
Here Adorno discusses the distinction between essence and appearance, its relation to authenticity, and what Heidegger does to this distinction. Classical metaphysics placed the true world (essence) as hidden behind appearances. Enlightenment reversed this with the thesis that the metaphysical “essence” is the appearance, leaving appearance as if it is the true essence. Each way of looking at things leaves the hidden as the authentic. Positivism cancels out what is not hidden, as subjective projection, thereby reinforcing the illusoriness of the authentic.
What Heidegger misses is that the authentic of positivism is just an imitation of the ancient “doctrine of essences”. But the hidden cannot be bad, so Heidegger treats human beings as if they need to be scolded by philosophy for having forgotten the essence.
The resistance against reified consciousness, which still resonates in the pathos of authenticity, is broken.
The answer to the question of what really is authentic is blocked by the form of the question, and shuffled off into the question of being. It is a deceptive move because it avoids the issue which every corporeal individual has an interest in, and that is “whether the individual is absolutely annihilated with death” or whether he has a Christian hope of individuality in the eternal:
…what Hamlet means by to be or not to be is replaced by the pure essence, which swallows up existence.
Note, “existence” refers to the individual, which is swallowed up by the universal, “pure essence”. Accordingly, Heidegger poses “the question of being” as the a priori condition necessary for the possibility of both ontic sciences, and the ontologies which ground the ontic studies.
All ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it may dispose over, remains fundamentally blind and an inversion of its innermost intent, if it has not sufficiently explicated the meaning of being and comprehended this explanation as its fundamental task."5
What Adorno says is that this move does the opposite of what is intended. It avoids the real question of authenticity, blocks access to it, and shrinks itself to a dimensionless point, as a useless tautology which says nothing but “being” over and over again.
Heidegger intended to give to the essence of being, superiority over logic, but he used Husserl’s principles which combine the pure, “absolutely valid” with the the self-given appearance of the object in “pure phenomenology”. Heidegger differs from Husserl only in that he “relocates the contradictory program away from its Husserlian staging-grounds, the consciousness, and into the transcendence of consciousness.”
Th incompatibility of the pure and the concrete, leaves “being” as a unity of the two, unable to support either one. Heidegger’s being can be neither existing nor a concept. This leaves it as an unattainable nihility, a mere name. Only through its determinations can a phenomenon reach beyond itself, and being remains completely indeterminate.
Volte:
The first sentence lays the groundwork for chapter:
The dialectic of being and the existent – that no being can be thought without the existent and no existent without mediation – is suppressed by Heidegger: the moments, which are not, without one being mediated by the other, are to him immediately the One, and this one is positive being.
So when Heidegger attempts to drive the ontic completely out of the ontological, it leaves the ontological as absolutely indeterminate. Further, being and the existent must be so indeterminate in relation to each other, that we cannot even say what the difference between the two is. But for Heidegger, the existent must be subordinate to being, and this is “the ontologization of the ontic”.
Everything existent is reduced to its concept, and this makes the difference between existent and concept disappear, leaving the concept without content. The precise formulation is expressed in Being and Time: ““The ‘essence’ of being-there [Dasein] lies in its existence [Existenz].””