ND I.II., “Mythology of Being” to “Historicity”
@Meta_U, I’ll try not to rewrite your summary so I’ll just look at a few things I thought were interesting.
Mythology of Being
Categories like fear, which is at least not to be stipulated, that it would have to last forever, become by means of their transfiguration constituents of being as such, something preordained [Vorgeordnetes] to every existence, their a priori. They install themselves as precisely the “meaning”, which in contemporary social conditions is not to be positively and immediately named. What is meaningless is endowed with meaning, in that the meaning of being is supposed to arise precisely in its counter-force [Widerspiel], in mere existence, as its form.
I don’t understand why Redmond chose to translate Angst as “fear”. Angst is a well-known Heideggerian category; when it’s translated (it doesn’t really need to be), it’s always translated as anxiety.
Anyway, this is one of Adorno’s most serious condemnations, one we’ve seen a few times before. It’s that for Heidegger, socially and historically contingent suffering becomes ontologically necessary, an aspect of the “fate of being,” owing to being’s predominance over mere existence.
And rather than a critique of suffering and the meaningless of life in this society, Heidegger dignifies these with his magical categories, which are thus offered as the meaning of life.
Ontologization of the Ontical
What is lesser is supposed to be truer, as later on in the self-justifying Heideggerian ideology of the magnificence of simplicity.
In both Hegel and Heidegger, what replaces concrete particularity and the non-identical is indeterminate, impoverished, thinner—or “scanty”.
The apology for scantiness is however not merely one for a thinking which has once more shrunk to a point, but has its precise ideological function.
Heidegger (and to some extent also Hegel) made a virtue of the poverty of his concept, and this is how it becomes ideological:
The affectation of noble simplicity, which warms to the dignity of poverty and of the frugal life, suits the continuing absurdity of real scarcity in a society, whose state of production no longer permits the appeal that there are simply not enough goods to go around.
A true ontology would be that of the matter-at-hand, i.e., material reality, i.e., society and culture. Thus ontology would concern itself with theorizing, or “constructing,” the culture industry, not being:
Philosophically legitimate ontology would have its place more in the construction of the culture-industry than in that of being; good, only that which has escaped ontology.
Insofar as there is something good, it would be whatever escapes the ontology.
Function of The Concept of the Existent
This is about existentialism’s prioritization of existence over essence. @Moliere, as a Sartre expert, you may find this section interesting.
What is true in the concept of existence is the objection against a condition of society and scientific thinking, which virtually drives out the unregimented experience, the subject as a moment of cognition. Kierkegaard’s protest against philosophy was also one against the reified consciousness from which, in his words, subjectivity has gone out: against philosophy he also perceived its interest.
But existentialism as it developed in Sartre etc. ends up taking what is in reality a mediated, “disempowered and internally weakened subjectivity,” and then isolating and hypostasizing it into something supposedly immediate.
The last paragraph of this section is very interesting. It’s about the essence of humanity. He seems to be saying that there could be one, or that we could become such that we could have one, but that reading off an essence from what we happen to be, as anthropologists might do, would only foreclose on our possibilities.
That it cannot be said, what humanity really is, is no especially sublime anthropology but a veto against every sort.
“Existence Ontological In Itself”
Despite the fact that Heidegger ontologizes subjectivity as Dasein, because…
The concept of subjectivity iridescently shimmers no less than that of being and thus is to be attuned to the latter any which way.
…the fact remains that…
That which is individuated, which has consciousness, and whose consciousness would not be without it, remains spatio-temporal, facticity, existent; not being.
Nominalistic Aspect
Nominalism, one of the roots of existential philosophy of the Protestant Kierkegaard, endows Heideggerian ontology with the attractive power of what is not speculative.
Heidegger profits from the prestige of concrete particulars that Kierkegaard, influenced by nominalism, wielded against Hegel. Heidegger presents his philosophy as one that attends, to an unprecedented degree, to concrete existence, especially being-in-the-world. His philosophy therefore has the attractive but false appearance of a grounded body of thought that’s poles apart from speculative metaphysics and idealism.
The philosophical personalism of Kierkegaard, and perhaps also its Buberian offshoot, senses the latent chance of metaphysics in nominalism; however, consistent Enlightenment recoils into mythology at the place where it absolutizes nominalism, instead of dialectically penetrating its thesis – there, where it breaks off the reflection in the belief of something ultimately given.
Nominalism is a good insight, but the concrete particular is only a moment in a dialectic, so you can’t stop short of its mediation without hypostasizing it, effectively mythologizing it as an absolute, the immediate given. As he said in the “Being Thesei” section:
every immediacy … is a moment, not the entirety of the cognition
Enlightenment is nominalist, because its aim is to demystify—and that’s all well and good—but Enlightenment becomes mythology precisely in regarding this too highly, as a definitive principle and result.
Existence Authoritarian
Heidegger’s philosophy says that
the measure of the truth would not be any sort of objectivity, but the pure being-so and acting-so of the thinker.
That is, truth becomes a matter of authenticity, without any shared rational measure. Thus the existence of the subject is truthful merely in its authoritarian assertion and affirmation of itself, with no possibility of being questioned.
existence, which proclaims itself willy-nilly as the criterion of thought, thus secures the validity of its decrees in authoritarian fashion, just as the political praxis of dictators does to the world-view of the day.
At the end of the section we get another appeal to utopia:
The utopian potential of thought would be, rather, that thought, mediated through the reason incorporated in individual subjects, would break through the narrowness of the thinker. …
It is hamstrung … by the existential concept of truth, propagating provincialism as the power to truth; that is why the cult of existence blossoms in the provinces of all countries.
He is condemning the provincialism of the existential concept of truth, because it finds truth in whatever the subject happens to be in its individuality, divorced from the universal demands of reason. But he has a dig at the literal provinces too.
Historicity
Heidegger’s concept of historicity on the surface seems like an advance compared to most other philosophies, that treat existence as timeless (Hegel being the notable exception). But Adorno isn’t satisfied. By turning history into part of the formal structure of Dasein, operating at all times, history becomes dehistoricized, …
as if real history were not stored up in the core of everything which is to be cognized
Thus…
The result is once again the ontologization of the ontic.
That history can accordingly be ignored or deified as need be, is a practical political consequence of the philosophy of being.
Actual history can be denigrated and ignored as merely ontic, or it can be deified as the destiny of being.
He ends the section saying that without the eternal idea of justice, Heidegger’s existential thought, in its adherence to invariants (hence the comment that he hadn’t shaken off Plato’s foremost prejudice), can affirm nothing except power.