ND Part II / Necessity Of The Substantive
Adorno cites Kant as an instance of the idealist mistake, in his theory of the subjective constitution of the objects of experience.
In the Critique of Pure Reason, sensation occupied the place of the indissolubly ontic as the something. However, sensation has no sort of pre-eminence of cognitive dignity before any other real existent. Its “my”, accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic conditions, is mistaken for a legal claim by the experience which is entangled in its reflection-hierarchy, nearest to itself; as if what any particular human consciousness presumed as the ultimate were really an ultimate in itself, as if every other particular human and limited consciousness could not claim the same privilege for its sensations.
There is a lot going on here. In Kant’s philosophy, the Something takes the form of sensation, whereas the thing in itself is beyond our ken. So we have the active, spontaneous faculty of understanding, synthesizing a unity from the manifold of sensations impinging on us through the passive faculty of sensibility (under its forms of intuition, space and time, etc etc). The thickness and complexity here is all on the subjective side, but it amounts to judgement and knowledge only when applied to the sliver of the Something, what is given.
So the substantive in this philosophy is what is given to me, i.e., what is mine. Adorno is saying that just because it is mine does not justify my privileging it over any other real existent. Kant virtually says “Reality appears as my sensations, so (I have a right to say that) sensations are what count as reality.” But ownership is just an ontic accident.
It’s important that Adorno doesn’t qualify “existent,” as in “object of experience”. He doesn’t mean it in that Kantian manner; this would be to assume Kant’s whole system already. Rather, he (Adorno) starts with plain factual existents, which include tables and chairs, bodies, sensations, and subjects. Among these, he is saying, sensations have no “pre-eminence of cognitive dignity” just because they are given to me.
Thus Adorno refuses that initial Cartesian move of Kant’s—one that is unargued for, since it’s just built in to transcendental philosophy—of starting in the head, as if that’s foundational. Without this, the mineness of sensation is nothing special.
I’m quite familiar with Adorno’s attitude to Kant from his other work, and central to his critique is the objection that the a priori cannot be purified of the empirical. There is no pure a priori, no transcendental subject separable from the empirical subject. This view can be seen in the present section:
Its “my”, accidental to its transcendental analysis and tied to ontic conditions
The transcendental analysis, since it is universal and necessary, makes a point of getting by without any actual, i.e., ontic, mineness. The two sides have been separated from each other in Kant’s philosophy, not just methodologically but quasi-ontologically. Nevertheless, one is taken as a kind of starting point from which the other is abstracted: the immediately given “mine” serves as the launch-pad from which the universalizing rocket of transcendental subjectivity takes off. And Adorno’s point is that it cannot really serve as such. The very universalizing that builds the pure subject strips away the ontical mineness that made the given immediate and foundational in the first place. The “my” is left behind as something merely empirical: the foundation dissolves in its being built upon.
Next he looks at the other end, the transcendental subject.
If the form however, the transcendental subject, is supposed to strictly require sensation in order to function and thus to judge accurately, then it would be quasi ontologically attached not only to the pure apperception but just as much to its counterpole, to its matter.
It then follows that
The idea of something immutable, identical to itself, would also thereby collapse.
This is because
Sensations … have the character of that which is transient.
The argument here is that since the transcendental subject is in fact attached constitutively to ontic, transient, real sensations—and thereby to real existents—the idea that it’s a fixed point, immutable and self-identical across all my representations, collapses, dragged down to earthly reality by transient matter.
And rather than something derived from the world around us, it was a conceptual imposition all along:
It is derived from the domination of the concept, which wished to be constant towards its content, precisely its “matter”, and for that reason is blind to such.
Thus the “I think” and the transcendental subject, as fixed, pure, a priori structures, belong not to real subjects but only to the concept. However, Adorno is not saying that the transcendental subject does not apply to real subjects at all. Rather, he is saying that it doesn’t apply as fixed and pure. We can legitimately refer to the “I think”, the form of understanding, and the a priori, so long as we remember that they are “contaminated with the existent” (a phrase he used in the Introduction: Privilege of Experience). In a word, mediated. The transcendental subject is embedded in the world, dependent on and constitutively involved with matter.
The question arises: If the transcendental subject is dependent on and reciprocally-constitutively involved with sensations, then in what sense is it transcendental? Surely to be transcendental it has to be prior? This takes us back to the previous section, where Adorno holds the contradiction open, refusing to come down on the side of realism against idealism, despite the preponderence of the object. Here, each side conditions the other. What Kant has called transcendental not only conditions but is also conditioned. Therefore “transcendental” loses its claim to purity and immutability.
As he says:
Sensations … are therefore the conditions of the possibility of cognition in their own right
But Adorno doesn’t just come out and say there is no such thing as the transcendental subject—that would be to remove the fertile contradiction entirely, cancelling out the real insight of the conditioning relation between subject and object—so much as downgrading and problematizing the transcendental.
The nonconceptual, inalienable from the concept, disavows its being-in-itself and transforms it. The concept of the nonconceptual cannot pause by itself, in epistemology; this necessitates the substantiality [Sachhaltigkeit] of philosophy.
First of all, the nonconceptual is “inalienable from the concept” in that the concept cannot be purified of what it’s about, i.e., of the something it points to beyond itself. And as such, it’s not located in a hidden noumenal realm, separate from what thinks it.
Since the concept and the object are interdependent and interwoven, philosophy itself is not—despite various efforts in this direction—only occupied with the necessary and universal, the eternal and changeless. It is always through contingent particulars that it thinks what it thinks.
The last paragraph criticizes the division of labour between empirical particulars, which are thought to be the concern of science, and the “highest concepts” dealt with by philosophy proper. From this point of view, much of Adorno’s thought is not real philosophy, because it’s so immersed in history and society.
But it’s not just that philosophy has turned away from its substantive content:
Rather the philosophical analysis strikes immanently, in what is innermost to the presumably pure concepts and their truth-content, into that which is ontic, before which the claim of purity shudders and, with arrogant mien, cedes to the particular sciences.
In other words, when you analyze things philosophically, right into the most abstract core of the concepts, you hit upon the ontic. This is what Adorno has been arguing in these first two sections: the Something and the substantive can never be expunged from thought, and thought never reaches anything pure and immutable. In the face of this [the ontic at the heart of philosophy], your analysis, when accompanied by the “claim of purity,” recoils from it and haughtily hands it over to science as merely factual and thus lacking the dignity of philosophy proper.
This is all nicely summarized at the end of the section:
Philosophical thinking has for its content neither the remainder after the cancellation of space and time, nor general findings about what is spatio-temporal. It crystallizes in the particular, in what is determined in space and time.
Philosophy is neither the idealist or ontological removal of real existents to reach pure forms or pure being, nor is it in the business of producing or discovering the general laws governing real existents. So he is not saying, abandon the purity of philosophy, roll up your sleeves, and join the scientists (including sociologists, psychologists, etc.). Philosophy is rather what can be seen in the particular, without necessarily jumping straight into abstraction or generalization. The content of philosophy takes shape in the particulars, so this is where the truth lies, since no higher law or abstraction, i.e., no concept, ever coincides with the determinate thing.
The last line seeks to protect the particulars from the temptation to install “the Something” as a foundation:
The concept of the existent pure and simple is merely the shadow of the false one of being.