ND Part II / Peephole Metaphysics
subject and object do not firmly oppose one another, as in the Kantian outline, but penetrate each other reciprocally
The consequence of the Kantian firm opposition of subject and object is a degradation of the object into indeterminacy (because what is given is reduced to a non-qualitative multiplicity), resulting in a hollow victory for the sovereign subject, which now rules over nothing determinate.
At the same time, the opposition reciprocally results in an indeterminacy on the side of the subject, a shrinking down of the subject to pure abstract reason. This is because to determine the qualities of the object, the subject needs objective validity, which in turn requires complete generality, i.e., a stripping away of the particulars.
But in case we thought mediation was the answer, i.e., the reciprocal penetration he’s already recommended, halfway through the second paragraph we get this:
The dualism is already given in the philosophical thought and as inescapable, as the process by which it becomes false in thought. Mediation is merely the most general, itself inadequate expression for this.
The error is not confined to the history of philosophy, which Adorno has now solved—it’s built in to philosophy as such, and inescapable. It can’t just be fixed by calling attention to mediation. So once again, Adorno is careful to avoid setting anything up as a first principle or doctrinal foundation.
This is the most interesting passage:
[The object’s] denigration was the flip side of the triviality that everything existent would be coloured by the observer, its group or species. In truth the cognition of the moment of subjective mediation into what is objective implies the critique of the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself, which, forgotten, lurks behind that triviality.
Central to subjectivist metaphysics, including empiricist offshoots like phenomenalism and “indirect realism,” is a triviality, namely that everything is “coloured by the observer”. Adorno here points out something I used to spend an inordinate amount of time pointing out when I took part in the direct vs. indirect realism discussions on TPF: that this triviality presupposes a “glance into the pure in-itself,” as the ideal “perspective” of what things are really like. Thus, anti-naive-realist philosophies assume naive realism as the gold standard that our perspective fails to live up to (otherwise known as the view from nowhere, a divine glance). In fact, Adorno says, subjectivism and naive realism are the same dualism seen from different ends.
I think there’s an asymmetry here, a preponderence of the object in what Adorno says. “the moment of subjective mediation into what is objective,” is a translation of “des Moments subjektiver Vermittlung im Objektiven,” which literally means “the moment of subjective mediation in the objective.” He is referring to the fact that the subjective is a moment within the objective, saying that the cognition of this moment is what allows us to question “the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself”.
Anyway, note carefully that the critique is directed at the notion of a glance into the pure in-itself, not at the pure in-itself as such. Does he reject that too? Yes and no, I’d say. It is the in-itself as correlate of a possible glance and as separate realm that is criticized, i.e., the what-would-be-seen-without-seeing. So it’s an attack on dualism, and it still leaves space for the object’s in-itself in the sense of its irreducibility to the subject.
There follows a polemic against subjectivism, i.e., “peephole metaphysics”.
Western metaphysics was, except for heretics, peephole metaphysics. The subject – itself only a limited moment – was locked for all eternity in itself, as punishment for its deification.
And near the end he weighs the pros and cons of Kant:
One cannot see out. What would be beyond, appears only in the materials and categories within. That is where the truth and untruth of the Kantian philosophy would step out of each other. It is true, in that it destroys the illusion of the immediate knowledge of the absolute; untrue, in that it describes this absolute with a model, that would correspond to an immediate consciousness, were it merely the intellectus archetypus [Latin: archetypal intellect].
Kant is true in his takedown of traditional metaphysics, which assumed direct knowledge of God and the world as a whole and in itself. Kant was right to say that there is no divine glance.
But Kant is untrue in that he still effectively retains the notion of a glance into the in-itself, which features in Kant’s system as intellectual intuition, Kant’s description of direct knowledge of the in-itself that does not need to go through the faculty of sensibility. After all, although he said that there is no divine glance, he qualified it by saying “for creatures like us” (paraphrasing), thus holding open the divine glance as a possibility.
So, Kant writes of the object as it is apart from the conditions of experience, but even positing that is to posit the divine glance. There remains the dualism between appearance and in-itself.
That seems a bit unfair to Kant, but ultimately I can see Adorno’s point anyway. And it is certainly the case that the first Critique is full of phrases like “mere appearances”, so Kant was steeped in that dualism even if he went some way to dissolving it.
The next step, beyond Kant’s subjectivism, is German idealism: it is also both true and false. True in its critique of Kant’s dualism, but false …
in its equation of subjectively mediated truth to the subject, as if its pure concept were being itself.