ND.I.I. Disempowerment of the Subject
negativedialectics.org/#disempowerment-of-the-subject
Ontology’s return to life due to objectivistic intention was supported by what admittedly least of all suited its concept: the fact that the subject became to a large extent ideology, which concealed the objective functional context of society and assuaged the suffering of the subjects under it.
This more or less repeats his point from earlier, but clarifies Heideggerian ontology’s ideological role. It is one set of ideas among many which conceal the reality of society, in its (society’s) cold, calculating, brutal instrumentalism—but is maybe a kind of second-order ideology, in that it appears to address this dire situation but ultimately works again to conceal and assuage.
The anthropocentric way of thinking about life has been shaken.
I was surprised to see him mention cosmology as having had a significant effect on the anthropocentric way of thinking. I don’t disagree with him—it’s just surprising to see Adorno agreeing with a fairly mainstream, conventional point (not usually his style).
This motif is more than a merely superficial world-view …
Maybe I expected him to think the overturning of geocentrism was a superficial world-view.
Overweening syntheses between philosophical developments and the ones of the natural sciences are of course offensive […]
That’s the Adorno I know. But:
Nevertheless the results of modern cosmology have radiated far and wide: all conceptions, which would make the universe resemble the subject or even deduce its pride of place therein, are relegated to naiveté, comparable to the cranks or paranoids who consider their little town to be the center of the world.
This makes a lot of sense and is probably fairly uncontroversial today. Of course, the ironic thing is that whereas the actual Copernican revolution dislodged us from the centre, Kant’s Copernican revolution put us back. So already, even with Kant, philosophy began to clash with cosmology—and when the tradition led to full-blown idealism, its anthropocentrism became untenable.
Adorno’s point with respect to Heidegger might be that by the time we got into the 20th century, persisting in idealist philosophy had become embarrassing. And Adorno does mean that Heidegger is idealist despite his self-conception.
An important concept of Adorno’s comes up in this section:
The suspicion and presentiment are universal, that the control of nature weaves ever more tightly through its advance the catastrophe which it also intended to ward off; the second nature, into which society has overgrown.
The concept of second nature comes to Adorno from Hegel via Lukács. It refers to the way the products of culture and history become naturalized, habitual, and internalized. For Lukács and Adorno, this is ideology in its most concrete form. For Adorno in particular, second nature comes to be associated with the “heteronomous” social totality that brutally or insidiously imposes itself on individuals from above or from without.
Adorno connects Heideggerian ontology with second nature:
The truth, which exiled humanity from the midpoint of creation and which reminds it of its powerlessness, strengthens the feeling of powerlessness as subjective modes of behavior, causing human beings to identify themselves with it, and thereby further reinforces the bane of second nature.
The truth, that we are not at the centre of the universe, has caused subjectivity and powerlessness to be conflated and identified. It is as if our necessary acceptance of powerlessness in the face of the cosmos (nature) has been conflated with our powerlessness in society (second nature), such that we think powerlessness is our inevitable fate, and we fail to push through the surface of things to see that powerlessness in society is not inevitable and eternal.
Heideggerian ontology encourages or embraces this conflation. Thrownness, for example, is presented as the way things are no matter what, a “cosmic” fact, whereas Adorno would say the experience of thrownness is a function of the kind of societies we live in. The Heideggerian pattern identified by Adorno is: accurate as phenomenology, ideological as ontology. Alienation is turned from a kind of damage done to people by a certain kind of society, into the human condition. What’s presented as the deepest of deep philosophy is a sophisticated acceptance of second nature.
@Moliere Is my pace too slow? I think my perfectionism or obsessiveness prevents me from allowing anything to slip through my fingers, so I like to try and work out everything he says.