ND.I.I. / Being, Subject, Object
negativedialectics.org/#being-subject-object
One thing I didn’t comment on in my last post was this:
Light falls on the restorative tendencies of today’s philosophies from the kitschy exoticism of cobbled-together world-views, as in for example the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhism. Similar to this, these simulate a position of thought which the stored-up history in subjects makes it impossible to assume. The delimitation of the Spirit to what is open and achievable in its historical level of experience is an element of freedom; non-conceptual meandering embodies the opposite. Doctrines which unhesitatingly run away from the subject into the cosmos are along with the philosophies of being far more compatible with the hardened constitution of the world, and the chances of success in it, than the slightest bit of self-reflection of the subject on itself and its real imprisonment.
The modern subject is tempted to embrace exotic spiritualities that seem to offer transcendence, while the actually existing subject, with its “stored-up history,” that of subjectivism, cannot really achieve this. The transcendent realm, or a position outside or prior to the subject, is not “open and achievable” for a subjectivity formed historically by the philosophies and ideologies of individualism and the priority of the subject. Adorno suggests that Heidegger’s ontology is in the same ball-park as these false spiritualities, in that it appears to offer a transcendence of the subject.
He continues the thought in this section, conceding that Heidegger was not naive about this:
To be sure Heidegger saw through the illusion which sustained the popular success of ontology: that the state of the intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention] could simply be chosen out of a consciousness in which nominalism and subjectivism are sedimented, by one that, above all, became what it is only by self-reflection. He bypassed the alternative with the doctrine of being, which maintained that it was beyond the intentio recta [Latin: direct intention] and intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention], beyond the subject and object, as well as the concept and the existent.
The following helped me work this out:
It turns out the phrases are derived from the work of Nicolai Hartmann who introduced the terms to correspond to the Scholastics’ intentio prima and intentio secunda. The intentio recta, therefore, is the state when cognition focuses upon the true object, while intentio obliqua is a state of consciousness which focuses upon the image of the object in the intellect.
— Martin Paul Eve, Adorno terminology: intentio recta and intentio obliqua
Another way of putting it: intentio recta is thinking directly of objects, and intentio obliqua is thinking about one’s own categories, concepts, and representations, i.e., the subject’s thinking turned back on itself in self-reflection.
Heidegger was sophisticated enough to know that, owing to the tradition of Descartes onwards through to modern idealism and epistemology, you cannot just go straight to Being with the intentio recta. Thinking has become too subjectivized, almost like the veil of perception became a self-fulfilling concept, such that subjects in actuality became trapped in themselves. The tradition of Descartes onwards made self-reflection the epitome of thinking, the notion that the person and the mind is in the head, that the isolated self is primary, finally that the self constitutes reality. This is the “stored-up history” that Adorno mentioned before.
Since Heidegger realizes all this, his solution is to step back, to reject the intentio recta/intentio obliqua dichotomy, and finally the subject/object polarity entirely. He wants to enter the fray prior to all that.
For Adorno, this is bypassing the issue, not solving it.
Heidegger’s debt to Husserl’s categorial intuition
Adorno moves on to show that Heidegger’s Being is dependent on Husserl’s categorical intuition:
[H]is talk of being presupposes the Husserlian doctrine of the categorical intuition or apperception [Wesenschau].
In the Husserlian literature the term is most often translated as categorial intuition so I’ll mostly use that. I went down a rabbit-hole to work out what it meant. At first I thought it was just another term for Kant’s synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition, but it’s very importantly, and very knowingly, different: for Kant, the synthetic unity is in intuition but is nevertheless achieved by the understanding, which imposes its categories; but for Husserl, the relevant categories are themselves given in intuition, without any activity of the understanding. Thus we perceive relations, properties, and classification in the things themselves.
EDIT: “Without any activity of the understanding” is too strong. I should have said something like “without a structure imposed by the understanding conceived as a separate faculty.”
The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a much-needed clarity through a distinction between straightforward or sensuous, and founded or categorial intuition.
— Husserl, Logical Investigations, Sixth Investigation
We do not merely perceive sense-data—we perceive super-sensuously. When I see the phone on the desk, I don’t see the phone, separately the desk, and then impose an “on” relation subjectively. I perceive that relation, and since the category of relation cannot be reduced to sense-data, we therefore perceive categorially.
Categorial intuition directly presents the unity of whole and part, of the members of a group, of the terms of a relation, and so forth.
— John Drummond, Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (quotes here)
Adorno’s claim is that categorial intuition forms the basis or inspiration for Heidegger to claim that Being can be disclosed directly, beyond mere sensual detection and prior to any ratiocinative activity of the understanding. Categorial essences can be apprehended directly.
This is where Adorno criticizes Husserl’s concept itself. First, he credits Husserl with genuine insight:
The critique contained in that doctrine of classificatory logic as the unity of characteristics of that which is grasped under the concept remains in force.
Science has tended to work by the classificatory logic whereby particulars are reduced to instances of a type or species, and states of affairs are reduced to juxtapositions of characteristics. Husserl argues that perception and knowledge cannot be entirely reduced to this logic, because it is the states-of-affairs that we perceive, with all their relations etc.
But at the same time, Husserl was in thrall to science and wanted his philosophy to serve as a basis for science. So he wanted to have it both ways, as Adorno says, to have his cake and eat it too. But according to Adorno, the two are incommensurable, and Husserl is left in internal contradiction:
His method, expressly stated as such, would like to imbue the classificatory concepts through the mode in which the cognition assures itself, with what it cannot have as something classificatory, as the mere preparation of the given, but would have solely through the comprehension of the thing itself, which in Husserl oscillates between something intramental and something opposed to such in the immanence of consciousness.
In other words, Husserl wanted to give classificatory concepts what they could not have—the direct grasp of a unity greater than the sum of its parts—precisely because they are classificatory concepts.
From this point, Heidegger took the step of casting aside the rational side entirely, rejecting classificatory concepts and along with them justification. Or a better way to put it is that he dug down beneath classificatory concepts, which he classed as the relatively superficial present-at-hand, i.e., theoretical stance. He thought he could find the more profound, primordial, pre-theoretical being-in-the-world beneath all that.
And Adorno’s point about that is that Heidegger thereby locates the primordial disclosure of being beyond justification and argument, thus beyond reason.
The discomfort with the epistemological preliminary question becomes the legal writ to simply eliminate this; for him dogmatics simply turns, in contrast to the tradition of its critique, into a higher wisdom.