ND Part II / Outset from the Concept (Part 2)
Next, Adorno says that in “the traditional philosophies”—the tradition of Hegel and German idealism—everything beyond the thinking subject was interpreted as part of the thinking subject. Identity-thinking identified its concepts with objects and took that correlation as proof of the subjective constitution of objects. Adorno says that this results in “a gigantic analytic judgement, leaving no room for the qualitatively new”. This again makes use of the distinction between analytic judgements as explicative versus synthetic judgements as ampliative. It’s pretty much the same as saying philosophy is one gigantic tautology.
Next, a puzzling statement:
All these sorts of considerations are too radical and for that reason, like most radical questions, not radical enough.
He is exploiting an ambiguity in the meaning of radical. He employs two different senses:
- Originating in the root or ground (etymonline: radical)
- Very different from what is conventional or traditional; thoroughgoing.
Considerations about the deep character of concepts are too radical(1) because they try to reach the root, origin, or ultimate ground, of conceptuality; this drive to find a foundation is one that Adorno has been exposing and criticizing since the beginning of part II.
But this drive is also not radical(2) enough, because it is not thoroughgoing enough, not different enough from the conventional way of thinking or from the philosophical tradition. A properly radical(2) philosophy would question the very drive to reach a foundation.
The form of the untiring recourse, in which something of the lash of the work-ethic rages, shrinks ever further away from what is to be seen through, and leaves it undisturbed.
Going for the origin takes you away from the object—foundation-seeking is a flight from the thing you’re trying to understand. And this is a relentless, brutal, self-defeating compulsion, just like the work ethic.
The category of the root, of the origin itself is dominating, the confirmation of what came first, because it was there first; of the chthonic against the migrant, of the settled against the mobile. What is alluring as the origin, because it does not want to be assuaged by what is derived, by ideology, is for its part an ideological principle.
The imagined origin is dominant and compelling, and thus chauvinistic, favouring what is settled in one’s own milieu (or nation) against the nomadic or migratory. Origin/foundation/root is blood-and-soil ideology (chthonic = of the earth), partly because it sets itself up, in its radicality(1), as being resistant to ideology, which is supposedly merely derived and secondary to that origin.
In the last paragraph, Adorno chooses to reinterpret Kraus’s “Origin is the goal”, making it more in line with what he’s after. Viz., our goal is not the reactionary one of getting back to a pure origin, before everything went wrong; rather, the origin is in a sense produced by the goal, and lies at the end instead of the beginning. I think by this Adorno means that Utopia—reconciliation, freedom, and the good—lies at the end of all our efforts and not at the start as an uncorrupted pure and natural way of life.
No origin except in the life of the ephemeral.
What matters is what is historical, mutable, and made by us—not what is pure and fixed.