ND.I.I / Ontological Objectivism
negativedialectics.org/#ontological-objectivism
Adorno criticizes Heidegger’s Being for being an empty concept, having nothing to say about either “individualized existences” or “rational abstraction.” Being is ultimately little more than a tautology. He quotes Heidegger himself: “Yet being—what is being? It is Itself.”
Appealing to Hegel, he says that even an analytic judgement, though merely explicative, says more than X is X. For example, the bachelor is unmarried says a bit more than the bachelor is the bachelor. Being cannot sustain even this minimally substantive judgement.
Being will have nothing to do with abstract concepts, but neither will it get its hands dirty with existing things. All that is left is the name itself.
In the section’s last part, Adorno takes us on a short historical tour of ontology: from Plato, on to Aristotle, later on scholasticism and rationalism, finally confronting Kant’s critique. Heidegger wants to “wipe all this away by regressing to the holy dawn of time prior to the reflection of critical thought.”
And Heidegger…
would like solely to circumvent the philosophical compulsion which, once grasped, would prevent the neutralization [Stillung] of the ontological need.
According to Adorno, the proper compulsion for philosophy is one that doesn’t neutralize or subdue the ontological need by seeming to satisfy it. The right philosophy would prevent such a neutralization. Heidegger, by regressing to the holy dawn, wishes to circumvent this compulsion so as to neutralize the ontological need, whereupon we can satisfy ourselves that everything is ok. For Adorno, the proper philosophical thing to do is avoid this false satisfaction and face up to our real problems (to put it more prosaically than it deserves).
The will not to be spoon-fed, to experience something essential from philosophy, is deformed through answers which are tailored according to the need, in the shadows between the legitimate obligation, to provide bread, not stones, and the illegitimate conviction that bread has to exist, because it must.