Adorno continues with his critique of Heidegger’s “being”. He describes it like this.
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. Being is the highest concept – for whoever says being, does not have it, but merely the word – and would nevertheless be privileged before all conceptuality, by virtue of the moments thought along with the word being, which do not exhaust themselves in the abstractly achieved conceptual unity of characteristics.
He then discusses how Heidegger’s “being” is dependent on, or derived from Husserl’s categorical intuition. The problem with the categorical intuition appears to be, that Husserl wants it to be prior to any category, “the ideal of what yields to ideation”, but as an ideal, it already has the character of a category, and he desires that it function as an epistemological category. So he wants to eat his cake and have it too.
Heidegger saw the problem and took a step to avoid it. To get outside the categories it cannot be something rational but must in a sense be irrational.
He thereby cast off the rational moment which Husserl guarded,* and, in this respect quite similar to Bergson, tacitly undertook a procedure which sacrificed the relation to the discursive concept, an inalienable moment of thought. Therein he covered over the weakness of Bergson, who juxtaposed two disparate modes of cognition, each unmediated by the other, in that by mobilizing the allegedly higher dignity, which was bestowed on the categorical intuition, he removed the epistemological one as preontological, along with the question concerning its legitimation. 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. This is the origin of Heidegger’s archaicism.
*See the chapter on jurisdiction [Rechtsprechung] in the “Ideas”.
So he says, this is supposed “to heal the concept of being from the wounds of its conceptuality, the division of the thought and what is to be thought.”
I’ll be a nit picker, and point out “Being is the highest concept”, and the categorical intuition is “the highest dignity”. So it’s not a matter of digging down beneath at this point, but going over the top of. That’s what I think is going on, they’re seeking the top of the pyramid of the supposed top-down causation of intention.
But that is fairly insignificant, and your reading is very much in agreement with mine. We say pretty much the same thing in two different ways, and that’s good. Thanks for the background information, it’s always helpful.