ND.I.I., Disappointed Need
negativedialectics.org/#disappointed-need
I was tripped up at the very beginning:
That the philosophy oriented towards the primacy of the method remains satisfied with such preliminary questions, and for that reason possibly also feels as a basic science on safe ground, only creates the illusion that the preliminary questions, and philosophy itself, scarcely have consequences any more for cognition.
Without appearing to take a turn, Adorno here takes a turn away from Heidegger and towards modern epistemology or analytic/neo-Kantian philosophy. I suspect there’s an intended significance in the way Adorno presents this turn. As I’ve discussed before, his style is deliberately contentful, and here in his style he makes it seem like what he’s talking about is a continuation of what came before, not a turn at all. I take the meaning to be that modern epistemology and Heidegger were just two sides of the same coin. If I’m right about this—and why would he write like that otherwise—it’s mind-boggling to think he was writing with that level of attention to meaning-within-style in every sentence of this book.
So, what tripped me up was the way he achieves this. The phrase, “such preliminary questions,” seems to refer back to previous sentences, so at first I struggled to work out what he was talking about. But in fact it refers back within the sentence to “the philosophy oriented towards the primacy of the method.” He is referring to modern epistemology that has handed over the substantive questions to science—in his milieu it would be neo-Kantianism, in our English-speaking one it would be the analytic tradition (roughly speaking).
He traces this unambitious, deflationary, over-technical approach in philosophy back to Kant, who was interested merely in “the normal functioning of the understanding.”
For Adorno, philosophers have given up too easily:
Defeatism hamstrings the specifically philosophical impulse to explode something true out from behind the idols of the conventional consciousness.
I enjoyed this polemic:
The scorn of the amphiboly chapter against the presumptuousness which wished to cognize what is innermost to things, the self-satisfied manly resignation by which philosophy settles down in the mundus sensibilis [Latin: sensible world] as something external, is not merely the enlightening negative reply to that metaphysics which confused the concept with its own reality, but also the obscurantistic one to those which do not capitulate to the façade.
We can see this macho, anti-metaphysical, scientistic scorn in evidence still today.
There are two sides to it. The critique of metaphysics was a good thing, but Adorno points out that the resulting methodologically-focused philosophy is also effectively obscurantist, since it closes down further enquiry (enquiry by the philosophies “which do not capitulate to the façade.”)
This is where we see what Adorno has been getting at.
Something of the recollection of this best of all moments, which critical philosophy did not so much forget, as zealously excise in honor of the science which it wished to found, survives in the ontological need; the will not to allow the thought to be robbed of that, for whose sake it has been thought.
The best of all moments is the moment in philosophy prior to sobering up and getting down to your work as the handmaiden of science—the moment in which it seems possible to reach deeper truths. Neo-Kantianism and analytic philosophy did not succeed in banishing this ontological need.
Incidentally, while he’s complaining about over-specialization, methodological focus, and irrelevant pedantry, he writes:
The partition between solitary disciplines such as sociology, economics and history allows the interest of cognition to disappear in pedantically drawn and overblown trench-battles.
We see here some of the reasoning for the Frankfurt School’s aspiration to build an inter-disciplinary tradition.
I’m going to ignore the details of this section and summarize by saying that the basic point is that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is a crass reaction to this methodological focus in philosophy, a clumsy attempt to satisfy the ontological need which so obviously was not going away.
Fundamental ontology eludes itself not the least because it holds up an ideal of “purity” which stemmed from the methodologization of philosophy – the latest link of the chain was Husserl – as the contrast of being to the existent, nevertheless philosophizing as if over something substantive. This habitus was to be reconciled with that purity only in a realm where all determinable distinctions, indeed all content blurred together.
That realm being the realm of Being.
He ends the section with a flourish:
Among its other functions, such as emphasizing its higher dignity in relation to the existent, one should not underestimate the fact that it simultaneously carries the memory of the existent, from which it wished to be raised up, as one of something prior to differentiation and antagonism. Being tempts alluringly, eloquent as wind-blown leaves in bad poetry. But what it praises harmlessly slips out of its grasp, while it is insisted upon philosophically like something it owns, over which the thought, which thinks it, has no control. That dialectic which allows the pure particularization and the pure generality to pass into each other simultaneously, both similarly indeterminate, is silenced and exploited in the doctrine of being; indeterminacy is rendered as a mythical panzer [Panzer: ancient sword, also WW II German tank].
Beyond a stirring and artful polemic with a great punchline, the most interesting and difficult point this makes is that Heidegger’s Being “carries the memory of the existent, from which it wished to be raised up, as one of something prior to differentiation and antagonism.”
So Being is prior to all existents, and yet according to Adorno it’s parasitic on them. I suggest this is because the thought of the whole, prior to the fragmentation when everything started to go wrong with our thinking (according to Heidegger), is actually a falsely described perception of a real unified life, which is blocked in real ways. That is, the thought of being is not beyond or above the existent at all, but is actually immanent to the condition it pretends to transcend. The ontological need is not a yearning for transcendence so much as a yearning for an end to the bad existent.