I think what is being said, is that Heidegger with “being” is attempting to start all over from the beginning, with a new “zero-point”. This starting all over supports the claim that it’s not metaphysics, because it’s supposed to be prior to any metaphysics.
Adorno seems to suggest that by doing this starting over, Heidegger thought he could avoid all the problems of metaphysics. The point Adorno makes, is that this intent, to wipe this all away, back to the dawn of time, and circumvent all philosophy, would actually prevent itself, “the neutralization of the ontological need”. So it’s really self-defeating.
The final line leads to the next level:
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.
As much as we can look at ontology, and say there’s something wrong here, because the answers are tailored toward a need, instead of toward truth or something substantive, there is still a legitimate obligation to provide for the need. However, the conviction that the provisions must exist, because there is a need for them, is illegitimate.
DISAPPOINTED NEED:
The empiricist way (method) of Kant, is a “negative reply to that metaphysics which confused the concept with its own reality”. It is to settle down into the sensible world, making an appeal to the intuitions and common sense. This makes science into a “causa sui”, cementing its place within the division of labour. However its “insufficiency nevertheless cannot remain hidden forever”, and this is “due to the borrowed ideal of positivity”.
Ontology, with its need, wants to go beyond “the ground-rules of positivity”. However, “Many adepts of science expect a decisive completion from ontology, without this needing to touch on scientific procedures.” But there is a traditional distinction between essence and fact, which Heideggerian philosophy claimed to rise above, yet the two coexist incompatibly within scientific activity, as distinct types of science.
But the antagonism between the exclusive scientific criteria and the absolute claim of a doctrine of essence or later that of being will not vanish at the mere behest to do so. It opposes its adversary abstractly, afflicted with the same deficiencies of the consciousness within the division of labor, as the cure it passes itself off as. What it provides against science, is not its self-reflection, not even, as Walter Broecker evidently thought, something imposed over such, with necessary movement, as what is qualitatively different. It comes, in the terms of the old Hegelian parable against Schelling, straight out of the pistol, an addition to science, which summarily finishes this latter off, without really changing anything.
We might say science is overrun by what deems itself to be essential, and this robs science of what is essential to it, what is substantive. This is a process initiated by Hegel, and upheld by Heidegger who raises being to an essence rather than an existent.
Heidegger’s hermeneutics adopted the turn against epistemology which Hegel inaugurated in the introduction to the Phenomenology as his own.
So there is a basic pretense in fundamental ontology. It holds up an ideal “purity”, philosophizes as if it is something substantive, and this blurs the two together. Nevertheless, the “purity” is insisted on, “emphasizing its higher dignity in relation to the existent”, and this necessitates a distinction.
The distinction between the concept and the material is supposed to be the original sin, while it perpetuates itself in the pathos of being.
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.
Now, to end this off, we mustn’t neglect the following. This I believe to be Adorno’s characterization of negative dialectics:
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]