ND I.I., “Lack as Gain”
This section says three interesting things:
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It’s not just that Being is an empty concept; it’s that its philosophical support is a network of concepts that borrow legitimacy from each other, with nothing ever actually making good on those debts.
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Heidegger has a rhetorical strategy: he always presents a lack of content in his philosophy as a sign of its profundity.
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Heidegger gets to give his Being a theological aura while maintaining plausible deniability: an attractively archaic, primordial depth of flavour while strenuously emphasizing how new and groundbreaking it is.
ND I.I., No Man’s Land
Adorno describes Heidegger as inheriting Husserl’s desire to break free from epistemology and get to the things themselves, but recoiling at making things substantive—in the way the idealists made their thought substantive with the identity-thesis, or the neo-Kantians did with their infinitesimal method (this has something to do with neo-Kantian philosophy of mathematics but I don’t really know).
It’s almost like Adorno is saying that an essential characteristic of Heidegger’s philosophy is that it doesn’t dare to be substantive enough that it is exposed to direct scrutiny.
Next, Adorno says that Heidegger not only repudiated empirical particulars like Husserl did, but also got rid of Husserl’s eidos, the basic essence of a phenomenon, or “the highest, fact-free, conceptual unity of the factual, in which traces of substantiality are intermixed.” The eidos, though abstract and pure, is still somewhat determinate. Heidegger gets rid of that, leaving only his more primordial Being, which is thus not only fact-free and non-empirical, but also conceptually indeterminate. Being thus represents the “contraction of essences” down to an indeterminate remainder.
In the end it [ontology] scarcely dares to predicate anything, even of being. Therein appears less any mystical meditation than the privation of a thought, which wishes to go to its Other and can permit itself nothing, for fear of losing what it claims. Philosophy turns tendentially into a ritual pose. In it indeed stirs something true, its falling silent.
The last sentence is a head-scratcher. It’s an “after all” concession to Heidegger, saying that his very reluctance to say anything substantive contains something true. Maybe this is because Adorno and Heidegger share a scepticism towards the ability of concepts, logic, and language to capture phenomena adequately. Heidegger’s silence—bolstered by pretensions to profundity—might be the wrong response to that, but the problem it’s reacting to is real. Adorno’s own response is the somewhat paradoxical one of accepting that concepts are necessarily inadequate to their objects but refusing to give up on our ability to conceptually grasp those objects.
@Moliere: almost caught up!