ND I.I., On Categorical Intuition (Part 1)
Adorno returns to Husserl’s concept of categorical intuition (also sometimes translated as categorial intuition or categorial vision), the super-sensuous perception of essences, which he previously identified as the secret basis for Heidegger’s Being (in the Being, Subject, Object section).
However much Heidegger’s Being shrinks to a dimensionless point, it still has categorial intuition as its fundamental basis. The comments on synthesis and Kant are meant to support the concept of categorical intuition: Kant didn’t realize that the manifold already corresponds with the synthesis when given in intuition. Otherwise, a synthesis wouldn’t be possible. The sides must be commensurable: the sensory manifold and the synthesizing subject are in a sense equal. Kant found an asymmetry because he prioritized the subject too much.
Incidentally, I found the Ashton translation clearer for this passage:
A simple mathematical theorem would not apply without the synthesis of the figures between which the equation is set up, and neither—this is whatKant neglects—would a synthesis be possible if the relation of elements were not in line with this synthesis, regardless of the trouble in which such a manner of speaking entangles us, according to current logic.
To put it drastically, in a way that invites misunderstanding: there could be no synthesis if the two sides of the equation were not actually alike.
— Negative Dialectics, tr. Ashton, p. 80
When he says this way of speaking gets us in trouble with current logic, I’m guessing what he means is that it’s circular, effectively treating the result of the synthesis as the precondition for the synthesis. But if a logician complained, Adorno might say, “that’s just too bad”—it’s logic that is lacking.
Back to Redmond:
This matching is no more to be spoken of outside of the thinking synthesis than a rational synthesis would be without that correspondence: a textbook case of “mediation”.
The rational synthesis and the correspondence between subject and object are mutually dependent.
As a result of all this correspondence and mediation, nothing is foundational. The thought wavers:
That one wavers in the reflection, as to whether thinking would be an activity and not on the contrary, precisely in its effort, something which measures itself, refers to this. What is spontaneously thought is, inseparable from this,something which appears.
Spontaneity and receptivity are inseparable. Kant already affirmed this, but Adorno is saying something stronger, namely (a) that they are not even separate faculties, and therefore (b) Kant’s subjective priority is not justified.
The next part elaborates on the section on Materiality-at-Hand:
If Heidegger had emphasized the aspect of the appearance [Erscheinens] against its complete reduction to thought, that would be a salutary corrective on idealism. But he isolates therein the moment of the matter-at-hand [Sachverhalt], gets hold of it, in Hegel’s terminology, just as abstractly as idealism synthesized it. Hypostasized,it ceases to be a moment, and becomes in the end what ontology, in itsprotest against the division between the concept and the existent, leastof all wished to be: reified.
@Moliere explained this earlier:
I take the gist to be that despite the initial focus on materiality-at-hand, Heidegger ultimately takes it back into idealism.
It is however according to its own character genetic. The Hegelian doctrine of the objectivity of the Spirit, product of the historical process, permits something like an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual, as many idealists rediscovered, the late Rickert for example. The more insistently the consciousness feels assured of the realized objectivity of what is intellectual, instead of attributing it to the reflecting subject as a “projection”, the closer it comes to a binding physiognomy of the Spirit. Such forms become a second immediacy to a thinking which does not draw all determinations to one side and disqualify what it faces.
The Hegelian doctrine permits an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual, meaning that our relationship to our ideas is similar to our relationship with objects of perception: our ideas thence become objects of a kind of intuition, thus objective, and the idea that they are mere projections of the mind is abandoned.
Adorno agrees with this last part about projections, because ideas for him become objective features of history and society, not reducible to projections of consciousness. So the idealist is right to feel that the ideas are objective: categorial intuitions, and the idea of Being itself, have formed historically and are thereby “genetic”.
Spirit, i.e., the world of human thought, thus presents an outward face, a physiognomy (because ideas do not remain purely subjective and private) from which we can infer Spirit’s character.
Second immediacy is something like second nature, although the latter is about reified social entities rather than ideas as such. Second immediacy, unlike second nature, is not something “bad,” but just the way ideas appear to us. The forms of thought generated in the historical process of mediation come to be the apparently immediate objects confronting the thinking subject (of course, all immediacy is also mediated).
Adorno is saying that this second immediacy is something we can face and genuinely encounter, so long as we don’t focus purely on the subject.