This chapter I find to be extremely difficulty. It required numerous readings. There is the thread of Husserl’s approach, and the thread of Heidegger”s. They are so tightly woven, and twisted together, being similar in the first place, that it’s difficult to separate them always, in Adorno’s statements. Nevertheless here’s an attempt to understand what’s oging on/ Please correct me where mistakes are apparent.
I would say here, that a synthesis is only possible when the potential for that synthesis is already there. This leads into Heidegger’s “matter-at-hand”, which I interpret as this potential for synthesis. This might be considered the content of thought, which serves as the elements necessary for the synthesis. That content, matters-at-hand, is what “appears” to be spontaneous to the thought, or the act of thinking.
I believe it is this, being prior to synthesis, as the basic matter which provides the potential for synthesis, which gives matter-at-hand its special status. But Adorno says in so doing, Heidegger hypostasizes it, and in the end it must be reified.
However, Hegel allowed for “the objectivity of the Spirit” through “an intuitive relationship to what is intellectual”. This reassures the consciousness of the objectivity of the intellectual (I interpret Adorno’s “intellectual” as similar to the traditional “intellectual object”, but with the desire to remove “object”), rather than approaching it as subjective projection. Adorno states that for a certain type of thinking, “a thinking which does not draw all determinations to one side and disqualify what it faces” these objective forms become a “second immediacy”.
I interpret this second immediacy as a false immediacy. And when Adorno says the doctrine of categorical intuition confuse first immediacy with second immediacy, I think he means that the false immediacy was taken as a true immediacy.
The issue is the difference between what comes to the thinker directly, immediately “something produced by being thought”, and what comes from external sources, training, research, etc.. Adorno seems to be saying that the second immediacy, the objective forms, are not truly immediate, as the idealists and categorical intuitionists, would have you believe. In fact to me, he goes further to imply that all ‘matters-at-hand’ which come to the thinking subject, are mediated in this way, being no less mediated than the textbook example of mediation which he gave already.
So the concept of categorical intuition is shown to not really be adequate for explaining the mind’s apprehension of universals, because it attempts to downplay this mediation. Adorno even says:
Phenomenological analysis was for a long time aware of the fact that the synthesizing consciousness has something receptive about it.
After dismissing “matter-at-hand”, as a secondary immediacy, he then turns to what I would call the true immediacy, and he names it as “insight”. How “insight” differs from “categorical intuition”, I would say, is that it is not supposed to be the thing which grasps the universal directly, as categorical intuition is. We might say that it enables the apperception. The matter-at-hand is received from an outside source, as a “specific object” and insight makes the particular general, in a way that Hegel proposed.
The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right, rather its hypostasis. The sharpest light falls on the species, when something primary emanates from a specific object: in it the tautology dissolves, which knows nothing else of the species, than how it is defined. Without the moment of immediate insight Hegel’s remark, that the particular is the general, would remain mere assertion. Phenomenology since Husserl rescued it, albeit at the cost of its complement, of the reflecting element.
So, the apperception of the universal is said to involve contradictions not easily resolved. I believe he then describes how Heidegger differs from the phenomenological school “which produced him”. The categorical intuition smuggles in immediacy through that which is mediated, to put everything immediate within the subject. Heidegger on the other hand with Matter-at-hand offers an objective unity of the multitude of subjects within society, “the collective life of the Spirit”. This takes “the intellectual” outside the subject, but forces an absolute nature on “Spirit” which for Heidegger is being.
If I understand correctly, Adorno says that this absoluteness does not escape the problems of the categorical intuition. It allows the Spirit to look at itself as if it is a sensory object, but then it suffers the same problem as the assumption of sensible things, meaning it will be criticized by the skeptic. “But this intuition is so little absolute and irrefutable as that of sensory things.”
So the categorical intuition actually contributes to how we can understand the thing itself, the particular, but does not do what it’s supposed to do, and that is to help us to understand apperception of universals. And even the understanding of the thing itslelf which it allows for us, is a false understanding, because the particular is apprehended as an “appearance” within the gaze of ideation. Therefore the rift between concept and thing is exposed.
In the final paragraph, the manifestation of this problem is described. What is supposed to be “an object”, is really a universal. Notice Husserl’s “ideal unity of the species”. We commonly think of “the species” as an object, but this assumed unity which makes it a whole, as an object is actually an ideal. So “the species” is properly understood as a universal rather than as an object, though we commonly interpret as an object.
Heidegger’s emphasis on being, which is not supposed to be any mere concept, can be supported by the indissolubility of the judgement-content in judgements as previously Husserl did to the ideal unity of the species. The positional value of such exemplary consciousnesses may indeed rise historically. The more socialized the world, the more tightly its objects are spun with general determinations, the more the particular matter-at-hand is tendentially, as Guenther Anders remarked, immediately transparent in its generality; the more can be descried by micrological immersion in it; a state of facts of nominalistic bent indeed, which is strictly opposed to the ontological intent, although it may have given rise to the apperception without this latter’s knowledge.
This has been described as a “dogmatic scientificization”, which Adorno now reveals as unscientific. It is more like a “false or overhasty generalization” which is not adequately supported by empirical evidence or good thought.
Insofar as empirical investigations concretely confront the anticipation of the concept, the medium of exemplary thought, with the fact that what is viewed out of something particular, quasi immediate, possesses no generality as something categorical, Husserl’s method just as much as Heidegger’s is convicted of its failing, that it shrinks from that test and yet flirts with it with the language of research, making it sound as if it had submitted itself to the test.
So the problem I believe, which Adorno identified is that this “second immediacy”, allows the ideas to be presented as immediate in the ontology, when they are really mediated through what you call “the historical process”. That is why I called it a false immediacy. I do believe that Adorno proposes a true immediacy though, “insight”, and this would be an immediacy which is not mediated. Notice, it really has no form, and remains as undescribed.