ND I.I., On Categorical Intuition (Part 2)
After praising the doctrine of categorial intuition, Adorno criticizes it for confusing second immediacy for first immediacy:
The doctrine of categorical intuition relied all too naively on this; it confused that second immediacy with a first.
That is, the doctrine took the historically sedimented intellectual forms—categories like identity, relation, causality—to be directly accessible by intuition (perceivable), forgetting that they were socio-historical prodcuts.
The rest of the passage is dense, but I’m not going to disentangle it in any detail in this case, because I think I get the gist: the doctrine of categorical intuition already rests on an idealism, hidden behind the “to the things themselves” descriptive phenomenology and assuming that thought has a stable, pre-given object it can receive immediately without transforming it. It’s this idealist core that Heidegger extracted and elevated into Being.
But it doesn’t seem to add anything spectacularly new to what he’s been saying for a while now.
Phenomenological analysis was for a long time aware of the fact that the synthesizing consciousness has something receptive about it. What belongs together in the judgement allows itself to be cognized in examples, not merely comparatively.
This contrasts Kant with Husserlian phenomenology. For Kant, things are brought together in judgement based on abstracting from what they share, e.g., redness from this thing and that thing. But in phenomenology this can be receptively intuited (perceived) and thus cognized in the synthesizing consciousness, for a single instance, i.e., without requiring an abstraction from multiple instances. In other words, it’s not that there’s a spontaneous faculty here and a receptive faculty over there; rather, the receptivity is always already part of the spontaneous, synthesizing faculty (for Adorno, sensibility and understanding cannot really be treated as discrete capacities).
The immediacy of the insight is not to be disputed in its own right, rather its hypostasis.
@Meta_U I see what you mean now. I hadn’t even read this bit when I doubted you. But! This immediacy is a phase, a moment in a dialectical process. He’s still a thinker of radical mediation, i.e., in Hegelian fashion, all immediacy is mediated. Settling for the immediacy would be to hypostatize it. Or put another way, we do experience things immediately, and that’s not to be doubted. Just don’t absolutize this immediacy or treat it as a foundation.
And I take the point to be that this hypostatization is basically what Heidegger did with his concept of Being. Or maybe it’s a continuum of hypostatization from categorial intuition (Husserl) to Being (Heidegger).
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 actual individual things, all you have is an abstract and tautological relation between concept and definition. That is, in Kant’s terms it’s analytic and explicative knowledge, not synthetic and ampliative. We need “something primary” from the thing itself to shine the sharpest light on the species concept.
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.
This takes the same thought into the Hegelian dialectic. It’s all very well seeing the particular in the general (or universal) and vice versa, but unless you see it for real, as in see for yourself that the particular is the general, it’s too abstract to have any purchase, and remains “mere assertion”.
Its apperception however – the later Heidegger shied away from the slogan of the school, which produced him – involves contradictions which are not to be resolved for the sake of peace and quiet from the nominalistic or the realistic side. On the one hand, ideation has an elective affinity to ideology, the smuggling of immediacy through that which is mediated, which clothed it with the authority of the absolute, evident being-in-itself, unimpeachable by the subject.
This is describing, once again, Heidegger’s act of taking something mediated as immediate, and presenting it as an absolute, beyond reproach (and beyond criticism).
On the other hand the apperception names the physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand. It legitimates the fact that the intellectual is not constituted by means of the cognizing consciousness directed at this, but is objectively grounded in itself, far beyond the individual prime mover, in the collective life of the Spirit and according to its immanent laws.
The “physiognomic gaze at intellectual matters-at-hand” goes back to what he was saying a few paragraphs previously:
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.
Ideas that come to form the second immediacy present a physiognomy, i.e., a face that can be read to reveal their underlying character.
But I’m not sure why he is bringing up apperception: does he mean the awareness of one’s own awareness—which is close to the Kantian concept—or does he just mean to refer to the total act of synthesis and the consciousness accompanying it? Does it matter?
Anyway, this is the “on the other hand”. On the one hand there was the ideology of Being, but this is about the right way to view and to think about ideas, reading their content from their physiognomies.
In a nutshell, I think Adorno is saying that ideas are not just projections of the subject but confront the subject as objectively grounded—and in fact are objectively grounded, “in the collective life of the Spirit and according to its immanent laws”. In other words, belonging to culture and society, not just to the individual subject.
And I haven’t even finished this section. It’s quite tough.