For me this is the key statement of the chapter, which elucidates why Heidegger’s “being’ cannot be what it is supposed to be. What Adorno says is that if something immediate is necessary for reflection (the immediate is logically prior to reflection) then the immediate would be prior to reflection, as a condition for it, and this would leave the immediate itself as noncommittal and arbitrary. It is such because it is prior to reflection and rational thought.
So I take this to be what is supposed as the basis of judgement, judgement providing the determinations necessary for synthesis. At the level which Heidegger is reaching for, prior to any synthesis, the judgement could not be guided by any concepts or thought, this form of “judgement” would create a thought, perhaps as a spontaneous thought. But since “judgement” implies decision under the direction of principles, this is not even a judgement at all, but I would call it some form of simple selection.
To me, this is like free will. It performs the selection, which may or may not follow the principles of reason, so it’s “free”, more fundamental than judgement because judgement requires reason. This is a level of pure indeterminacy. So putting a word to it, “being”, and talking about it as a determinate thing defeats the purpose. Fundamentally, the rational mind cannot apprehend the irrational.
It is not thought, because in the indeterminacy which it demands it is simply unthinkable.
This way of transcending the rationality of the reflecting subject, is said by Adorno to be a clever but desperate act of violence, as an attempt at “break out”. What follows, I believe is a description of how this is a mistaken direction because it neglects the importance of “the moment of the synthesis in the substrate”. And there is an inversion of reality implied, similar to looking into a mirror.
In the next paragraph, he explains how this mistake makes human relations into an intelligible world of “thought-forms”, instead of allowing them to be analysed as they are, as human relations. So by trying to get beneath thinking, thinking itself is taken to be the world, and that is reification. Therefore the attempt at breakout only enhances what it was trying to break out from, the world of thought-’forms.
The conclusion being that the necessity of the rational moment cannot be escaped in this way. To prioritize the irrational in the break out attempt is to assume a position beyond the subject/object separation, but this leaves no approach toward understanding that difference.
Heidegger evades what needs to be done, according to one of the motives of dialectics, in that he usurps a standpoint beyond the difference of subject and object, in which the inadequacy of the ratio to what is thought is revealed. Such a leap however fails with the means of reason. Thought cannot conquer any position wherein the separation of subject and object which lies in every thought, in thinking itself, would immediately disappear.