ND I.I., “Meaning of Being”
I won’t say much about this section as I think it’s fairly clear. The point is encapsulated in these quotes:
That the sense of the word being would immediately be the meaning of being is a bad equivocation.
This becomes possible through the iridescent shimmer of the word being.
That this concept is not supposed to be a concept but immediate, veils the semantic meaning in ontological dignity.
Adorno is accusing Heidegger of equivocating between (1) the semantic meaning of “being”, i.e., the word’s linguistic sense, and (2) the ontological or metaphysical meaning, i.e., what it means to be. Heidegger, whose work is full of etymologies with ostensibly ontological significance, dresses up the former as the latter.
This is like the distinction between real and verbal definition. In the Republic, Plato wants to know what justice really is, rather than what is commonly meant by the word—and unlike Heidegger, he ascribes no ontological weight to the latter.
(There is more nuance here than I’m describing—Adorno doesn’t think the two meanings of meaning can be cleanly separated—but I won’t be going into that now)
EDIT: It turns out that I have a bit more to say.
If true being is conceived of as radically chôris [Greek: separately] from the existent, then it is identical with its meaning: one need only cite the meaning of what is essential [Wesenheit] to being and one has the meaning of being itself.
Maintaining the “ontological difference,” distinguishing being from beings, Heidegger ensures that there is nothing left of being itself than its meaning: being = the semantic meaning of being. This represents a collapse of being into its concept and of the real definition into the verbal definition, and lo and behold, Heidegger has not left idealism behind after all.