ND I.I., Ontology Suborned
Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is reactionary. It wants to go back to the authoritarian order before Enlightenment exploded it.
Only as an act of violence against thought does it have a chance. For the loss which resonates in the kitschy expression forgetfulness of being was no stroke of destiny but motivated. What is mourned, the legacy of the early archai [Greek: ancient, old], melted away from the consciousness, which wrenched itself away from nature.
That said, Heidegger is responding to a real defectiveness:
The society, according to whose own concept the relations of human beings are to be founded in freedom, without freedom being realized to this day, is as paralyzed as defective. In the universal exchange-relationship all qualitative moments are flattened out, whose epitome could be something like a structure.
But although Heidegger’s philosophy is responding to this defectiveness, or in H’s terms this loss, its response is a bad one:
Even the ontological drafts feel this, projecting it onto the victims, the subjects, and frantically drowning out the apprehension of objective negativity by means of the tidings of order in itself, all the way to the most abstract one of all, the structure of being.
That is, the damage to human beings in modernity is blamed on human beings themselves, in their “forgetfulness of being” and the “inauthenticity” of das Man, thus obscuring the objective causes of alienation, anomie, etc.
Adorno ends by tying together the ideological function of Heidegger’s philosophy with Heidegger’s own political alignment. It’s notable that whenever he brings this up, he wants us to see that he has earned it. Here, he wants to show that Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies were not accidental and ugly excrescences on an otherwise innocent body of thought but in some sense constituted his thought.