Meaning of Being:
I think this chapter explains very well what I said earlier:
So now we find that Heidegger wants to give “being” a meaning which is impossible for it to have. In a sense, he wants it to have the most universal meaning, applicable to everything as pure abstract thought, but without any specific content. This leaves it meaningless.
Concepts, instruments of human thought, cannot make sense, if sense is itself negated, if every memory of something objective, beyond the mechanisms of the formation of concepts, is driven out.
According to this scheme the breakout attempt out of idealism is imperceptibly revoked, the doctrine of being regresses into one of a thinking which removes everything from being, which would be different from pure thought.
That this concept is not supposed to be a concept but immediate, veils the semantic meaning in ontological dignity. “The talk of ‘being’ never understands these names in the sense of a species, under whose empty generality the historically conceived doctrine of the existent belongs as special cases.
In the end, “being” appears to have so much ontological dignity due to its historical significance, but under Heidegger’s usage it means nothing and this is equivocated with the historical sense of everything. So it seems like “being” has great significance in Heidegger, drawing on that “historically conceived doctrine of the existent”, when it really has none because it’s a thinking which negates all content.
Ontology Suborned:
I see this chapter as expounding on what was said concerning human relations in “Being Thesei”. The doctrine of being bases itself in subjective thought-forms rather than the true objective substrate of human relations, and this is very problematic. In “On Categorical Intuition” we saw the problems involved with the supposed objectivity of Spirit, now we see the problems with supposing the subjectivity of being.
The expression “draft” [Entwurf: draft, design, sketch] betrays its tendency to negate freedom out of freedom: trans-subjective committalness [Verbindlichkeit] is delivered over to an act of constitutive subjectivity.
In that so-called “draft”, being itself is thrown, instead of humanity being thrown, and this allows being (which is actually just a concept) to be portrayed as that which creates humanity, prior to humanity. I see this as a rehashing of the Hegelian ideal, that the state is derived from the Idea. “Being” is an idea, though it’s proclaimed as “Beyond” ideas.
Now, since being has been situated as apprehended within the thinking subject, this assigns the highest authority to the subject, “passing itself off as the voice of being”. The consciousness which does not experience this apprehension of being is disqualified as the ‘forgetfulness of being’”. So the subject who apprehends being as the highest authority, poses as the voice of authority in relation to the one with forgetfulness.
The claim of “forgetfulness” is nothing but a coverup for deception. This forgetfulness is supposed to be a “loss of being” which is a cause of suffering. The nature of the deception, I believe is revealed by Adorno as the defective concept: “the relations of human beings are to be founded in freedom”.
This is reminiscent of Plato’s noble lie. But Adorno proceeds to discuss the illusion of freedom.
By no means is the course of society anywhere so anarchic, as it still seems in the constantly irrational contingency of the individual destiny. But its objectified juridicality [Gesetzlichkeit] is the adversary of a constitution of existence, in which one could live without fear.
Social order has become a horror, though philosophies claim the opposite.
That freedom remained largely an ideology; that human beings are powerless before the system and are not capable of determining their life and that of the whole through reason; indeed that they cannot even think the thought of such, without suffering even more, ensorcels their rebellion into its inverted form: they invidiously prefer the worse to the appearance [Schein] of something better.