Reading Group: Negative Dialectics by Theodor Adorno

Books and Papers Reading Groups
21

ND.I.I. Disempowerment of the Subject

negativedialectics.org/#disempowerment-of-the-subject

Ontology’s return to life due to objectivistic intention was supported by what admittedly least of all suited its concept: the fact that the subject became to a large extent ideology, which concealed the objective functional context of society and assuaged the suffering of the subjects under it.

This more or less repeats his point from earlier, but clarifies Heideggerian ontology’s ideological role. It is one set of ideas among many which conceal the reality of society, in its (society’s) cold, calculating, brutal instrumentalism—but is maybe a kind of second-order ideology, in that it appears to address this dire situation but ultimately works again to conceal and assuage.

The anthropocentric way of thinking about life has been shaken.

I was surprised to see him mention cosmology as having had a significant effect on the anthropocentric way of thinking. I don’t disagree with him—it’s just surprising to see Adorno agreeing with a fairly mainstream, conventional point (not usually his style).

This motif is more than a merely superficial world-view …

Maybe I expected him to think the overturning of geocentrism was a superficial world-view.

Overweening syntheses between philosophical developments and the ones of the natural sciences are of course offensive […]

That’s the Adorno I know. But:

Nevertheless the results of modern cosmology have radiated far and wide: all conceptions, which would make the universe resemble the subject or even deduce its pride of place therein, are relegated to naiveté, comparable to the cranks or paranoids who consider their little town to be the center of the world.

This makes a lot of sense and is probably fairly uncontroversial today. Of course, the ironic thing is that whereas the actual Copernican revolution dislodged us from the centre, Kant’s Copernican revolution put us back. So already, even with Kant, philosophy began to clash with cosmology—and when the tradition led to full-blown idealism, its anthropocentrism became untenable.

Adorno’s point with respect to Heidegger might be that by the time we got into the 20th century, persisting in idealist philosophy had become embarrassing. And Adorno does mean that Heidegger is idealist despite his self-conception.

An important concept of Adorno’s comes up in this section:

The suspicion and presentiment are universal, that the control of nature weaves ever more tightly through its advance the catastrophe which it also intended to ward off; the second nature, into which society has overgrown.

The concept of second nature comes to Adorno from Hegel via Lukács. It refers to the way the products of culture and history become naturalized, habitual, and internalized. For Lukács and Adorno, this is ideology in its most concrete form. For Adorno in particular, second nature comes to be associated with the “heteronomous” social totality that brutally or insidiously imposes itself on individuals from above or from without.

Adorno connects Heideggerian ontology with second nature:

The truth, which exiled humanity from the midpoint of creation and which reminds it of its powerlessness, strengthens the feeling of powerlessness as subjective modes of behavior, causing human beings to identify themselves with it, and thereby further reinforces the bane of second nature.

The truth, that we are not at the centre of the universe, has caused subjectivity and powerlessness to be conflated and identified. It is as if our necessary acceptance of powerlessness in the face of the cosmos (nature) has been conflated with our powerlessness in society (second nature), such that we think powerlessness is our inevitable fate, and we fail to push through the surface of things to see that powerlessness in society is not inevitable and eternal.

Heideggerian ontology encourages or embraces this conflation. Thrownness, for example, is presented as the way things are no matter what, a “cosmic” fact, whereas Adorno would say the experience of thrownness is a function of the kind of societies we live in. The Heideggerian pattern identified by Adorno is: accurate as phenomenology, ideological as ontology. Alienation is turned from a kind of damage done to people by a certain kind of society, into the human condition. What’s presented as the deepest of deep philosophy is a sophisticated acceptance of second nature.

@Moliere Is my pace too slow? I think my perfectionism or obsessiveness prevents me from allowing anything to slip through my fingers, so I like to try and work out everything he says.

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Not at all. I’m glad you’re doing that because my mind has been more jumping between larger connections while letting go of things I didn’t know how to comprehend.

1 Like
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Cool. But when I read the following sections I began to get quite lost so I hope it doesn’t take too long to work out what’s going on. I admire your ability to make the large connections, so our approaches are complementary, I hope.

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As the book by Adorno which you referred me to, “Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems” indicates, he was well versed in Aristotelian metaphysics. And he uses Aristotelian terms ‘form” and “matter” in an Aristotelian way. But I’ll leave it at that, because as you say it’s not very relevant, I just mentioned it as a potential aid to understanding.

I look at functional as pragmatically oriented. What You call “instrumentally useful”, for me is the means to an end, two ways of describing the grounds of pragmatism. The substantive, for me is truth oriented, and truth relates to the particulars, therefore it “takes the particular seriously” as you say. In my mind, the two, pragmatically oriented and truth oriented, are not mutually exclusive. If truth is the goal, then the functional will reflect this, and the two will unite one the means the other the end.

This brings to mind an issue I came up against in Catholic moral philosophy. They like to distinguish between a want (whim) and a need (necessity). From this perspective, in the same way that an individual can get distracted and chase after wants, thereby neglecting what is needed, we could assume that even ideology could be distracted in this way, to an extent. My problem was how to distinguish a want from a need, and the answer to this question, in a round about way, always leads to God.

So when you say that ideology in general always “appears to satisfy a real need”, how do we know that this is a real need, and not just a distraction? The same moral philosophy mentioned above, will try to distinguish between a real good and an apparent good. Now, ‘appears to be real’ is kind of ambiguous, and it doesn’t provide principles to decide whether it is a real need or appears as such, under a whimsical attitude.

So what I provided was just one example of what “functional” could be, the intent to bridge a gap. Maybe that doesn’t properly describe why Heidegger is judged as functional rather than substantive. But to talk about a concept having a life of its own, i..e. independent meaning, rather than being tied up with other concepts for meaning, is difficult to imagine. And this may not be the right way either. Take a look at this quote, it’s right after he makes the distinction between functional and substantive concepts:

Society has become the total functional context which liberalism once thought it was; what is, is relative to what is other, irrelevant in itself. The horror of this, the dawning consciousness that the subject is losing its substantiality, prepares it to listen to the assertion that being, covertly equated with that substantiality, survives as something which cannot be lost in the functional context.

First, society has become functional in itself due to the influence of liberalism. Enveloped within this functionality is the idea that “what is” is relative to “what is other”. The term is defined by its opposite, rather than anything substantial, thus leaving the true meaning of “what is” as irrelevant.

The subject then perceives itself as losing its substantiality, and this is a horror to it. That puts it into a condition where it is ready to accept that “what is” will not be lost to the functional context of society, if it accepts the proposed concept of “being”. This is why he says the word exerts such an attraction, and calls it a “cult of being”. But “being” is just a covert substitute for substantiality, one which is rooted in the functionality of society rather than a true substantiality.

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ND.I.I. / Being, Subject, Object

negativedialectics.org/#being-subject-object

One thing I didn’t comment on in my last post was this:

Light falls on the restorative tendencies of today’s philosophies from the kitschy exoticism of cobbled-together world-views, as in for example the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhism. Similar to this, these simulate a position of thought which the stored-up history in subjects makes it impossible to assume. The delimitation of the Spirit to what is open and achievable in its historical level of experience is an element of freedom; non-conceptual meandering embodies the opposite. Doctrines which unhesitatingly run away from the subject into the cosmos are along with the philosophies of being far more compatible with the hardened constitution of the world, and the chances of success in it, than the slightest bit of self-reflection of the subject on itself and its real imprisonment.

The modern subject is tempted to embrace exotic spiritualities that seem to offer transcendence, while the actually existing subject, with its “stored-up history,” that of subjectivism, cannot really achieve this. The transcendent realm, or a position outside or prior to the subject, is not “open and achievable” for a subjectivity formed historically by the philosophies and ideologies of individualism and the priority of the subject. Adorno suggests that Heidegger’s ontology is in the same ball-park as these false spiritualities, in that it appears to offer a transcendence of the subject.

He continues the thought in this section, conceding that Heidegger was not naive about this:

To be sure Heidegger saw through the illusion which sustained the popular success of ontology: that the state of the intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention] could simply be chosen out of a consciousness in which nominalism and subjectivism are sedimented, by one that, above all, became what it is only by self-reflection. He bypassed the alternative with the doctrine of being, which maintained that it was beyond the intentio recta [Latin: direct intention] and intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention], beyond the subject and object, as well as the concept and the existent.

The following helped me work this out:

It turns out the phrases are derived from the work of Nicolai Hartmann who introduced the terms to correspond to the Scholastics’ intentio prima and intentio secunda. The intentio recta, therefore, is the state when cognition focuses upon the true object, while intentio obliqua is a state of consciousness which focuses upon the image of the object in the intellect.

— Martin Paul Eve, Adorno terminology: intentio recta and intentio obliqua

Another way of putting it: intentio recta is thinking directly of objects, and intentio obliqua is thinking about one’s own categories, concepts, and representations, i.e., the subject’s thinking turned back on itself in self-reflection.

Heidegger was sophisticated enough to know that, owing to the tradition of Descartes onwards through to modern idealism and epistemology, you cannot just go straight to Being with the intentio recta. Thinking has become too subjectivized, almost like the veil of perception became a self-fulfilling concept, such that subjects in actuality became trapped in themselves. The tradition of Descartes onwards made self-reflection the epitome of thinking, the notion that the person and the mind is in the head, that the isolated self is primary, finally that the self constitutes reality. This is the “stored-up history” that Adorno mentioned before.

Since Heidegger realizes all this, his solution is to step back, to reject the intentio recta/intentio obliqua dichotomy, and finally the subject/object polarity entirely. He wants to enter the fray prior to all that.

For Adorno, this is bypassing the issue, not solving it.

Heidegger’s debt to Husserl’s categorial intuition

Adorno moves on to show that Heidegger’s Being is dependent on Husserl’s categorical intuition:

[H]is talk of being presupposes the Husserlian doctrine of the categorical intuition or apperception [Wesenschau].

In the Husserlian literature the term is most often translated as categorial intuition so I’ll mostly use that. I went down a rabbit-hole to work out what it meant. At first I thought it was just another term for Kant’s synthetic unity of the manifold in intuition, but it’s very importantly, and very knowingly, different: for Kant, the synthetic unity is in intuition but is nevertheless achieved by the understanding, which imposes its categories; but for Husserl, the relevant categories are themselves given in intuition, without any activity of the understanding. Thus we perceive relations, properties, and classification in the things themselves.

EDIT: “Without any activity of the understanding” is too strong. I should have said something like “without a structure imposed by the understanding conceived as a separate faculty.”

The old epistemological contrast between sensibility and understanding achieves a much-needed clarity through a distinction between straightforward or sensuous, and founded or categorial intuition.

— Husserl, Logical Investigations, Sixth Investigation

We do not merely perceive sense-data—we perceive super-sensuously. When I see the phone on the desk, I don’t see the phone, separately the desk, and then impose an “on” relation subjectively. I perceive that relation, and since the category of relation cannot be reduced to sense-data, we therefore perceive categorially.

Categorial intuition directly presents the unity of whole and part, of the members of a group, of the terms of a relation, and so forth.

— John Drummond, Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy (quotes here)

Adorno’s claim is that categorial intuition forms the basis or inspiration for Heidegger to claim that Being can be disclosed directly, beyond mere sensual detection and prior to any ratiocinative activity of the understanding. Categorial essences can be apprehended directly.

This is where Adorno criticizes Husserl’s concept itself. First, he credits Husserl with genuine insight:

The critique contained in that doctrine of classificatory logic as the unity of characteristics of that which is grasped under the concept remains in force.

Science has tended to work by the classificatory logic whereby particulars are reduced to instances of a type or species, and states of affairs are reduced to juxtapositions of characteristics. Husserl argues that perception and knowledge cannot be entirely reduced to this logic, because it is the states-of-affairs that we perceive, with all their relations etc.

But at the same time, Husserl was in thrall to science and wanted his philosophy to serve as a basis for science. So he wanted to have it both ways, as Adorno says, to have his cake and eat it too. But according to Adorno, the two are incommensurable, and Husserl is left in internal contradiction:

His method, expressly stated as such, would like to imbue the classificatory concepts through the mode in which the cognition assures itself, with what it cannot have as something classificatory, as the mere preparation of the given, but would have solely through the comprehension of the thing itself, which in Husserl oscillates between something intramental and something opposed to such in the immanence of consciousness.

In other words, Husserl wanted to give classificatory concepts what they could not have—the direct grasp of a unity greater than the sum of its parts—precisely because they are classificatory concepts.

From this point, Heidegger took the step of casting aside the rational side entirely, rejecting classificatory concepts and along with them justification. Or a better way to put it is that he dug down beneath classificatory concepts, which he classed as the relatively superficial present-at-hand, i.e., theoretical stance. He thought he could find the more profound, primordial, pre-theoretical being-in-the-world beneath all that.

And Adorno’s point about that is that Heidegger thereby locates the primordial disclosure of being beyond justification and argument, thus beyond reason.

The discomfort with the epistemological preliminary question becomes the legal writ to simply eliminate this; for him dogmatics simply turns, in contrast to the tradition of its critique, into a higher wisdom.

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That’s fair. I have nothing against your application of Aristotle; it’s more that I’m personally not very comfortable thinking along those lines.

I have no major disagreement here, and your contrast between truth-oriented and pragmatically oriented is genuinely enlightening. My point was that Adorno in that instance was mostly applying a stronger sense of functional, related to the instrumentalization of reason which produced the modern alienated subject and the calamitous 20th century.

Of course, Catholic moral philosophy goes with the virtues proper to a human being, and maybe Adorno is not so far from that, except of course that where Thomism arrives there positively, Adorno does it negatively.

The rest of your post is quite agreeable. :+1:

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I noticed there’s a book about “cultural Marxism” coming out soon. I like the cover:

getimage_d8b59be7-cc90-4ca1-a2a0-c2a459ef9b02
getimage_d8b59be7-cc90-4ca1-a2a0-c2a459ef9b02430×650 70.5 KB

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I find the following passage to be very expressive.

The grounds of philosophical idealism, the control of nature itself, has lost the certainty of its omnipotence precisely because of its unstoppable expansion during the first half of the twentieth century; as much because the consciousness of human beings lagged behind and the social order of their relationships remained irrational, as because it took the measurement of what was achieved, whose minuteness was measurable only by comparison to what was not achievable. The suspicion and presentiment are universal, that the control of nature weaves ever more tightly through its advance the catastrophe which it also intended to ward off; the second nature, into which society has overgrown.

In relation to the idealist goal, which is “the control of nature”, notice he proposes two reasons for the loss of “the certainty of its omnipotence”. The first mentioned, the consciousness lagged behind in its understanding of social order and its relationships because they remained irrational. The second, achievements could only be measured in comparison with what was not achievable. The activity derived from the ideal goal of controlling nature then weaves within itself, the catastrophe which it intended to avoid, “the second nature”.

The second nature is not at all explained, and this is my first acquaintance with it.

So “the second nature” appears to me to refer directly to the artificial. There is a traditional distinction between the natural, and the artificial. Demarcation was never well defined, because the products of living things other than human beings were consider to be natural, while the products of human beings were artificial. And Aristotle had intentionally blurred the boundary by comparing how natural things come into existence through potential (oak tree from an acorn) in a way similar to how artificial things come into existence through the artist’s intention (teleology).

With the advent of evolutionary theory, the boundary between natural and artificial has been functionally dissolved, as human beings are now natural, therefore their products are considered to be natural. But they take the character of “second nature”. Now this sort of leaves intention, final cause, and teleology as ungrounded, floating freely, with nothing to be attributed to. So the ancient grounding of intention, as the property of an individual human being producing artifacts, is replaced by a grounding in society as a whole, where intention and final cause originate in society, act through ideology as downward causation, as “the ‘heteronomous’ social totality that brutally or insidiously imposes itself on individuals from above or from without”.

Of course this is just a continuation of the social structure produced by theology, within which the Will of God acts through the clergy, through the rulers, subordinating the individual subjects. Without “God” though, the source of intention is undefined and the structure is unintelligible.

After introducing that concept, “second nature”, he goes on to explain the subjective feeling of powerlessness which reinforces the bane of second nature. This produces a naive belief in being, “membership-in-being”, which I assume is a substitute for a true understanding of relationships of social order which remain irrational to the subjects. They feel like they’re facing “the all”, but they actually cling to the particular, and this reinforces their weakness which makes them feel like they’re facing the All. This is a sort of trap, a cage or prison, which he calls “the subjugation of the subject under being”.

So he ends with a paragraph about how the bane can be lessened, if, in Hegel’s words, the subject is “somehow there”. What strikes me is that he now turns to what is “achievable”, in contrast to the beginning of the chapter where he says certainty is lost due to achievements being measured in relation to what “is not achievable”.

The delimitation of the Spirit to what is open and achievable in its historical level of experience is an element of freedom; non-conceptual meandering embodies the opposite.

And that is followed up with:

Doctrines which unhesitatingly run away from the subject into the cosmos are along with the philosophies of being far more compatible with the hardened constitution of the world, and the chances of success in it, than the slightest bit of self-reflection of the subject on itself and its real imprisonment.

Notice, “far more compatible with the hardened constitution of the world”. Those are the determinist doctrines, determinism forcing what is not achievable. The “self-reflection of the subject on itself and its real imprisonment” are the philosophies of free will.

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ND.I.I / Ontological Objectivism

negativedialectics.org/#ontological-objectivism

Adorno criticizes Heidegger’s Being for being an empty concept, having nothing to say about either “individualized existences” or “rational abstraction.” Being is ultimately little more than a tautology. He quotes Heidegger himself: “Yet being—what is being? It is Itself.”

Appealing to Hegel, he says that even an analytic judgement, though merely explicative, says more than X is X. For example, the bachelor is unmarried says a bit more than the bachelor is the bachelor. Being cannot sustain even this minimally substantive judgement.

Being will have nothing to do with abstract concepts, but neither will it get its hands dirty with existing things. All that is left is the name itself.

In the section’s last part, Adorno takes us on a short historical tour of ontology: from Plato, on to Aristotle, later on scholasticism and rationalism, finally confronting Kant’s critique. Heidegger wants to “wipe all this away by regressing to the holy dawn of time prior to the reflection of critical thought.”
And Heidegger…

would like solely to circumvent the philosophical compulsion which, once grasped, would prevent the neutralization [Stillung] of the ontological need.

According to Adorno, the proper compulsion for philosophy is one that doesn’t neutralize or subdue the ontological need by seeming to satisfy it. The right philosophy would prevent such a neutralization. Heidegger, by regressing to the holy dawn, wishes to circumvent this compulsion so as to neutralize the ontological need, whereupon we can satisfy ourselves that everything is ok. For Adorno, the proper philosophical thing to do is avoid this false satisfaction and face up to our real problems (to put it more prosaically than it deserves).

The will not to be spoon-fed, to experience something essential from philosophy, is deformed through answers which are tailored according to the need, in the shadows between the legitimate obligation, to provide bread, not stones, and the illegitimate conviction that bread has to exist, because it must.

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Great post.

Yeah, I didn’t really get that bit.

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Adorno continues with his critique of Heidegger’s “being”. He describes it like this.

He bypassed the alternative with the doctrine of being, which maintained that it was beyond the intentio recta [Latin: direct intention] and intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention], beyond the subject and object, as well as the concept and the existent. Being is the highest concept – for whoever says being, does not have it, but merely the word – and would nevertheless be privileged before all conceptuality, by virtue of the moments thought along with the word being, which do not exhaust themselves in the abstractly achieved conceptual unity of characteristics.

He then discusses how Heidegger’s “being” is dependent on, or derived from Husserl’s categorical intuition. The problem with the categorical intuition appears to be, that Husserl wants it to be prior to any category, “the ideal of what yields to ideation”, but as an ideal, it already has the character of a category, and he desires that it function as an epistemological category. So he wants to eat his cake and have it too.

Heidegger saw the problem and took a step to avoid it. To get outside the categories it cannot be something rational but must in a sense be irrational.

He thereby cast off the rational moment which Husserl guarded,* and, in this respect quite similar to Bergson, tacitly undertook a procedure which sacrificed the relation to the discursive concept, an inalienable moment of thought. Therein he covered over the weakness of Bergson, who juxtaposed two disparate modes of cognition, each unmediated by the other, in that by mobilizing the allegedly higher dignity, which was bestowed on the categorical intuition, he removed the epistemological one as preontological, along with the question concerning its legitimation. The discomfort with the epistemological preliminary question becomes the legal writ to simply eliminate this; for him dogmatics simply turns, in contrast to the tradition of its critique, into a higher wisdom. This is the origin of Heidegger’s archaicism.

*See the chapter on jurisdiction [Rechtsprechung] in the “Ideas”.

So he says, this is supposed “to heal the concept of being from the wounds of its conceptuality, the division of the thought and what is to be thought.”

I’ll be a nit picker, and point out “Being is the highest concept”, and the categorical intuition is “the highest dignity”. So it’s not a matter of digging down beneath at this point, but going over the top of. That’s what I think is going on, they’re seeking the top of the pyramid of the supposed top-down causation of intention.

But that is fairly insignificant, and your reading is very much in agreement with mine. We say pretty much the same thing in two different ways, and that’s good. Thanks for the background information, it’s always helpful.

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@Moliere

Adorno has an interesting claim about Heidegger that I don’t understand going on here, that he claims to be beyond metaphysics while obviously doing metaphysics. I’m wondering if this is a jab at the ontic/ontological distinction?

— Archived post by Moliere

Yes, I think so. Heidegger positioned himself as investigating precisely what metaphysics had always taken for granted but forgotten. Metaphysics was always ontic—about beings—whereas Heidegger was interested in that which metaphysics had presupposed.

But Adorno says: no, that’s still metaphysics. To go deeper than metaphysics had done hitherto, is a paradigmatically metaphysical move, and the very distinction Heidegger uses, between ontic and ontological, is itself a metaphysical one. Heidegger applies an idiosyncratically precise definition of metaphysics merely to allow himself to take a position against it as one who has seen deeper than everyone else. And that, Adorno says, should make us suspicious.

I do find that fairly convincing. It’s only circumstantial evidence against Heidegger, so to speak—it doesn’t show that his philosophy is wrong—but it reveals something about what he’s up to.

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Yes, fair point, but it depends on context. If you’re trying to emphasize being as the deepest ground, it makes sense for your metaphors to go downwards, no?

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ND.I.I., Disappointed Need

negativedialectics.org/#disappointed-need

I was tripped up at the very beginning:

That the philosophy oriented towards the primacy of the method remains satisfied with such preliminary questions, and for that reason possibly also feels as a basic science on safe ground, only creates the illusion that the preliminary questions, and philosophy itself, scarcely have consequences any more for cognition.

Without appearing to take a turn, Adorno here takes a turn away from Heidegger and towards modern epistemology or analytic/neo-Kantian philosophy. I suspect there’s an intended significance in the way Adorno presents this turn. As I’ve discussed before, his style is deliberately contentful, and here in his style he makes it seem like what he’s talking about is a continuation of what came before, not a turn at all. I take the meaning to be that modern epistemology and Heidegger were just two sides of the same coin. If I’m right about this—and why would he write like that otherwise—it’s mind-boggling to think he was writing with that level of attention to meaning-within-style in every sentence of this book.

So, what tripped me up was the way he achieves this. The phrase, “such preliminary questions,” seems to refer back to previous sentences, so at first I struggled to work out what he was talking about. But in fact it refers back within the sentence to “the philosophy oriented towards the primacy of the method.” He is referring to modern epistemology that has handed over the substantive questions to science—in his milieu it would be neo-Kantianism, in our English-speaking one it would be the analytic tradition (roughly speaking).

He traces this unambitious, deflationary, over-technical approach in philosophy back to Kant, who was interested merely in “the normal functioning of the understanding.”

For Adorno, philosophers have given up too easily:

Defeatism hamstrings the specifically philosophical impulse to explode something true out from behind the idols of the conventional consciousness.

I enjoyed this polemic:

The scorn of the amphiboly chapter against the presumptuousness which wished to cognize what is innermost to things, the self-satisfied manly resignation by which philosophy settles down in the mundus sensibilis [Latin: sensible world] as something external, is not merely the enlightening negative reply to that metaphysics which confused the concept with its own reality, but also the obscurantistic one to those which do not capitulate to the façade.

We can see this macho, anti-metaphysical, scientistic scorn in evidence still today.

There are two sides to it. The critique of metaphysics was a good thing, but Adorno points out that the resulting methodologically-focused philosophy is also effectively obscurantist, since it closes down further enquiry (enquiry by the philosophies “which do not capitulate to the façade.”)

This is where we see what Adorno has been getting at.

Something of the recollection of this best of all moments, which critical philosophy did not so much forget, as zealously excise in honor of the science which it wished to found, survives in the ontological need; the will not to allow the thought to be robbed of that, for whose sake it has been thought.

The best of all moments is the moment in philosophy prior to sobering up and getting down to your work as the handmaiden of science—the moment in which it seems possible to reach deeper truths. Neo-Kantianism and analytic philosophy did not succeed in banishing this ontological need.

Incidentally, while he’s complaining about over-specialization, methodological focus, and irrelevant pedantry, he writes:

The partition between solitary disciplines such as sociology, economics and history allows the interest of cognition to disappear in pedantically drawn and overblown trench-battles.

We see here some of the reasoning for the Frankfurt School’s aspiration to build an inter-disciplinary tradition.

I’m going to ignore the details of this section and summarize by saying that the basic point is that Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is a crass reaction to this methodological focus in philosophy, a clumsy attempt to satisfy the ontological need which so obviously was not going away.

Fundamental ontology eludes itself not the least because it holds up an ideal of “purity” which stemmed from the methodologization of philosophy – the latest link of the chain was Husserl – as the contrast of being to the existent, nevertheless philosophizing as if over something substantive. This habitus was to be reconciled with that purity only in a realm where all determinable distinctions, indeed all content blurred together.

That realm being the realm of Being.

He ends the section with a flourish:

Among its other functions, such as emphasizing its higher dignity in relation to the existent, one should not underestimate the fact that it simultaneously carries the memory of the existent, from which it wished to be raised up, as one of something prior to differentiation and antagonism. Being tempts alluringly, eloquent as wind-blown leaves in bad poetry. But what it praises harmlessly slips out of its grasp, while it is insisted upon philosophically like something it owns, over which the thought, which thinks it, has no control. That dialectic which allows the pure particularization and the pure generality to pass into each other simultaneously, both similarly indeterminate, is silenced and exploited in the doctrine of being; indeterminacy is rendered as a mythical panzer [Panzer: ancient sword, also WW II German tank].

Beyond a stirring and artful polemic with a great punchline, the most interesting and difficult point this makes is that Heidegger’s Being “carries the memory of the existent, from which it wished to be raised up, as one of something prior to differentiation and antagonism.”

So Being is prior to all existents, and yet according to Adorno it’s parasitic on them. I suggest this is because the thought of the whole, prior to the fragmentation when everything started to go wrong with our thinking (according to Heidegger), is actually a falsely described perception of a real unified life, which is blocked in real ways. That is, the thought of being is not beyond or above the existent at all, but is actually immanent to the condition it pretends to transcend. The ontological need is not a yearning for transcendence so much as a yearning for an end to the bad existent.

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A point of perspective I suppose, epistemological, or metaphysical. Epistemology requires grounding, the deeper the better. Ontology seeks the highest principle, the higher the better.

I believe this is why ontological principles themselves, like “being”, “Spirit”, and “God”, cannot serve directly as epistemological grounding. These pie-in-the-sky ideals need to be brought down to earth, and supported by a firm ontology, the deeper the better. So it’s not the principle itself, “being”, which as Adorno says is just a word, that serves as the epistemological foundation, it is how that word is planted in the ground, the world we live in, and this is ontology itself, which serves as the foundation.

I think where Adorno is pointing, is that the planting of the ontological ideal is done through social relations, ideology. This means that society itself is ontology, so society and its relations, form the epistemological foundation. Not far off from Wittgenstein’s portrayal of language. I call it communion (please excuse any religious overtones).

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It’s not your religious overtones that bother me, it’s the idea that Adorno is looking for or trying to establish an ontology or an epistemology. I take one of the lessons of negative dialectics to be that such attempts are the problem.

37

That’s a misunderstanding of what I said then. I surely didn’t imply that Adorno is trying to establish an ontology. I said he was pointing toward what ontology is. And, I said I think the direction he is pointing indicates “society itself is ontology”. So, do you think I was proposing that he is attempting to establish a society?

38

Ah, I did misunderstand. My apologies.

39

I think what is being said, is that Heidegger with “being” is attempting to start all over from the beginning, with a new “zero-point”. This starting all over supports the claim that it’s not metaphysics, because it’s supposed to be prior to any metaphysics.

Adorno seems to suggest that by doing this starting over, Heidegger thought he could avoid all the problems of metaphysics. The point Adorno makes, is that this intent, to wipe this all away, back to the dawn of time, and circumvent all philosophy, would actually prevent itself, “the neutralization of the ontological need”. So it’s really self-defeating.

The final line leads to the next level:

The will not to be spoon-fed, to experience something essential from philosophy, is deformed through answers which are tailored according to the need, in the shadows between the legitimate obligation, to provide bread, not stones, and the illegitimate conviction that bread has to exist, because it must.

As much as we can look at ontology, and say there’s something wrong here, because the answers are tailored toward a need, instead of toward truth or something substantive, there is still a legitimate obligation to provide for the need. However, the conviction that the provisions must exist, because there is a need for them, is illegitimate.

DISAPPOINTED NEED:

The empiricist way (method) of Kant, is a “negative reply to that metaphysics which confused the concept with its own reality”. It is to settle down into the sensible world, making an appeal to the intuitions and common sense. This makes science into a “causa sui”, cementing its place within the division of labour. However its “insufficiency nevertheless cannot remain hidden forever”, and this is “due to the borrowed ideal of positivity”.

Ontology, with its need, wants to go beyond “the ground-rules of positivity”. However, “Many adepts of science expect a decisive completion from ontology, without this needing to touch on scientific procedures.” But there is a traditional distinction between essence and fact, which Heideggerian philosophy claimed to rise above, yet the two coexist incompatibly within scientific activity, as distinct types of science.

But the antagonism between the exclusive scientific criteria and the absolute claim of a doctrine of essence or later that of being will not vanish at the mere behest to do so. It opposes its adversary abstractly, afflicted with the same deficiencies of the consciousness within the division of labor, as the cure it passes itself off as. What it provides against science, is not its self-reflection, not even, as Walter Broecker evidently thought, something imposed over such, with necessary movement, as what is qualitatively different. It comes, in the terms of the old Hegelian parable against Schelling, straight out of the pistol, an addition to science, which summarily finishes this latter off, without really changing anything.

We might say science is overrun by what deems itself to be essential, and this robs science of what is essential to it, what is substantive. This is a process initiated by Hegel, and upheld by Heidegger who raises being to an essence rather than an existent.

Heidegger’s hermeneutics adopted the turn against epistemology which Hegel inaugurated in the introduction to the Phenomenology as his own.

So there is a basic pretense in fundamental ontology. It holds up an ideal “purity”, philosophizes as if it is something substantive, and this blurs the two together. Nevertheless, the “purity” is insisted on, “emphasizing its higher dignity in relation to the existent”, and this necessitates a distinction.

The distinction between the concept and the material is supposed to be the original sin, while it perpetuates itself in the pathos of being.

Being tempts alluringly, eloquent as wind-blown leaves in bad poetry. But what it praises harmlessly slips out of its grasp, while it is insisted upon philosophically like something it owns, over which the thought, which thinks it, has no control.

Now, to end this off, we mustn’t neglect the following. This I believe to be Adorno’s characterization of negative dialectics:

That dialectic which allows the pure particularization and the pure generality to pass into each other simultaneously, both similarly indeterminate, is silenced and exploited in the doctrine of being; indeterminacy is rendered as a mythical panzer [Panzer: ancient sword, also WW II German tank]

40

I’m mostly in enthusiastic agreement with your interpretions, except for this:

If you mean that “That dialectic” etc., refers to negative dialectics, I don’t think that’s right. Whatever it is he means was silenced and exploited in Being and Time in 1927, long before negative dialectics existed.

The dialectic he means is either the perennial one in philosophy between universal and particular, or—more likely—the Hegelian one between absolute particular and absolute universal, in which one becomes indistinguishable from the other. This is just a moment of thought, but Heidegger latches on to it and uses it for his ultimate concept.