Since we’re pretty much in agreement most the time, I think I’ll try to focus on the parts which you do not focus on. That’s why I took the time to dissect the last paragraph in “Expression of the Inexpressible”. Sometimes what jumps out to you as very meaningful is not the same as what jumps out to me.
Yeah, good strategy. I gave up trying to disentangle that last paragraph and decided I had a decent enough grasp of it—so I read your analysis with interest.
I have to admit, things seem to have been getting a bit repetitive. I mean how many different ways can he say the same thing about Heidegger’s concept of being? I suppose if one was reading through the book quickly it would be good that he expresses the same criticism in about five different ways, because all of his explanations are quite complex and it would probably take a while before something actually clicked.
I’m definitely bored with the critique of Heidegger, but as I said in my post on it, the “Copula” section marked the beginning of a different approach, more analytical and less polemical. Whether he will keep going in that vein remains to be seen.
Finding different ways to say the same thing is one way of describing the method of constellations, so reading Adorno often has that feeling of going over the same thing again and again.
It’s clear that he continued to share his friend Walter Benjamin’s stated intention (in 1930) to “demolish Heidegger”. The Jargon of Authenticity was published just two years before ND.
Anyway, we’re on the home stretch, around three quarters through Part 1. Soon we’ll leave Heidegger behind and get into the theoretical weeds of “Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories”.
ND I.II., The Child’s Question
The child, fundamental ontology could argue, if it wasn’t too ontic-psychological to do so, inquires into being. The reflection drives this out of it, and the reflection of the reflection would like, as ever in idealism, to render compensation for this.
The child’s question is the naive “why” question, e.g., the series of whys leading to being itself, as the ontologist might see it. The child asks without reflection, and later, as the child grows, reflection drives out this immediate orientation towards being—again, as the ontologist might see it. Then reflection on this reflection, including in the form of philosophy and particularly idealism, tries to recover what has been lost in reflection, providing stand-ins. But there’s no way of getting back.
But the doubled reflection hardly asks immediately, as the child does. Philosophy paints the latter’s conduct with the anthropomorphism, as it were, of the adult, as that of the childhood of the entire species, as pretemporal- supratemporal.
Reflection and/or philosophy misinterprets the child’s “why” questions as questions about being, but this is a kind of anthropomorphism, projecting our world/thing, subject/object dichotomy back on to the child’s experience. What is actually happening is that the child is learning to use language, struggling to replace its practical engagement with a matching of word and thing.
Its naivete is unnaive. As language, culture migrates into the earliest impulses of its consciousness; a mortgage on all talk of originality.
The question, “Why is the bench called a bench?” is not naively directed immediately at the bench in itself. The child is asking about words as much as about the bench. There is no pure origin.
The meaning of the words and their truth-content, their “position towards objectivity” are not yet sharply defined from each other; to know what the word bench means, and what a bench really is – which does include the existential judgement – is one and the same to that consciousness or not at all differentiated, and which by the way in countless cases can be distinguished only with difficulty.
Word and thing, subject and object, have not been fully separated. This means that the immediacy is, in the beginning, an immediacy with a unitary bundle of word and thing.
Oriented to the storehouse of words it has acquired, childhood immediacy is to this extent mediated in itself, the preformed boring into the why, into the first.
So childhood immediacy is mediated, because it always already goes through language. That we “see” through words from the beginning is something we forget, projecting an immediacy back on to it mistakenly.
It is in Heidegger’s favor that there is no non-linguistic in-itself; that therefore language is in the truth, this latter is not in language, as something merely signified by such. But the constitutive share of language in the truth does not establish any identity of both.
Language is involved in truth from the start; we cannot get to the pure pre-linguistic thing. But it doesn’t follow that language is truth, i.e., that there is no non-linguistic remainder.
The power of language proves itself by the expression and thing stepping out of each other in the reflection. Language becomes an office of truth only in the consciousness of the non-identity of the expression with what is meant.
This is a clear and elegant formulation of non-identity. It’s a bit like a negative correspondence theory.
He goes on to say that Heidegger stops at this point, turns back, and tries to bestow the power of the “more” through a naming ritual: naming it “being” and applying his special neologisms, as if they held magic power. But we are past all that.
It is more than a sign only through its signifying power, there where it most exactly and densely holds what is meant. It is, only insofar as it becomes, in the continuous confrontation of expression and thing …
The sign exceeds what it signifies when it signifies well. This happens contingently, in ongoing linguistic and conceptual refinements—not because language is a sacred code for being, as Heidegger seems to think. Thus he is guilty of a kind of mysticism, Teutonic Kabbalistics, i.e., a version of Kabbalah for the German language.
This manner of destroying traditional metaphysics is blind to its own cultural embeddedness, and does not stop to question it as any truly radical philosophy would.
I find that this chapter provides an interesting turn. What I think Adorno is alluding to with the discussion of how a child learns through language, is the deep relationship of dependence between the child and caregiver which extends even prior to the learning of language. He could have gone further to describe how the mother nurses the baby, and in prebirth the child is dependent in a more absolute way. But he starts with the use of words. Language forms the medium, in a relationship which had been immediate in its earlier phases. As the child separates from its mother, becoming independent, language comes in between, to fill that gap.
I would say that it’s all about the words. the child is learning to talk, and things are just accessories to this, or play toys, “action-objects” which one doesn’t need to talk about. So when it pesters “its mother with the embarrassing problem of why the bench is called a bench”, I would say that the child is learning it’s new relationship, as somewhat independent from its mother, and this is “culture”.
So when Adorno say that this is prior to any separation between meaning and truth, and that sort of “objectivity” hasn’t even entered the consciousness of the child, I think we need to respect that what is first and foremost to the child’s consciousness is learning the words themselves. This is a matter of how to hear them, and how to say them. And that is prior to any sort of learning of-------- meaning.
So if there is a fetishism as Adorno says, it involves the words themselves, as objects, in an “unreflective nominalism”. And this demonstrates that rather than truth being within language, as what is signified by it, language is in truth, as taking part in it. Since language only shares in truth, there is no identity principle.
From reflection comes the separation between thing and expression, the power of language. “Truth” enters consciousness due to the apprehension of falsity “non-identity”. Heidegger does not accept the importance of reflection, and assigns the power of language to a “ritual of naming” which is not consistent with the reality of secularized languages. The ritual naming would have to be based in trust in God, but the objectivity of secularized languages is based in intransigence.
The word is more than just a sign, it gains signatory “power”, when it “most exactly and densely holds what is meant”. However, “It is, only insofar as it becomes, in the continuous confrontation of expression and thing”. And Heidegger’s treatment of historical languages as attributes of 'being", serve to destroy doubt and philosophical radicalism in a way which is itself illusory.
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ND I.II., Volte
EDIT: I originally titled this post incorrectly as “Question of Being”. As it is, what follows begins with “Volte” and then briefly has a look at the “Question of Being” section.
NOTE ON TRANSLATION: Adorno is using Sein for being as such, and Seiendes for particular beings or entities. Redmond translates the latter as the/an existent. I flip between using being and existent for the latter but it should be clear in context.
I read the section backwards, starting with the last paragraph:
The entire construction of the ontological difference is a Potemkin village.
By reducing everything individually existent to its concept, that of the ontic, what makes it into the existent, in contrast to the concept, consequently disappears. The formal general-conceptual structure of the talk of the ontic and all its equivalents takes the place of the content of that concept, which is heterogenous to what is conceptual. What makes this possible is the fact that the concept of the existent – therein not at all dissimilar from Heidegger’s celebrated one of being – is the same one which encompasses the purely and simply non-conceptual, circumscribing what does not exhaust itself in the concept, without however ever expressing its difference from what is encompassed.
The concept of the existent is itself conceptual and can thus only circumscribe its non-conceptual content. This distinction is not openly expressed in the concept, and this allows Heidegger to abstract from the non-conceptual content to produce the general category of the ontic.
This means that both the ontic and the ontological are conceptual. But Heidegger represents the ontological difference as one between conceptual and non-conceptual realms, whereas in fact both have equally abandoned the non-conceptual.
The last line is a good one:
The ontological difference is removed by virtue of the conceptualization of what is non-conceptual into non-conceptuality.
Rather than merely forgetting the non-conceptual, Heidegger actively obliterates it by thoroughly conceptualizing it: the concept of the ontic is effectively the concept of non-conceptuality. The ontological difference is meant to be a distinction between beings and being, but with the category of the ontic, we are left with no beings at all.
This is a Potemkin village because the ontological difference is not as fundamental a difference as it seems.
The crucial part of the previous paragraph is when he writes:
Heidegger’s triumph over other, less canny ontologies is the ontologization of the ontic. That no being is without the existent, is reduced to the form, that the being of the existent belongs to the essence of being.
A dialectical approach would embrace being’s mediation with beings, but Heidegger cannot bring being down to Earth like that, so does something else instead: he reduces beings to modes of being.
ND I.II., Question of Being
I didn’t closely read all of this section, but I found this interesting:
As Husserl before him, Heidegger unthinkingly bows to desiderata of thinking placed next to each other, which, in the history of the metaphysics which he put out of circulation in all too sovereign a fashion, proved to be incompatible: to the pure, that which is free of all empirical admixture and hence absolutely valid, and to the immediate, the purely given, irrefutable because it lacks the conceptual supplement.
Adorno is suggesting that Heidegger inherited a basic contradiction inherent in Husserl’s phenomenology, namely the attempt to satisfy two incompatible demands in a single concept: for a priori validity, and for the immediate given. Husserl tried to do this with consciousness; Heidegger does it with an empty, indeterminate concept, that of being.
Question of Being
Here Adorno discusses the distinction between essence and appearance, its relation to authenticity, and what Heidegger does to this distinction. Classical metaphysics placed the true world (essence) as hidden behind appearances. Enlightenment reversed this with the thesis that the metaphysical “essence” is the appearance, leaving appearance as if it is the true essence. Each way of looking at things leaves the hidden as the authentic. Positivism cancels out what is not hidden, as subjective projection, thereby reinforcing the illusoriness of the authentic.
What Heidegger misses is that the authentic of positivism is just an imitation of the ancient “doctrine of essences”. But the hidden cannot be bad, so Heidegger treats human beings as if they need to be scolded by philosophy for having forgotten the essence.
The resistance against reified consciousness, which still resonates in the pathos of authenticity, is broken.
The answer to the question of what really is authentic is blocked by the form of the question, and shuffled off into the question of being. It is a deceptive move because it avoids the issue which every corporeal individual has an interest in, and that is “whether the individual is absolutely annihilated with death” or whether he has a Christian hope of individuality in the eternal:
…what Hamlet means by to be or not to be is replaced by the pure essence, which swallows up existence.
Note, “existence” refers to the individual, which is swallowed up by the universal, “pure essence”. Accordingly, Heidegger poses “the question of being” as the a priori condition necessary for the possibility of both ontic sciences, and the ontologies which ground the ontic studies.
All ontology, no matter how rich and firmly compacted a system of categories it may dispose over, remains fundamentally blind and an inversion of its innermost intent, if it has not sufficiently explicated the meaning of being and comprehended this explanation as its fundamental task."5
What Adorno says is that this move does the opposite of what is intended. It avoids the real question of authenticity, blocks access to it, and shrinks itself to a dimensionless point, as a useless tautology which says nothing but “being” over and over again.
Heidegger intended to give to the essence of being, superiority over logic, but he used Husserl’s principles which combine the pure, “absolutely valid” with the the self-given appearance of the object in “pure phenomenology”. Heidegger differs from Husserl only in that he “relocates the contradictory program away from its Husserlian staging-grounds, the consciousness, and into the transcendence of consciousness.”
Th incompatibility of the pure and the concrete, leaves “being” as a unity of the two, unable to support either one. Heidegger’s being can be neither existing nor a concept. This leaves it as an unattainable nihility, a mere name. Only through its determinations can a phenomenon reach beyond itself, and being remains completely indeterminate.
Volte:
The first sentence lays the groundwork for chapter:
The dialectic of being and the existent – that no being can be thought without the existent and no existent without mediation – is suppressed by Heidegger: the moments, which are not, without one being mediated by the other, are to him immediately the One, and this one is positive being.
So when Heidegger attempts to drive the ontic completely out of the ontological, it leaves the ontological as absolutely indeterminate. Further, being and the existent must be so indeterminate in relation to each other, that we cannot even say what the difference between the two is. But for Heidegger, the existent must be subordinate to being, and this is “the ontologization of the ontic”.
Everything existent is reduced to its concept, and this makes the difference between existent and concept disappear, leaving the concept without content. The precise formulation is expressed in Being and Time: ““The ‘essence’ of being-there [Dasein] lies in its existence [Existenz].””
I have a plan. I don’t think much is to be gained from going through the next 7 sections in detail like we’ve been doing so far, and I’m really fed up with the Heidegger stuff, so I’m thinking I’d like to just read them quickly and then maybe write a single post about them. That way we can get to Part 2 before we lose the will to live.
Incidentally, I noticed the following in Gillian Rose’s 1976 review of the Ashton translation:
Negative Dialectics is a very uneven book. The Introduction and Part Two, “Negative Dialectics: Concept and Categories,” are among the most original and sustained pieces that Adorno ever wrote. The exemplars or “models,” as he called them, which form the second half of the book, are poor. The reader would do better to look elsewhere in Adorno’s oeuvre where there are finer ones.
So I’m looking forward to Part 2.
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I haven’t had anything to say, but I’m just checking in to say I’m reading along.
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I’ve read through the rest of Part 1, and it deals mostly with the concept of existence. Specifically he is concerned with concepts of existence, existents, etc., and how these concepts cannot properly capture the existents themselves.
Here’s a stab at a brief description of each chapter. Being brief, it will be slanted toward what struck me as important.
Mythology of Being:
Heidegger presents a mythical history, within which existents are derived from Being.
Ontologization of the Ontical:
This section deals with how the indeterminate is determined as indeterminate. Hegel does something similar making the non-identical, identical. The problem though is that no concept is capable of being nonconceptual. Hegel, being idealist, openly ontologized the ontic, Heidegger conceals the ontologization.
Function of the Concept of the Existent:
Here he talks about the concept of existence, and existentialism in general. Existence is assigned to the individual subject. But this focus on individuality and subjectivity leaves human existence in general, i.e. the essence of humanity, as indeterminate.
Existence Ontological in itself:
Kierkegaard’s way of describing the existence of the individual subject does not differ too much from Heidegger, in its ambiguity and conflation of the ontic and the ontological.
Nominalistic Aspect:
In the relation between the individual subject, and society, nominalism does not provide what is required to place the individual subject as prior to society. Even “my” points to “other”, from which it is distinguished.
Existence Authoritarian:
Here we have explained the problems of subjectivity in general, when existence is assigned to the subject. By excluding what is other, subjectivity produces an authoritarian approach. Rather than being mediated by numerous thinkers authority is attributed to the thinker.
Historicity:
By absorbing “existence”, into “being”, Heidegger allowed the temporal existents to be swallowed up into the eternal Idea. This “historicity” makes historical conditions irrelevant, allowing “history” to be used however one wants. Rather than truth, it’s affirmation.
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ND I.II., “Mythology of Being” to “Historicity”
@Meta_U, I’ll try not to rewrite your summary so I’ll just look at a few things I thought were interesting.
Mythology of Being
Categories like fear, which is at least not to be stipulated, that it would have to last forever, become by means of their transfiguration constituents of being as such, something preordained [Vorgeordnetes] to every existence, their a priori. They install themselves as precisely the “meaning”, which in contemporary social conditions is not to be positively and immediately named. What is meaningless is endowed with meaning, in that the meaning of being is supposed to arise precisely in its counter-force [Widerspiel], in mere existence, as its form.
I don’t understand why Redmond chose to translate Angst as “fear”. Angst is a well-known Heideggerian category; when it’s translated (it doesn’t really need to be), it’s always translated as anxiety.
Anyway, this is one of Adorno’s most serious condemnations, one we’ve seen a few times before. It’s that for Heidegger, socially and historically contingent suffering becomes ontologically necessary, an aspect of the “fate of being,” owing to being’s predominance over mere existence.
And rather than a critique of suffering and the meaningless of life in this society, Heidegger dignifies these with his magical categories, which are thus offered as the meaning of life.
Ontologization of the Ontical
What is lesser is supposed to be truer, as later on in the self-justifying Heideggerian ideology of the magnificence of simplicity.
In both Hegel and Heidegger, what replaces concrete particularity and the non-identical is indeterminate, impoverished, thinner—or “scanty”.
The apology for scantiness is however not merely one for a thinking which has once more shrunk to a point, but has its precise ideological function.
Heidegger (and to some extent also Hegel) made a virtue of the poverty of his concept, and this is how it becomes ideological:
The affectation of noble simplicity, which warms to the dignity of poverty and of the frugal life, suits the continuing absurdity of real scarcity in a society, whose state of production no longer permits the appeal that there are simply not enough goods to go around.
A true ontology would be that of the matter-at-hand, i.e., material reality, i.e., society and culture. Thus ontology would concern itself with theorizing, or “constructing,” the culture industry, not being:
Philosophically legitimate ontology would have its place more in the construction of the culture-industry than in that of being; good, only that which has escaped ontology.
Insofar as there is something good, it would be whatever escapes the ontology.
Function of The Concept of the Existent
This is about existentialism’s prioritization of existence over essence. @Moliere, as a Sartre expert, you may find this section interesting.
What is true in the concept of existence is the objection against a condition of society and scientific thinking, which virtually drives out the unregimented experience, the subject as a moment of cognition. Kierkegaard’s protest against philosophy was also one against the reified consciousness from which, in his words, subjectivity has gone out: against philosophy he also perceived its interest.
But existentialism as it developed in Sartre etc. ends up taking what is in reality a mediated, “disempowered and internally weakened subjectivity,” and then isolating and hypostasizing it into something supposedly immediate.
The last paragraph of this section is very interesting. It’s about the essence of humanity. He seems to be saying that there could be one, or that we could become such that we could have one, but that reading off an essence from what we happen to be, as anthropologists might do, would only foreclose on our possibilities.
That it cannot be said, what humanity really is, is no especially sublime anthropology but a veto against every sort.
“Existence Ontological In Itself”
Despite the fact that Heidegger ontologizes subjectivity as Dasein, because…
The concept of subjectivity iridescently shimmers no less than that of being and thus is to be attuned to the latter any which way.
…the fact remains that…
That which is individuated, which has consciousness, and whose consciousness would not be without it, remains spatio-temporal, facticity, existent; not being.
Nominalistic Aspect
Nominalism, one of the roots of existential philosophy of the Protestant Kierkegaard, endows Heideggerian ontology with the attractive power of what is not speculative.
Heidegger profits from the prestige of concrete particulars that Kierkegaard, influenced by nominalism, wielded against Hegel. Heidegger presents his philosophy as one that attends, to an unprecedented degree, to concrete existence, especially being-in-the-world. His philosophy therefore has the attractive but false appearance of a grounded body of thought that’s poles apart from speculative metaphysics and idealism.
The philosophical personalism of Kierkegaard, and perhaps also its Buberian offshoot, senses the latent chance of metaphysics in nominalism; however, consistent Enlightenment recoils into mythology at the place where it absolutizes nominalism, instead of dialectically penetrating its thesis – there, where it breaks off the reflection in the belief of something ultimately given.
Nominalism is a good insight, but the concrete particular is only a moment in a dialectic, so you can’t stop short of its mediation without hypostasizing it, effectively mythologizing it as an absolute, the immediate given. As he said in the “Being Thesei” section:
every immediacy … is a moment, not the entirety of the cognition
Enlightenment is nominalist, because its aim is to demystify—and that’s all well and good—but Enlightenment becomes mythology precisely in regarding this too highly, as a definitive principle and result.
Existence Authoritarian
Heidegger’s philosophy says that
the measure of the truth would not be any sort of objectivity, but the pure being-so and acting-so of the thinker.
That is, truth becomes a matter of authenticity, without any shared rational measure. Thus the existence of the subject is truthful merely in its authoritarian assertion and affirmation of itself, with no possibility of being questioned.
existence, which proclaims itself willy-nilly as the criterion of thought, thus secures the validity of its decrees in authoritarian fashion, just as the political praxis of dictators does to the world-view of the day.
At the end of the section we get another appeal to utopia:
The utopian potential of thought would be, rather, that thought, mediated through the reason incorporated in individual subjects, would break through the narrowness of the thinker. …
It is hamstrung … by the existential concept of truth, propagating provincialism as the power to truth; that is why the cult of existence blossoms in the provinces of all countries.
He is condemning the provincialism of the existential concept of truth, because it finds truth in whatever the subject happens to be in its individuality, divorced from the universal demands of reason. But he has a dig at the literal provinces too.
Historicity
Heidegger’s concept of historicity on the surface seems like an advance compared to most other philosophies, that treat existence as timeless (Hegel being the notable exception). But Adorno isn’t satisfied. By turning history into part of the formal structure of Dasein, operating at all times, history becomes dehistoricized, …
as if real history were not stored up in the core of everything which is to be cognized
Thus…
The result is once again the ontologization of the ontic.
That history can accordingly be ignored or deified as need be, is a practical political consequence of the philosophy of being.
Actual history can be denigrated and ignored as merely ontic, or it can be deified as the destiny of being.
He ends the section saying that without the eternal idea of justice, Heidegger’s existential thought, in its adherence to invariants (hence the comment that he hadn’t shaken off Plato’s foremost prejudice), can affirm nothing except power.
To me, anxiety is a broad term, and the experience of it, comes in different forms which can range from bad to good. So anticipation can be a type of anxiety which has been manipulated to be pleasurable as the lead-up to something good. Angst, on the other hand, I take to always have bad connotations, as being anxious toward the unknown. That’s the thing with anxiety, toward the known it can be good, but toward the unknown it is bad. Angst, as anxiety toward the unknown, generally manifests as fear. But as you say it ought not be translated as equivalent. Angst implies an attitude toward the unknown, so indeterminacy is indicated, whereas fear is often an attitude toward what is known and already determined. So fear is a broader term than angst, just like anxiety is broader than angst, but they each extend in different ways, and overlap in angst.
I see him as saying that existentialism makes “the essence of humanity” impossible. This is because of the way that it treats the subject, and in principle that which is individuated, as “an accidental piece of the world”, explained in the prior paragraph. If we take a perspective from the more general, then humanity is accidental in relation to animals, as the species which is individuated.
The more concretely anthropology appears, the more deceptive it becomes, indifferent towards that in human beings which is by no means grounded within them as the subject but rather in the process of desubjectivization, which since time immemorial ran parallel with the historical formation of the subject. The thesis of arrivierter [French: new-fangled] anthropology, that humanity would be open – seldom does it lack the invidious side-glance at animals – is empty; they pass off their own indeterminacy, their fallissement [French: archaic term for bankruptcy] as something determinate and positive.
Yes, I agree more or less. My point was that despite all that, Redmond should have indicated with his chosen translation that Adorno was referring specifically to the Heideggerian existential Angst (one that’s specifically distinguished from fear within Being & Time, as it happens).
Otherwise