Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 1 - Relationship to Ontology.pdf - Negativ Dialectics - MKTK

Negative Dialectics

Part I: Relationship to Ontology

I. The Ontological Need

Question and Answer 69-73

The ontologies in Germany, particularly the Heideggerian one, remain influential to this

day, without the traces of the political past giving anyone pause. Ontology is tacitly

understood as the readiness to sanction a heteronomous social order, exempted from the

justification of consciousness. That such considerations are denied a higher place, as

misunderstanding, a falling astray into the ontic, and a lack of radicalism in the question,

only reinforces the dignity of the appeal: ontology seems all the more numinous, the less

it solidifies into a definite content, which the impertinent understanding would be

permitted to get a hold of. Intangibility turns into unassailability. Whoever refuses to

follow suit, is suspected of being someone without a fatherland, without a homeland in

being, indeed not so differently from the idealists Fichte and Schelling, who denigrated

those who resisted their metaphysics as inferior. In all of its mutually combative schools,

which denounce each other as false, ontology is apologetic. Its influence could not be

understood, however, if it did not meet an emphatic need, the index of something

omitted, the longing that the Kantian verdict on the knowledge of the absolute ought not

to rest there. When in the early days of the neo-ontological movements the resurrection of

metaphysics was spoken of with theological sympathy, this was still crudely but openly

evident. The Husserlian will to replace the intentio obliqua [Latin: oblique intention] with

the intentio recta [Latin: direct intention], to turn to the things themselves, already had a

touch of this; what in the critique of reason delimited the borders of the possibility of

cognition was nothing other than the recollection of the capacity of cognition itself,

which the phenomenological program at first wished to dispense with. In the “draft” of

the ontological constitution of subject areas and regions, finally in the “world as the

epitome of all existence”, the will clearly stirred to grasp the whole without the borders

dictated by its cognition; the eidê [Greek: form, kind], which became Heidegger’s

existential [Existentialien] in Being and Time, is supposed to comprehensively anticipate

what those regions, all the way to the highest, actually were. The unspoken assumption

was that the drafts of reason could sketch out the structure of all fullness of the existent;

second reprise of the old philosophy of the absolute, the first of which was post-Kantian

idealism. At the same time however the critical tendency continued to have an effect, less

against dogmatic concepts than as the effort to no longer set forth or construe the

Absoluta [Latin: absolutes] which had relinquished their systematic unity and were set in

opposition each other, but to receptively receive and describe them, from the standpoint

of the positivistic ideal of science. Therein absolute knowledge became once again, as in

Schelling, intellectual intuition. One hopes to cancel out the mediations, instead of

reflecting on them. The non-conformist motive, that philosophy need not

compartmentalize itself into its branches – those of organized and immediately applicable

science – capsized into conformism. The categorical construct, exempt from any sort of

critique, as the scaffolding of existing relationships, is confirmed as absolute, and the

unreflective immediacy of the method lends itself to every sort of caprice. The critique of

criticism becomes pre-critical. Hence the intellectual mode of conduct of the permanent

“Back to”. The absolute becomes what it least of all would like and what indeed critical

truth said it was, something natural-historical, out of which the norms to be adapted to

could be quickly and crudely inferred. In contrast the idealistic school of philosophy

denied what one would expect of philosophy, by those who take it up unprepared. This

was the flip side of its scientific self-responsibility, imposed on it by Kant. The

consciousness of this, that a philosophy run as a specialty niche, which dismisses the

questions of those who have turned to it for the answers only it can provide as idle, has

nothing to do with people any more, could already be glimpsed in German idealism; it is

expressed without collegial discretion by Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche

broke off every accord with academia. Under this aspect, the contemporary ontologies are

not simply making the anti-academic tradition of philosophy their own, by asking, as

Paul Tillich once put it, questions about what concerns one unconditionally. They have

academically established the pathos of the non-academic. In them, the comfortable

shudder at an impending world-catastrophe is combined with the soothing feeling of

operating on solid, possibly even philologically secure ground. Audacity, ever the

prerogative of youngsters, knows enough to cover itself by general accord and through

the most powerful educational institutions. Out of the entire movement, the opposite

became of what its beginnings seemed to promise. The concern with the relevant

rebounded into an abstraction, which could in no way be trumped by any neo-Kantian

methodology. This development is not to be separated from the problematic of the need

itself. It is so little to be placated by that philosophy as once by the transcendental system.

That is why ontology has surrounded itself with its miasma. In keeping with an old

German tradition, it considers the question more important than the answer; where it

owes what it has promised, it has raised its failure for its part to a consoling existential. In

fact questions have a different weight in philosophy than in the particular sciences, where

they are abolished through their solution, while their rhythm in the history of philosophy

would be more akin to duration and forgetting. This does not mean, however, as in the

constant parroting of Kierkegaard, that the existence of the questioner would be that

truth, which searches in vain for the answer. Rather in philosophy the authentic question

almost always includes in a certain manner its answer. It does not follow, as in research,

an if-then pattern of question and answer. It must model its question on that which it has

experienced, so that it can catch up to it. Its answers are not given, made, produced: the

developed, transparent question recoils in them. Idealism would like to drown out

precisely this, to always produce, to “deduce” its own form and if possible every content.

By contrast, the thinking which does not claim to be an origin, ought not to hide the fact

that it does not produce, but gives back what it, as experience, already has. The moment

of expression in thinking prevents it from dealing more mathematico [Latin: in

mathematical terms] with problems, and then serving up apparent solutions. Words like

problem and solution ring false in philosophy, because they postulate the independence

of what is thought from thinking exactly there, where thinking and what is thought are

mediated by one another. Only what is true, can truly be understood philosophically. The

fulfilling completion of the judgement in which understanding occurs is as one with the

decision over true and false. Whoever does not participate in the judging of the

stringency of a theorem or its absence does not understand it. It has its own meaning-

content, which is to be understood, in the claim of such stringency. Therein the

relationship of understanding and judgement distinguishes itself from the usual temporal

order. There can be no judging without the understanding any more than understanding

without the judgement. This invalidates the schema, that the solution would be the

judgement, the problem the mere question, based on understanding. The fiber of the so-

called philosophical proof is itself mediated, in contrast to the mathematical model, but

without this simply disappearing. For the stringency of the philosophical thought bids its

manner of procedure to measure itself by its conclusive forms. Proofs in philosophy are

the effort, to procure a committalness [Verbindlichkeit] to what is expressed, in that the

latter becomes commensurable to the means of discursive thinking. It however does not

purely follow from these: the critical reflection of such productivity of thought is itself a

content of philosophy. Although in Hegel the claim to the derivation of the non-identical

out of identity is raised to an extreme, the thought-structure of the great Logic implies the

solutions in the way that the problems are posed, instead of presenting the results after

settling all accounts. While he sharpened the critique of analytical judgement to the thesis

of its “falsehood”, everything is an analytical judgement for him, the turning to and fro of

the thought without the citation of anything extraneous to it. That the new and the

different would be the old and familiar, is a moment of dialectics. So evident its context

with the identity-thesis, so little is it circumscribed by this. The more the philosophical

thought yields itself to its experience, the closer it approaches, paradoxically, the analytic

judgement. To become aware of a desiderata of cognition is mostly this cognition itself:

the counterpart of the idealistic principle of perpetual production. In renunciation of the

traditional apparatus of the proof, by stressing the knowledge which is already known,

philosophy establishes that it is by no means the absolute.

Affirmative Character 73-74

The ontological need guarantees so little of what it wishes as the misery of the hungry

does of food. However no doubt of such a guarantee plagued a philosophical movement,

which could not have foreseen this. Therein was not the least reason it ended up in the

untrue affirmative. “The dimming of the world never achieves the light of being.” 1 In

those categories to which fundamental ontology owes its resonance and which they for

that reason either deny or so sublimate, that they can no longer give rise to unwelcome

confrontations, is to be read how much they are the imprints of something missing and

not produced, however much they are its complementary ideology. However the cult of

being, or at least the attraction which the word exerts as something superior, lives from

this, that functional concepts really have come more and more to repress substantive

concepts, as once in epistemology. 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. What ontological

philosophizing attempts to awaken, to conjure, as it were, is however hollowed out by

real processes, the production and reproduction of social life. The effort to theoretically

vindicate humanity and being and time as Ur-phenomena does not halt the destiny of the

resurrected ideas. Concepts, whose substrate is historically passed by, were thoroughly

and penetratingly criticized even in the specifically philosophical area as dogmatic

hypostases; as with Kant’s transcendence of the empirical soul, the aura of the word

being-there [Dasein: existence], in the paralogism chapter; the immediate recourse to

being in the one on the amphiboly of the concept of reflection. Modern ontology does not

appropriate that Kantian critique, does not drive it further through reflection, but acts as if

it belonged to a rationalistic consciousness whose flaws a genuine thinking had to purify

itself of, as if in a ritual bath. Despite this, in order to rope in critical philosophy, an

immediate ontological content is imputed to this latter. Heidegger’s reading of the anti-

subjectivistic and “transcending” moment in Kant is not without legitimation. The latter

raises the objective character of his mode of questioning programmatically in the preface

to the Critique of Pure Reason and left no doubt of it in carrying out the deduction of the

pure concept of understanding. It does not vanish, in what the conventional history of

philosophy terms the Copernican turn; the objective interest retains primacy over the

subjectively directed, happenstance cognition, in a dismembering of the consciousness in

empirical style. By no means however is this objective interest to be equated with a

hidden ontology. Against this speaks not only the critique of the rationalistic one in Kant,

which granted room for the concept of a different one if need be, but that of the train of

thought of the critique of reason itself. This has the consequence that objectivity – that of

cognition and that of the incarnation of everything cognized – is mediated subjectively. It

indeed tolerates the assumption of an in-itself beyond the subject-object polarity, but

leaves it quite intentionally so indeterminate, that no sort of interpretation however

cobbled together could possibly spell an ontology out of it. If Kant wished to rescue that

kosmos noetikos [Greek: cosmos of the intellect] which the turn to the subject attacked; if

his work bears to this extent an ontological moment in itself, it nonetheless remains a

moment and not the central one. His philosophy would like to achieve that rescue with

the power of that which threatens what is to be rescued.

Disempowerment of the Subject 74-76

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. To this extent, and not just today, the not-I is drastically suborned to

the I. Heidegger’s philosophy omits this, but registers it: in his hands that historical

primacy becomes the ontological preeminence of being of pure and simple, above

everything ontic, everything real. He also prudently refrained from turning back the

Copernican turn, that to the idea, before everyone’s gaze. He zealously separated his

version of ontology from objectivism, his anti-idealistic attitude from realism, whether it

be critical or naïve. 2 Unquestionably, the ontological need was not to be levelled out to

anti-idealism, according to the battle lines of the academic schools. But under its

impulses, perhaps the most enduring was the disavowal of idealism. The anthropocentric

way of thinking about life has been shaken. The subject, philosophical self-reflection, has

appropriated the critique of geocentrism, as it were, dating back to centuries earlier. This

motif is more than a merely superficial world-view, so easily as it was exploited in world-

viewing terms. Overweening syntheses between philosophical developments and the ones

of the natural sciences are of course offensive: they ignore the growing independence of

physical-mathematical formal languages, which are no longer accessible to the intuition,

or indeed any categories immediately commensurable to human consciousness.

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 naivete, comparable to the cranks or paranoids

who consider their little town to be the center of the world. 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. Ontology and the

philosophy of being are – next to other and coarser ones – modes of reaction in which

consciousness hopes to escape from that entanglement. But they have a fatal dialectic in

themselves. 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 naïve belief in being, the ignominiously

ideological [weltanschaulich] derivative of critical apprehension, really does degenerate

into what Heidegger once defined incautiously as membership-in-being

[Seinsgehoerigkeit: belonging-in-being]. They feel themselves to be facing the All, but

cling at the slightest provocation to everything particular, insofar as it is energetic enough

to convict the subject of its own weakness. Its readiness to turn a blind eye to the

catastrophe which originates in the context of the subject itself, is the revenge for the vain

wish to spring out of the cage of its subjectivity. The philosophic leap, Kierkegaard’s Ur-

gesture, is itself the caprice by which it imagines to escape the subjugation of the subject

under being. Only where the subject is also, in Hegel’s words, somehow there, is its bane

lessened; it perpetuates itself in that which would be simply different from the subject,

just as the deus absconditus [Latin: absent god] always bore traces of the irrationality of

mythical deities. 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.

Being, Subject, Object 76-78

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:

Adorno, Theodor - Negative Dialectics - 1 - Relationship to Ontology.pdf

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