Adorno’s Critique of Husserlian Phenomenology

The Frankfurt school philosopher, Theodor W. Adorno, is the most famous and powerful critic of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, and Martin Heidegger’s fundamental ontology found in Being and Time (1927), and Introduction to Metaphysics (1935).

Edmond Husserl’s phenomenological method of intuiting essences (the necessary structure of the object) is his remedy of the “loss of experience” in modern life. Husserl’s goal is to construct another kind of epistemology, or knowing, that is not causal-mechanical thinking which dominate modern science. Natural-scientific reductionism which has characterized epistemology since Galileo’s scientific view of nature is the cause for this lost experience according to Husserl in this work, “The Crisis of European Science,” (1934-1937).

Modern science applies universalizing concepts, or categorization, of particular objects as the way to analyze and gain control of objects. For example, the color red can be an attribute of a particular thing from which the color can be abstracted from a number of particular instances of red to form a universal concept of “redness.” However, now, the particular thing, such as a cup, is only a subordinated exemplar, or substitute for the color red. In practice the prefabricated abstracted conceptual universal becomes more real than its actual particular existential instantiation. This process of abstraction and subordination by classification is essentially natural empirical science.

Husserl acknowledges classifying science as a great achievement in human thought; however, this classificatory thinking, which is coherent for science and technology, is appointing itself as the sole judge of what is recognized as a valid experience and what is real. The totalizing philosophy of empirical-scientific reductionism has infiltrated all sphere of life resulting in the dehumanization of society and disenchantment with modernity. Husserl is not asserting that positivistic empirical science is invalid, but that sphere of causal mechanical thinking must be integrated with human values.

This is the, The Crisis of the European Sciences, by Husserl (1911)(pdf.)Our current challenge today is to restore the subject as human being. The elimination of the subject from science, history, philosophy, logic--and even the science of psychology, of all disciplines--is the hallmark of our historical epoch--and it leads to an epoch of dehumanization.

Husserl proposed a new method of the “intuition of essences” (Wesensschau) in which essences are like numbers with a priori necessary characteristics. “Intuition” is meant here as Kantian “sense experience.” The intuition of essences counters the classificatory concept. Husserl extracts essential meaning from the particular rather than extracting common universal attributes with other particulars. The essence of a thing is revealed by phenomenology critiquing the object’s conceptual abstractions (“eidetic abstractio”’):

“Husserl thought that essences and laws of essences are universal entities, whose validity is independent from the concrete situation of grasping them. They are one and the same regardless the various acts in which they can be thought or intended.Now Husserl’s aim was to find similar a priori essences like the mentioned ones not only in the field of mathematics and logic, but in all kinds of phenomena and in all areas of reality. Hence, he attempted to create a new science: an extensive eidetic science, which works out the pure essences and laws of essences that underlie all phenomena... So Husserl's attempt here can be called a ‘logic’ or ‘theory of science’, which regards the a priori concepts and laws of scientific theories as essences. His search for a priori conditions is of the same kind as Kant’s search for the ‘conditions of the possibility of experience’, e.g. the pure concepts of the understanding categories like ‘unity’,‘plurality’ or ‘cause and effect’4. For Husserl there are lots of pure concepts and laws which must be examined by the ‘intuition of essences’, e.g. the concepts ‘unity’, ‘relation’, ‘combination’, ‘representation’, ‘truth’, ‘concept’, ‘expression’, ‘meaning’ and others... The phenomenologist is convinced that the concepts used in normal language have an ideal meaning [ideale Bedeutung] that is independent from the concrete linguistic...usage or as to say it in terms of the later Wittgenstein independent from the ‘language game’[Sprachspiel] in which the concept is used” (The Method of Husserl’s Phenomenology: Wesensschau [intuition of essences], Epoché, [eidetic variation], pdf. ).

The “natural attitude” is a theoretical attitude that views the world and experience through preexisting assumptions of its structure--it is ordinary experience. Husserl wants to translate this experience into a science of “essential structures.” Empiricism, a form of the natural attitude, only allows perception of the object to count as experience and demands that all cognition be verified through experience. However, experience is narrowed by delimiting preexisting concepts that fail to capture the entire meaning of the particular. A photographer will experience a forest differently than a logger needing 10 metric tons of lumber in 8 hours. The history of science and philosophy has continually demonstrated that conceptualization continually fails to capture the object. Hegel said, “The object is the true.” That part of the object which is not captured by the subjective concept is the nonconceptual. That part of the object that is not identical to the subjective concept is the nonidentical. In both cases experience is lost, or as Adorno described this loss as a “withering of experience.”

Philosophy’s mission, according to Adorno, is to use concepts to know the non-conceptual. Adorno said this is the challenge of philosophy:

“…to counter Wittgenstein by uttering the unutterable….The work of philosophical self-reflection consists in unraveling that paradox. Everything else is signification, secondhand construction, pre-philosophical activity, today as in Hegel’s time. Though doubtful as ever, a confidence that philosophy can make it after all—that the concept can transcend the concept, the preparatory and concluding element, and can thus reach the non-conceptual-is one of philosophy’s inalienable features and part of the naiveté that ails it. Otherwise it must capitulate, and the human mind with it. We could not conceive the simplest operation: there would be no truth; emphatically, everything would be just nothing. But whatever truth the concepts cover beyond their abstract range can have no other stage than what the concepts suppress, disparage, and discard. The cognitive utopia would be to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts, without making it their equal” (Negative Dialectics, Adorno, p.10).

Whenever that which is suppressed, disparaged, and discarded by the concept is recovered, Adorno calls this process spiritual experience. Husserlian phenomenology is concerned with the same philosophical project of recovering experience:

”Although it is never explicitly stated within it, Husserlian phenomenology can be turned toward an expression of this spiritual experience. It is the skeptical dissolution of all types of cognitive experience that do not fit the scheme of the natural-scientific reduction that drives the crisis of experience, as Husserl sees it”(Adorno: The Recovery of Experience by Roger Foster, p. 93 | Loc. 236).

Both Adorno and Husserl agree the goal of philosophy is to uncover the nonidentical and nonconceptual that is discarded by procrustean conceptualization and identity thinking; however, their methodologies are different. Adorno’s methodology is negative dialectics that is in part Adorno’s refinement of Hegelian dialectical thinking. Husserl’s method is the discovery of phenomenological essences:

“Husserl portrays naturalist thinking as driven by a form of virulent skepticism. He argues that its desire to purify thinking of the hold of the idols of tradition, and superstition-of "coarse and refined prejudices of any kind"-has gratuitously constricted the types of experience that can legitimately enter into the realm of scientific discourse.  Ideas, and essences have been consigned to the trash heap of history as one more form of superstition. Empiricist naturalism does not realize that, when it operates in this way, it is illegitimately using the criteria of cognitive significance applicable to one specific domain (that one governed by the natural attitude) as the yardstick with which to measure cognitively significant experience as such” (Ibid., p.103 | Loc. 1602-6).

But does Husserl’s new way of thinking--intuition of essences—achieve what Adorno calls the “breakout” from natural-scientific reductionism by using conceptual classification to discover essences? Adorno’s judgment is Husserl’s “breakout” attempt is a failure. Foster summarizes Adorno’s reasoning as “Husserl’s failure to overcome the natural-scientific reduction: ideal objects [abstracted essences] turn out to be the same brute facts shorn of their experiential significance” (Ibid., p. 99). Adorno therefore considers these essences as “empty abstractions.” Husserl’s essences “will simply replicate the ossified, isolated facts that pass for genuine experience in empiricist naturalism.”(Ibid., p.104). Husserlian phenomenology failed because it “used concepts to unseal the non-conceptual with concepts.” Adorno described Husserl’s failure as an “escape into the mirror”(Negative Dialectics, Adorno, p. 51).” Later, Adorno claims that Heidegger makes this same error of escaping into the mirror with phenomenological fundamental ontology, but with less success in Roger Foster’s reasoned analysis.

Ludwig Wittgenstein was much more careful at this point in confronting the nonidentical. The realm of the nonidentical is not within the sphere of experience. Language does not and cannot function the same outside of the boundary of sense experience:

“…only certain things exist, but that they exist is something that cannot be said. It can only be shown, and the solipsist’s mistake is to express it in a factual proposition…. [The Subject, or observer] is only a metaphysical subject, which is a kind of focal vanishing point behind the mirror and what the mirror reflects. So the only thing that he [Wittgenstein] can legitimately say is that what is reflected in the mirror is reflected in the mirror…but this is…only a tautology. It means only that whatever objects exist exist. So when solipsism is worked out, it becomes clear that there is no difference between it and realism” (Ludwig Wittgenstein by David Pears, Penguin, 1970, pp.74-75).

Consequently, Wittgenstein’s famous statement, “What can be said at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,(1922). On the other hand, Adorno believes there is another way of thinking, and philosophical writing that can reveal the nonidentical in a nondominating relation to the subject without embracing pure subjective idealism and irrationalism just as Husserl and Heidegger have mistakenly done. Interestingly, Adorno recognizes the metaphysical notion of the absolute, or what Kant referred to as the unconditional:

“Adorno ultimately associates the notion of metaphysical thinking qua nonidentical thinking with the very idea of the ‘absolute.’ This is actually a key element of his reconception of metaphysics and nonidentity in the following way: ‘the absolute as it hovers before metaphysics, would be the nonidentical that refuses to emerge until the compulsion of identity has dissolved’ “(Negative Dialectics, p. 406).

“The absolute for Adorno signifies a desire for something which is not co-extensive with immediate given experience....”(Adorno: The Rutledge Philosophers, Brian O’ Connor, 2013, p. 103-104|loc. 1694).

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