Adorno’s Critique of Heideggerian Fundamental Ontology

“From the time of Parmenides it has been a common assumption of all philosophers that the logos, the word which grasps and shapes reality, can do so only because reality itself has a logos character." --Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology Vol. I. p. 75.

Adorno is Heidegger’s fiercest critic of the phenomenological method that Heidegger adopts in establishing a fundamental ontology by giving a systematic description of human existence. Adorno wrote, Jargon of Authenticity, as a critique of Heideggerian language. A central concept of existentialism is human authenticity. Heidegger rejects the label of “existentialist” and instead refers to himself as a phenomenologist. Heidegger is actually an existential phenomenologist since he examines the existence of Dasein. Adorno was opposed to the entire philosophical movement of existentialism for the contradictions he claimed rendered it as pure idealism run wild. Adorno approaches the philosophy of experience as an epistemologist. “Experience” here means a relation of subjects to nonconceptual objects. Heidegger, on the other hand, approaches experience as an ontologist. Heidegger's analysis is of "being" (ὄν,) Greek for 'being' (often written as “Being”) as opposed to (ὄντα) that means "things that are." Fundamental ontology examines the “ontological (ontos) structuring to the world of entities.”

For this reason I argue Adorno’s epistemological argument against Husserl’s phenomenological description of essences as a failed breakout and “escape into a mirror” does not apply to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. Heidegger rejects Adorno’s most important tool of Negative Dialectics which is the Subject-Object model of epistemology.

For Adorno the Subject-Object model--borrowed and refined from Hegel--shows the relation and structure of both experience and understanding. The “subject” is the observer, and the “object” is the thing observed. The object is “prior” for it existed before the observing subject, and the object historically has contradicted conventional concepts of what the object is causing scientific revolutions to re-interpret, or re-adjust the concept of the object. In this model, the subject is not a passive observer, but rather is a “constituting” subject (Kant) by its construction of an object as a concept then adjusting the concept to capture the object for classification. For example, the subject must necessarily constitute the object in the categories of space and time for it to become an object for classification. There is a dialectical relationship between the subject and object. The object is true (Hegel). The subject is conceptually constructing the object, but never fully capturing it: subject and object can never be identical for this would mean the subject has absolute knowledge of the object. Objects are irreducible to concepts and so they are nonidentical to its concept. Also, there is subject-object reciprocity and mediation in which the subject relates to a particular object. When too much emphasis is placed on the constituting subject, the epistemological relationship is Subjective Idealism. When too much emphasis is put on the object thereby making the subject passive, the relationship is Empirical Positivism, which is another kind of distortion of experience and understanding.

By “mediation” of subject and object Adorno is referring to the 1.) meaning-producing qualities of the reciprocatory and nonidentical dimensions of the subject-object relationship. 2.) the object is more than the concept of the particular subject. 3.) the object is in part determined by the subject in that it is apprehended through consciousness(CR, p. 48).

Adorno accuses Heidegger of uncritically accepting the erroneous epistemological presupposition of “truth as immediacy,” or truth as “Givenness” of the object untouched by an interfering subject that may enquire further into the object. Adorno directs this criticism of “truth as Givenness” at both Husserl and Heidegger wherein the critical thinking subject is replaced by a passive agent mechanically applying “rigidified cognitive structures” subordinating the object under its universalizing classificatory concept:

“Once the commitment to an idea of truth as givenness is accepted, Adorno believes, the elimination of the experiencing subject has already been incorporated into the understanding of cognition. It is because of its commitment to the epistemologically crucial notion of givenness that Husserlian phenomenology finds itself unable to execute the outbreak other than through a reification of the spiritual capacities of the subject...  The subject no longer recognizes itself, its own essence, in the rigidified structures that now wholly determine its interaction with objects. Cognitive structures, then, have now become wholly severed from the experiencing subject”(Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, Roger Foster, p. 96 | Loc. 1492-98: “RE” here after).

As a historical materialist --not the straw man version of crude materialism attributed to Marx-- Adorno believed the subject “can think against the given without reaching for a realm lying outside of the historical-material sphere”(RE, p 101). Adorno criticized Heidegger for “the theologizing of language,” and “simply uses the fragments of everyday language as though that language were sacred”(RE, p.96). With the doctrine of the Logos, Heidegger certainly theologized language.

Heidegger rejects Adorno’s subject-object dialectic as superfluous and instead asserts his own ontological analysis of a pre-rational immediacy of experience. Heidegger explicitly wrote “Subject and object are not the same as Da-sein and world”(Being And Time, p. 60). For Adorno anything beyond the subject-object mediated relation is pure subjective idealism ungrounded in material reality. Adorno’s key critical points are Heidegger’s,

“...privileging a prereflective form of experience that leads him [Heidegger] to irrationalism. Second, fundamental ontology is alleged not to contain the conceptual resources that would enable it to overcome idealism, the key position in the philosophical tradition that Heidegger criticizes so strongly”(Adorno's Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality, Brian O'Connor, p.156, here after “CR”).

Adorno rejects metaphysics on the basis that such speculation fails the test of subject-object epistemology by 1. Creating a false invariant world of a priori reified essences dualistically existing independent of historical reality.  2. Adorno calls metaphysics “peep-hole metaphysics” where the subject is an invariant abstract metaphysical subject that takes no part in the historical world. 3. Metaphysics offers an “extra-worldly transcendent source of meaning” thereby justifying social conditions and reinforces the status quo. 4. Adorno rejects the teleological view of history for “events cannot be made intelligible simply by placing them within an historical narrative”(Adorno, Brian O’Connor, Routledge, p. 91,here after as “Adorno”). These four criticisms are historically related to the Feuerbachian critique of religion which says all theology is anthropology—“Thus God is nothing else than human: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of a human's inward nature”(Wiki: Feuerbach).

For Adorno the subject is minimized, if not completely erased from any role as an active rational agent in metaphysical ontologies such as Heidegger’s description of existence. A rationality based on sheer Givenness accepts uncritically appearances as truth and fails to grasp the object. If appearances are truth, the critical subject is neutralized:

“The idea here is that the prevalence of certain rationality has, in fact, taken hold of the criterion by which we conceptualize. To put this another way, consciousness is in the grip of a particular model of rationality, one that accepts appearances as truth.' Thus it is limited to accepting society as it is given-its appearances-as the whole of society and does not examine the structures that lie behind those appearances. Hence it cannot achieve the sort of understanding that grasps the contextual position of objects. The role of the subject in this environment-if it operates under this rationality-is simply to affirm reality since this rationality gives the subject no motivation to reflect more deeply....[Adorno describes this as the] neutralization of critical consciousness, critical consciousness being the ability to reject a prevailing paradigm of interpretation when it becomes clear that this paradigm falls short of an adequate grasp of an object....”(CR, p. 74).

According to Adorno an even worst implication of Heidegger’s commitment to the “truth as givenness” assumption is if the object is given immediately (unmediated by the subject-object model) to the subject, the object cannot be nonidentical. In other words, Heidegger is imprisoned in a subjectivist jail without transcendence.

Adorno’s critique of Heidegger as an “escape into the mirror” revealed a circularity in Husserl’s phenomenological description of essences by duplicating conceptual classification. Both Adorno and Heidegger are attempting to get to “concrete nonreified experience.” However, Heidegger’s analysis is not based on epistemology, but rather ontology. And very early Heidegger broke from Husserl by making the distinction between “appearing” and “appearance.” Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is “critical” by distinguishing “semblance” from “sign.” Heidegger knows what the pre-Socratic Greek ontologists knew, “Appearance is not reality.” Phenomenology is the science of φαινόμενον, phenomenon, meaning, (photon), bring to light, and make to appear, to show. Anything that shows or shines is a phenomenon. Heidegger makes the phenomenological distinction between mere appearing and appearance. Schein, means, semblance, “outward or surface appearance,” or misleading appearance—appearing as it is not. On the other hand, Erscheinung means the way in which the thing appears, but is also a mark, or sign of what a thing is. The example used is a “symptom.” Red spots appear on the skin, but they signify something else, a fever. So the spots are Erscheinung of the fever. It is the thing that appears, but not what is meant. Phenomenon is what shows itself as itself. Neither semblance nor sign are possible without something appearing so phenomenon underlies all appearances.

Heidegger changed his phenomenological analysis of being from an analysis of consciousness and meaning to a philosophy of  “appropriation:”

“Heidegger is groping his way out of metaphysics. Appropriation does not designate a 'realm' as does Being, but rather a relation, that of man and Being. What is radically new and non-Metaphysical about Appropriation is not only that it is an 'activity'--a non-static process--Appropriation is non-metaphysical because in the relationship between man and Being as appropriated to each other, the relation is more fundamental than what is related”(On Time and Being , Translated by Joan Stambaugh, New York, Harper & Row,1972).

Heidegger’s method is no longer phenomenological eidetic reductionism, but “hermeneutical induction” which is a “re-seeing” of phenomena. Heidegger makes the distinction between calculative thinking and meditative thinking which is able to “re-see” and reinterpret a distorted world and open its possibilities. Hermeneutics is a Greek word ἑρμηνεύω (hermeneuō) meaning a principle by which to "translate" or "interpret." We discussed this “re-seeing” under the topic of paradigms (Also see Wiki: Paradigms.). Hermeneutical induction is a “shifting,” or re-seeing of phenomena. Re-interpreting the object can also be correctly called, “paradigm induction.”

Heidegger struggled to piece together historical fragments of the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus’ writings to reconstruct a lost hermeneutic of Being. Heidegger is not anti-epistemological, but pre-epistemological:

"...for Heidegger everyday intentionality already understands being, and therefore phenomenological method is simply the thematization of ordinary life....Phenomenological method for Heidegger is not re-duction but in-duction (epagoge: cf. Physics A, 2, 185 b 13), a second-order hermeneutics that explicitates the first-order hermeneutical understanding of being that man already is. By “induction” Heidegger does not mean reasoning from particulars to universal but rather re-seeing (Hinfuhrung zu) the being-dimension one has already seen, bringing it into explicit view, and reading entities in terms of it”(“Heidegger’s Philosophy of Mind” by Thomas Sheehan, p. 296, pdf.).

This is precisely the kind of historical analysis by Heidegger which traces back from a formal concept to its genesis in historical reality that Adorno criticized Husserl for lacking in his epistemology (Logical Absolutism). Adorno referred to this kind of empirical critical analysis as revealing the “suffering of the concept” as an antidote against reification which is a kind of forgetting. This means tracking backwards from the concept to find its historical material origins to gain insight of the object in a historical context. Geometry, for example, had its genesis from surveying land; the US Supreme Court was once known as the “chicken and dogs court” for settling neighbor disputes in its genesis; the Wall Street financial center had its genesis in financing the world slave trade.

Heidegger’s fundamental ontology that begins with the question of Being attempts to ground philosophy in the material world (being-in-the-world) and at the same time avoid the abstract dualisms of subject-object epistemology and reductivist empiricist philosophy. Heidegger does not recreate essences and duplicate concepts, but reinterprets appearance so as to experience the nonreified “nonidentical dimensions of the subject-object relationship.” Heidegger critically distinguished between appearance and sign of phenomena thus avoiding Husserl’s eidetic circularity and escape into the mirror. Heidegger certainly theologized language with his famous statement, “Language is the house of Being.” Heidegger wrote “...the destroyed relation to being as such is the actual reason for the general misrelating to language”(Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger, p. 42). Human relationship to Being is more than epistemological, but pre-epistemological and therefore the subject is not merely an abstract metaphysical observer of the world. Heidegger is not positing a transcendent world above the material world, but rather there is transcendence in immanence; it is part of the object that is not under the scope of the concept—the nonidentical. For Heidegger transcendence means “depth,” not irrationalism:

“The Depth of Reason:

The depth of reason is the expression of something that is not reason, but which precedes reason and is manifest through it. Reason in both its objective [grasped-and-shaped world] and its subjective structures [grasping-and-shaping-self] points to something which appears in these structures, but which transcends them in power and meaning. This is not another field of reason, which could progressively be discovered and expressed, but it is that which is expressed through every rational expression”(Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology Vol. I. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957 & 1963. page 79).

Reason as “Logos,” or “Depth of Reason” is a greater understanding of Logic that encompasses the “ability to reason” as well as intuition and spirituality. Language is an important part of that ability, but is only one dimension of the power of reason.

Paul Tillich further said, “...existentialism is a natural ally of Christianity. Immanuel Kant once said that mathematics is the good luck of human reason. In the same way, one could say that existentialism is the good luck of Christian Theology”(Tillich, Paul. Systematic Theology Vol. II. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1951, 1957 & 1963. page, p. 27).

Orlando