Iain Macdonald
Can any more be said today regarding Adorno and Heidegger?1 Perhaps their historical opposition has become as devoid of interest as their attacks on each were polemical. As is well known, Adorno’s career-long critique of Heidegger is unremitting and extraordinarily severe: ‘being itself is too poor, too meagre, not to reek of poverty. One gets the impression that if the absolute is nothing more than the air wafting around a wretched stove bench, then one should prefer to have nothing to do with it.’2 Although it is not widely known, things were not very different in the other camp. In an interview dating from 1969, Heidegger stated that he had no interest in reading Adorno, even though – or perhaps because – the substance of his critique had been reported to him.3 For Heidegger, Adorno’s attacks were illegitimate in part because of their apparent malice – he had also been told that Adorno had vowed to ‘bring him down’4 – but, more importantly, because they seemed to miss the point: his thinking showed that he was a ‘sociologist, not a philosopher’.5 Indeed, Heidegger even questions Adorno’s credentials: ‘With whom did Adorno study [philosophy]? … Did he study under anyone at all?’6
More substantially, their differences can be summed up as follows: while Heidegger sought to work his way through metaphysics, back toward the primordial ‘non-conceptual reserve of the essence’7 of be-ing (Seyn), Adorno by contrast sought to renew philosophy in the form of praxis-transforming interpretation (Deutung).8 Heidegger’s philosophical struggle is with being; Adorno’s is with social and political, as well as metaphysical, impediments to emancipation. On this basis, it would seem that there is little or no common ground between Heideggerian ontology and Adornian dialectics, to the extent that there is little or no agreement on what the task of philosophy is. As Dieter Thomä very succinctly puts it: ‘Precisely because Adorno orients “being” toward “happiness”, he remains distant and foreign to Heidegger, in whose work happiness counts among the most absent of concepts.’9
The aim of these reflections is not to reconcile Adorno and Heidegger: neither to show how Heidegger’s thought is ‘really’ oriented toward happiness, nor to argue that Adorno is a crypto-Heideggerian. Rather, the aim is to chart the outlines of a novel concept of possibility that is central to both their thoughts.
Since Aristotle, possibility has largely been treated as subordinated to actuality. As Aristotle puts it, actuality is in all essential ways ‘prior’ to potentiality.10 Such is the power of this hierarchy that, in spite of numerous variants and modifications in later traditions, it has dominated our understanding of the possible. But is this priority absolute? This is the fundamental question that Heidegger and Adorno both pose and answer, in the negative, by proposing a kind of possibility that is to be distinguished both from possibilities that conform to actuality and from those that are merely logical. What is this other kind of possibility? In a word, it is a kind of possibility that may well appear unreal (i.e., merely logical or even impossible) from the standpoint of actuality, but which can in fact serve to transform actuality and our vision of the things and possibilities contained within it. To be sure, this claim is differently endorsed by Heidegger and Adorno, but in a way, it will be argued, that suggests a qualified complementarity between their approaches.
Their innovations in this regard may not seem obvious, and it is true that other attempts have been made to rethink possibility and its subordination to actuality. Thus, the Christian tradition, in its myriad engagements with Aristotle’s philosophy, does at times lay claim to a higher and prior notion of possibility, for example, in Duns Scotus, where God’s absolute power (potentia absoluta) implies the possibility of profoundly altering creation at any time, thereby setting in motion real possibilities very different than those we know. Alternatively, one might think of Kant as an exception to the subordination of possibility to actuality. By virtue of his Copernican revolution, experience is seen as having basic subjective conditions of possibility, among which we find the category of possibility itself. Possibility thereby serves actuality – but not as its servant, as it were; on the contrary, possibility and the other categories are the formal criteria of the experience of objectivity. These arguments have their historical merits. However, what we find in Heidegger and Adorno is quite different. Very schematically: on the one hand, and by contrast with Scotus, Heidegger and Adorno attempt to defend a version of absolute potentiality as available within our own, human experience of what is; and on the other hand, this attempt is made without recourse to a table of categories and what that entails in Kant’s thought: formalism and the supposition of transcendental subjectivity.
As we shall see, then, Heidegger and Adorno lay claim to a notion of possibility that prompts us not only to reorganize our intellectual understanding of possibility, but also to reconceive being and to reorder actuality.
Evidencing Heidegger and Adorno’s priority of possibility could have been pursued in a number of ways: some more historical-diachronic, some more textual-synchronic, perhaps still others more original. The path chosen here involves, first, an attempt to render visible and intelligible Heidegger’s concept of being as possibility, as outlined in passages from the Contributions to Philosophy, but especially in contrast to a related notion: Husserl’s concept of horizonality. This particular strategy no doubt involves a number of disadvantages, not least its narrowness and comparative approach, but its chief advantage is that it affords a relatively clear perspective on Heidegger’s peculiar concept of possibility that is not purely internal to his language and methods. In other words, the hope is that the apparent excursus on Husserl will serve as ballast, thereby facilitating the reader’s comprehension of Heidegger’s concept of possibility as a refusal of be-ing (Verweigerung des Seyns). In a second step, Adorno’s own peculiar concept of possibility as ‘utopia’ or as the emancipatory potential of an ‘imageless materialism’ (bilderlosen Materialismus) will be brought to the fore. Here, the claim will be that Adorno deploys a notion of possibility that commands a transformation of actuality and its attendant possibilities, thereby serving potentialities either invisible within or rendered unreal by the existing order. Once this textual work has been done, it will be possible to examine the point of intersection between Adorno and Heidegger that their concepts of possibility suggest, namely, the reversal of the traditional priority of actuality over possibility.
The general aim of the present study is thereby two-fold: to illuminate concepts and passages in Heidegger and Adorno that are fairly obscure and in some cases undertreated in the literature; and to underscore their related contributions to the historical understanding of modality, especially as regards their shared claim that there is a kind of possibility wholly or mostly unacknowledged in the tradition. Perhaps beyond that, one might hope that this shared claim may help us to nuance the tensions between Adorno and Heidegger appropriately and so to lay the ground for future developments of their respective bodies of work.
As is well known, Heidegger’s philosophy is an attempt to dislodge an unusual and suppressed notion of being from the history of metaphysics. This involves, among other things, a critique of being as presence, i.e., as being tied to positive givenness or to the eminence and unassailable necessity of a particular being’s actuality (for example, God or the knowing subject). To such conceptions, Heidegger opposes a notion of being that is shot through with withdrawal (Entzug), reserve (Vorenthalt), and refusal (Verweigerung), rather than presence. In the Contributions to Philosophy, for example, Heidegger explains how the metaphysical notion of being as presence suppresses a primordial negativity that he calls the ‘refusal of being’ (die Verweigerung des Seyns). In a word, he means to show that, contrary to much of the Western philosophical tradition, be-ing in the eminent sense, Seyn, is not something positive. It ‘is’ rather refusal. Or better, be-ing refuses: that is its essence and its essential sway (Wesen, Wesung). But what does this refusal amount to? And if Heidegger’s primordial ‘not’ is really as negative as he claims it is – a pure absence that is the forgotten true ground (Ab-grund) of pure presence – then what work does it do?
Instead of quoting extensively from the Contributions and other works of the same period that deal with the refusal of be-ing, it may be more fruitful to follow a particular problem from the history of metaphysics to the heart of Heidegger’s thought. Nevertheless, we take our lead from a definition that Heidegger gives of refusal in the Contributions:
if one wanted to attempt the impossible and grasp the essence of being with the help of ‘metaphysical’ ‘modalities’, then one might say: refusal (the essential sway of be-ing) is the highest actuality of the highest possible as possible and thus is the first necessity, leaving aside the source of ‘modalities’ in οὐσία.11
Heidegger is here suggesting that in order to understand the refusal proper to be-ing, we must think of modalities neither as subjective categories, nor as elements of an Aristotelian ontology of actuality, but rather only as being’s most essential deployment, eclipsed by beings and forgotten within the tradition. To grasp what this means and why Heidegger thinks that we should believe his claims, we shall turn to a classic phenomenological topos: Husserl’s concept of horizon. The idea is that we can better understand Heidegger’s concept of refusal through a critical reading of horizonality and the notion of possibility that is deployed therein. The insufficiency of horizonality for understanding beings will serve to indicate a potentiality deeper than the kind discussed by Husserl.
As sketched in the Cartesian Meditations, horizons are essentially ‘“predelineated” potentialities’12 that, though not strictly given, ‘actually’ make up the objectivity of objects by the ways in which they contribute to intentional content. So in the case of Husserl’s cube or die, as I turn it in my hands the sides that disappear from view fade into retentional non-being and potentialities of making them present once again; and likewise, as a new side comes into view, it emerges from protentional non-being and potentialities proper to perception and the thing. These coordinated (spatiotemporal) potentialities are horizons proper to the object as it is given in the intentional relation. In this manner, horizonality constitutes the ‘implicitly intended objective sense’13 of any object. In Heideggerian terms, horizonality is therefore to be construed as the being of beings, according to phenomenology. Husserl, for his part, puts it like this: ‘every actuality involves potentialities, which are not empty possibilities, but rather possibilities intentionally pre-delineated in respect of content – namely, in the actual subjective process itself – and, in addition, having the character of possibilities actualizable by the ego’.14
One might think that Heidegger’s attempts to critique the notion of being as presence must somehow derive from the horizonal interplay of potentiality and actuality, of absence and presence. After all, ‘horizon’ as a technical term is not foreign to Heidegger’s work: for example, Part One of Being and Time was supposed to culminate in the ‘Explication of Time as the Transcendental Horizon for the Question of Being’.15 Is the refusal of be-ing somehow equivalent to the co-present non-being of potentiality in Husserl’s sense, which always accompanies the being of actualized possibilities? Is Husserl’s richer notion of horizonal actuality an antidote to the interpretation of being in terms of presence?
Because of the intentional character of Husserl’s interpretation of actuality and potentiality, it should be clear that it is impossible to salvage the traditional notion of horizon and so reconcile Heidegger with orthodox phenomenology. ‘Objective sense’ and the ‘living present’ are still too positive and too subjective, even though they incorporate what is not, namely, co-given potentialities, into what is, namely, the actual. The reason is precisely the one given by Husserl: the potentialities in question are only those ‘actualizable by the ego’. Horizonality ultimately depends upon the living actuality of the subject.
This is an absolutely basic and inalienable feature of Husserl’s notion of horizonality. The non-being of potentiality, understood as co-present nonactuality, is proper to the ‘actual subjective process’ (aktuelle Erlebnisse), not to be-ing (Seyn) in Heidegger’s sense. To the extent that there is a withholding or a refusal, it is relative first of all to the subject, not to be-ing. Husserl confirms this in the same passage from the Meditations: ‘On every level [überall], an “I can” and an “I do” or “I can do otherwise than what I am doing” contributes to these possibilities.’16 Of course, he does not mean that the arbitrary actions of the will perfectly determine objective sense; he means that there is objective sense only insofar as it is for the subject and in relation to what the subject is capable of in general. The deeper problem remains: Husserl is tied to a metaphysical model of being based on objectivity, representedness, and thoughtness (Gegenständlichkeit, Vorgestelltheit, Gedachtheit)17 – or in his own terminology: intentionality. He falls prey to the original error of metaphysical thinking from Plato through to Hegel: ‘the “not” has already been sublated in the “yes”’,18 which in Husserl’s case takes the form of the ‘I can’ and ‘I do’ of the transcendental ego.
Nevertheless, Husserl unwittingly gives us a vital clue to understanding Heidegger’s refusal of be-ing, hence the importance of the example. The key passage is the one just cited: ‘On every level, an “I can” and an “I do” or “I can do otherwise than what I am doing” contributes to these possibilities’ – to which Husserl adds: ‘and, what is more, regardless of the always outstanding possible hindrances to this and every other freedom’.19 The additional clause is obviously meant to reinforce the main idea: objective sense is dependent upon actualities and potentialities bound up in the vicissitudes of intentional life. But what exactly are these ‘always outstanding possible hindrances’ to the ‘I can’ and ‘I do’ of the ego?
Husserl no doubt means that there are many possible and real limitations on the intentional freedom of the ego. Perhaps someone snatches the cube from my hand before I get a chance to turn it around. My ‘I can’ and ‘I do’ would thereby be interrupted. Or perhaps the cube in question is a sugar cube dissolving into a cup of coffee: it thereby gradually loses its prior horizons (though it may persist in memory) and has its objective sense irrevocably altered. The point is that such occurrences are of course possible, but they are mere contingencies that, at most, affect intentional fulfilment, but not the more basic fact that objective sense is an intentional nexus of actualities and possibilities that the ego effects.
A similar point can be made about basic features of human perception, for example, binocular vision, which rules out certain perspectives, such as being able to see the front and the back of the cube at the same time. In this regard, the real freedom of the ‘I can’ and ‘I do’ certainly seems to be subject to an intrinsically determining hindrance, i.e., a ‘not’. However, it is once again contingent, insofar as binocular vision is a feature of human perception that might have evolved differently. But more significantly, it is a ‘hindrance’ that in fact serves to organize perception positively. Binocular vision in no way inhibits the ego from constituting the objective sense of the cube – any more than the one-eyed pirate is excluded from sharing in the objective sense of the same cube. Such limitations are real limitations, but in all such cases, Husserl still seems entitled to say: ‘regardless of the always outstanding possible hindrances to this and every other freedom’. Essentially, he does not see them as denying the fundamental role played by the intentional nexus of actuality and potentiality. Any such hindrance can in fact only contribute to the givenness of the object as a ‘pole of identity, having a consciously pre-intended sense that has yet to be actualized’.20 What I am hindered from seeing is in any case integrated into objective sense precisely as participating in co-given potentialities. In a deep sense, then, there are no real hindrances and thus there can be no potentiality or non-being (no primordial ‘not’) that resists the objective sense that is given or co-given subjectively.
From a Heideggerian angle, this is where Husserl goes astray. There ‘is’ a more basic non-being that tacitly conditions the positivity of objective sense beyond horizonal co-givenness. To glimpse it, we just need to shift our perspective on horizonality and hindrances. Is horizonality always relative to the synthesizing ego? Yes, says Husserl. Is being therefore reducible to what the transcendental ego synthetically (actively or passively) makes of it? No, says Heidegger. Of course, both would agree that a certain partiality is always at work in the construal of beings. Husserl’s point is just that we can adequately think this necessary partiality via the concept of horizon. Partiality as organized partiality is just what gives us access to integral objects; and without a synthesizing ego who engages in this organizational activity, there would be no perception of integral objects enduring in space and time. To be an object is to have objective sense; and to have objective sense is to be horizonal, i.e., to be a more or less regular and homogeneous intentional nexus of actuality and potentiality, being and non-being.
At the centre of this claim is the transcendental fact that consciousness is essentially an ‘intending-beyond-itself’ (Über-sich-hinaus-meinen) or a ‘more-intentionality’ (Mehrmeinung).21 For Husserl, it is precisely this ‘more’, emanating from the ego, that gives us access to integral objects, instead of mere facets. For Heidegger, however, this ‘more’ is the sign of a negativity that the ego cannot master and to which it is in thrall. To put it somewhat crudely, there is a non-givenness that subtends co-givenness.22
Without a doubt, the ‘more’ in Husserl’s sense is intentional: what is for the ego is constantly related, by the ego, to what is potentially actualizable by the ego. However, if the constituting ego always intends more than is given in fulfilled intentions, it is not just because its syntheses positively anticipate, confirm, and retain this ‘more’ – but also because the work of synthesis is never done. Thus the ego’s more-intentionality synthetically fills up the objective sense of the cube; but, at the same time, it is driven by a constant and concomitant ‘becoming-less’ that is not in the ego’s power: an abiding and inexhaustible reserve of horizonality beyond what is co-given at any given moment. I may turn the cube as I wish, but as I turn it what becomes absent is only partly due to my having chosen to turn it as I did. The ego’s ‘gaining’ the cube-as-cube in its horizonal objectivity follows only from constantly ‘losing’ the cube in a way that the ego can only compensate for by its ‘I can’ and ‘I do.’ There is presence only because there is a reserve of possibility or withholding of being that the ego constantly delimits and re-delimits (ὁρίζω) but does not exhaust. As Derrida puts it: ‘the thing itself always slips away’.23
Ultimately, the I decides very little, precisely because the ‘I can’ is determined and bound by a tacit giving or granting of possible being that I have always already uncovered and construed, habitually forgetting in the process that actuality and its horizons are the precipitates of an incessantly renewed withholding that I cannot circumscribe. The Heideggerian point would be this: it is not merely that I synthesize a flat surface adjoining other flat surfaces at right angles that makes the cube a cube, where these surfaces and angles are always propped up, as it were, by the horizons that I do not now see. In the first instance, it is also that the cube’s sides disappear from view in an apparently regular way that I do not control that makes the cube a cube. The specific manner in which the cube’s potentialities are deployed from a constantly replenished but withheld and uncircumscribable reserve of potentialities is what makes the cube a cube – not some sort of brute givenness. In short, the cube’s deployment in terms of possibilities that I construe is not up to me, although I participate in it.
But surely there is nothing strange in this constant, disempowering loss – in this ‘more’ that only manifests itself as a retreat? Is it not just the otherness of the ‘real’ thing that resists me? Indeed, the otherness of the thing would adequately explain this resistance, were we able simply to help ourselves to a notion of pre-existing, positive being, understood as ontologically pre-individuated. Unfortunately, such naïve realism is ruled out from the outset. As Husserl convincingly shows, the thing is ‘itself’ only as a synthesis that is both perspectival and a constant work-in-progress. Beings are never simply present (wholly there) as such, in the sense of dumb positivity. This is just what horizonality teaches us in the first instance. More than that, however, ipseity in general is only ever graspable obliquely, synthetically, presumptively, asymptotically, fragmentarily, and so on. Again, presence is only ever present as conditioned by an apparently regular withholding of potentialities: ‘All origination and all genesis in the field of the ontological is not growth and unfolding [of something ‘actually’ pre-given] but degeneration, since everything arising arises [entspringt], that is, in a certain sense, runs away.’24 This is why ‘the thing itself always slips away’.
Thus, what is important here is not just the fact that the sides ‘of the cube’ must necessarily retreat, must refuse themselves to me so that the cube can appear to me as present. More generally, the point is that it is refusal or withholding (non-givenness rather than brute givenness) that makes something an object and the object that it is for me, a Gegen-stand. Whereas Husserl goes as far as saying that integral beings are given only horizonally, Heidegger adds to this that to be a being at all and so to gain the appearance of positivity, there must ‘be’ a withholding of being. This can be framed as a general condition of possibility of beings in order to make Heidegger’s claim clearer: only because ‘it’ (be-ing, Seyn) withdraws is there ever an ‘it’ (a being, Seiendes) of whatever sort. It is this refusal or necessary withholding of being that grants the locally construed possibilities of the cube that are adumbrated horizonally for and by the knowing subject. There ‘is’ being (Sein) only on the basis of a refusal (a non-being, a ‘not’, or a ‘nihilating’ in the sense of a constant and constantly withheld renewal of non-being) that always outstrips its ‘yield’ and that the ego does not command.
This refusal is be-ing (Seyn) in the eminent sense. So when Heidegger says that refusal is ‘the highest actuality of the highest possible as possible and thus is the first necessity’,25 he means that being (‘the highest actuality’) must take root (‘first necessity’) in possibility qua unmasterable non-being (‘the highest actuality of the highest possible as possible’: subjective genitive), that is, in ‘nihilating’ or non-being taken in an active sense.
More specifically, we might say that Heidegger’s concept of refusal names that which is withheld within what is ‘really’ possible for me here and now, for us, for the ego in general and its kinaesthetic system. To put it differently, refusal names that which the ego can never make visible in an intentional act: the never-positively-given movement of possibilizing (nihilating as the constant and constantly withheld renewal of the non-being of potentiality) that fosters the intentional nexus of actuality and potentiality. This ‘happening’ that makes that which merely happens possible is just what Heidegger calls the event (Ereignis), of which Dasein is the site but not the origin. Thus, when Heidegger writes of the event of being, he is calling attention to the fact that happenings of whatever sort are not exhausted by the activity of a pure I, or by the apparently positive presence of beings and co-given potentialities, but in an ultimate sense are rather made possible by what is not given in the apparent presence of a being. More generally, an event occurs only through the participation of the self in a play of this unmasterable possibility (Seyn), experienced as a differentiation of what-is and what-is-not that is constantly happening to me, producing actuality while always tacitly retreating within it.
In an important passage from the Contributions, Heidegger summarizes these ideas as follows:
What is possible – and even the possible as such – presents itself only in the attempt [Versuch]. The attempt must be thoroughly governed by a fore-grasping will. As putting-itself-beyond-itself, the will resides in a being-beyond-itself [Übersichhinaussein]. This residing … holds sway as risk [Wagnis]. And only in such risks does the human being reach into the domain of de-cision [Ent-scheidung]. And only in such risks is the human being able to take the measure of things [wägen].
That being is and therefore does not become a being, this is expressed most sharply as follows: be-ing is possibility [das Seyn ist Möglichkeit], what is never present-at-hand and yet, through event-ing [Er-eignung], always what grants and denies in refusal.26
The difference between Heidegger and Husserl in this passage may seem infinitesimal, but it is decisive. Succinctly, we might say that so-called real possibility, homogeneous with the ego’s syntheses and co-given horizonally, has as its condition of possibility a granting-denying hidden within the intentional nexus of actuality and potentiality – a possibilizing that we can glimpse only negatively, for example, in the fact that the positivity of beings is ‘powered’ by an immeasurable withholding that is inadequately rendered by the phenomenological tradition as horizonality. This is the non-given nihilating-happening – the negativity – that traditional ontology cannot quite grasp, centred as it is on the presence of beings. (The notion of being as possibility will be further developed below in connection with another attempt by Heidegger to critique actuality and its attendant possibilities.)
We shall put Heidegger’s claims in abeyance for a moment in order to explore Adorno’s treatment of possibility. However, it may be helpful at this juncture to face up to a fundamental aspect of Adorno’s critique of Heidegger: that Heidegger’s concepts are hopelessly abstract, while pretending to be concrete (by speaking of decisions and risks, for example). Indeed, the refusal of be-ing may seem formal and even idle in respect of social praxis. But at the same time, as we shall see, there is a way in which Adorno’s concept of possibility intersects with Heidegger’s while building in a concreteness that is no doubt lacking in the latter.
In any event, it is certainly not difficult to understand what Adorno finds objectionable in Heidegger’s language, especially in the talk of the self’s ‘being-beyond-itself’ and the alleged risks it involves: ‘Danger, risk, risking oneself, and the all the dread associated with them, do not get us very far’,27 says Adorno, because merely thinking about the structural relations of possibility and actuality is just not good enough. To put it bluntly, Heidegger’s formalism and theoretical rigour do not illuminate historical reality or define praxis:
Instead of discerning human conditions in concepts, [Heidegger’s philosophy] mistakes these concepts for the mundus intelligibilis. It conserves by repeating that which it rebels against, namely, screening thought structures that should be removed, according to its very own philosophical programme.28
Thus, Heidegger constructs concepts (event, refusal, etc.) that merely repeat the time-honoured error of establishing a world separate from the sensible one, i.e., in the form of the set of allegedly ‘true’ universal and necessary concepts that render the meaning of being ‘in itself’. But the real hitch is that in so doing, his concepts cover over or screen, and sometimes even ontologize and ossify, historical human conditions. (Here one might think of existentiales such as idle talk, curiosity, and ambiguity, understood as so-called ‘positive’ phenomena, basic to Dasein's being.29)
Thus the point of the critique is that Dasein's formal ‘putting-itselfbeyond- itself’ and ultimately be-ing’s refusal are just screens that block us from effecting real transcendence from out of material conditions of existence. The key difference lies in how Adorno and Heidegger think transcendence, the ‘more’ of ‘more-intentionality’. For Heidegger, it is an immemorial negativity that remains negative, a ‘possibilizing’ (or ‘nihilating’) that drives actuality and real possibility while always retreating within them. For Adorno, on the other hand, it is the dialectical transcendence of actuality that aims, ultimately, at real social and political renewal:
According to its ideal, philosophical language moves out of itself beyond what it says in the flow of thought. It transcends dialectically. … [By contrast, Heidegger’s] jargon takes over this transcendence destructively and consigns it to its own clattering. … The jargon blurs the distinction between the ‘more’ for which language gropes, and the ‘more’ as being-in-itself [Ansichsein].30
This latter critique is particularly relevant in the present context. Heidegger’s constant withholding of being certainly seems to be an invisible ‘more’ that exceeds the appearance of brute givenness and so may be said to be proper to being-in-itself. More generally, it is no doubt true that Heidegger’s philosophy is almost exclusively ontological-descriptive, rather than historical-normative.31 As a result, it is highly abstract and internal. But what is it that Adorno is really advocating here? What is this ‘more’ – Adorno’s ‘good more’, as opposed to Heidegger’s ‘bad more’ – and where does it come from?
The answer lies in his concept of imageless materialism (bilderlosen Materialismus), described in Negative Dialectics:
The materialist longing to grasp the thing aims at the opposite [of an object fully deciphered by fixed concepts or images]: the full object would only be conceivable in the absence of images [nur bilderlos]. This imagelessness converges with the theological ban on images. Materialism secularized the ban in not allowing utopia to be positively pictured; this is the meaning of its negativity.32
Clearly, the materialism Adorno defends here does not correspond to any traditional political or economic materialism. Indeed, he says outright in an earlier passage that traditional materialism ‘became untrue’ by clinging to obsolete images of society.33 It is for this reason that we must strip it too (not just ontology) of existing images (ideals, doctrines): so as to return to it its critical potential.
Adorno appropriates materialism in a very specific sense, then. It is certainly concrete, historical thinking (it is ‘in things, in states of affairs’34), but its imagelessness implies that the tensions that course through reality push thought to reconceive what is (or what merely is), not to make it match a pre-existing ideal or image, but to overcome these tensions within actuality by determinately negating their cause: the idolatry of pre-existing ideals. The problem, of course, is that such images purport to deliver us reality, but as such they effectively block what the object might yet be, i.e., what it is possible for it to become and, more specifically, what it ought to become, given the tensions in which it is enmeshed. However, notwithstanding the screen of images we call actuality, there is no metaphysical hinterworld that we are blocked from reaching. On the contrary, imagelessness goes all the way down, implying in fact that there is no ‘truer’ reality ‘behind’ this one that we happen to have misnamed. Only diagnosis is prognosis. This is the kernel of Adorno’s dialectic. As for Heidegger, it should be clear that Adorno’s critique implies that he trades in images that at best think possibility in general terms, but whose generality abstracts away from the historicality (suffering, contradictions, etc.) of actuality. Heidegger’s concepts are simply too ‘wide-meshed’.35
What is imageless materialism, then? In a word, it is the decipherment of real conditions of existence and of what ought to be, independent of the authority of pre-established images of what things are. It is a materialism whose emancipatory potential lies in it not being in the service of a preexisting ideal, but rather in the service of what real conditions of existence demand, even if the demand flouts expectations, political allegiances, and metaphysical assumptions about the nature of reality. In other words, it is a materialism of broadly Marxian inspiration but liberated from dogmatic Marxism. In this sense, imagelessness means that there is no requirement to remain faithful to the conclusions of Marx’s arguments (such a requirement would involve precisely the kind of image that Adorno critiques), though there is a moral requirement to remain faithful to the historical acuity and dialectical rigour that they evince.
Imageless materialism thereby coincides with the notion of philosophy as interpretation (Deutung) that Adorno had already worked out in ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’ (1931). As Adorno argues in this text, there is no static ‘meaning’ (no Sinn, no hinterworld) for philosophy to uncover, but there are nevertheless riddles posed by actuality and, possibly, solutions. Interpretation responds to these riddles of the given – where the ‘given’ is not to be understood in a naïve realist sense, but rather in the sense of what we take or find as given along with its tensions and contradictions, which constitute ‘fleeting, disappearing hints within the riddle-figures of beings’.36 These riddle-figures are therefore nothing mysterious. They are the traces of unconscious conditioning forces or suppressed truths – for example, those that explain a concrete historical situation of universal suffering and its origins, such as appear in Marx’s analysis of the genesis of private property. Dialectical thinking shows us that these forces are, in fact, transformable – provided we can invent the concepts that name them and denounce their seemingly natural, fateful character. Philosophy as interpretation, as opposed to ontology, teaches us to recognize and exorcise these ‘blind demons’ or ‘demonic forces’ of history.37
The concrete example of interpretive unriddling given by Adorno is that of the commodity structure.38 He does not provide us with much in the way of detail, but the idea would have been clear enough in 1931. The example concerns what it means to be a thing today. In brief, we can say that to be a thing is to be a commodity: that is how reality appears to us. More importantly, though, to analyse the reasons for this apparently natural or ontological ‘fact’ is already to adumbrate a new interpretation of beings stripped of this pseudo-reality. Interpretation is thus a radical process that does not so much solve the riddle of the commodity structure as ‘dissolve’ it. In the old days, this would have meant, for example, ‘dissolving’ the conceptual myth of private property along with the corresponding political gesture of actually abolishing it. But because the revolutionary gesture had already disqualified itself and become objectively impossible to enact, Adorno focuses only on the general logic of unriddling: social transformation is predicated on naming the conceptless, non-identical ‘more’ that inhabits and haunts so-called reality.
This task is what Adorno calls the ‘actuality of philosophy’: the task of forging constructions of the real that elaborate on the horizons of what is – not to confirm what already is (as the horizons of the cube eventually confirm that it is a cube, or as classical political economy confirms the ‘natural’ character of labour and private property), but rather to transform the entire field of actuality into what ought to be. One might say, then, that interpretation (Deutung, also a ‘showing’ and a ‘pointing’) shows us horizons of actuality that more properly belong to what is not, though they are necessarily hinted at in what is.
Why do these horizons belong to ‘what is not’? The reason is that right life is blocked by our vision of what actuality allows and defines as possible. Therefore, we cannot simply read right life directly off wrong life as a kind of real possibility that wrong life expresses directly. Right life is precisely not an objectively real possibility of wrong life. We must first interpret the contradictions of wrong life in order to discover coherent, actualizable possibilities other or different than those sanctioned by actuality. Philosophy in this sense is most properly the enactment of a determinate negation that reveals ‘the power of freshly disclosed actuality’.39 The otherness or difference of this new actuality is the ‘more’ that Adorno seeks to activate through interpretation.
The idea is thereby not merely to reorder beings within the existing network of actuality and possibility that we call reality, for example, in the manner of a dictatorship of the proletariat. The idea is rather to develop an ars inveniendi (as Adorno calls it) whose products utterly transform actuality and real possibility. It is the aim of this art of invention and imagination to answer ‘the questions of a pre-given actuality each time, through a fantasy that rearranges the elements of the question without going beyond the scope of the elements, a fantasy whose exactitude is verifiable through the disappearance of the question’.40 This ‘exact fantasy’ (exakte Phantasie)41 is thereby at once actuality ‘freshly disclosed’ and the construction of an immanent possibility ‘unheard of’ within existing actuality.
An example of this procedure again comes from the context of Marx’s thought: to name the universal subject of a suffering inflicted by an ontological illusion is already to name the solution to the riddle posed by the illusion. Another example would be artistic creation, perhaps most obviously in the context of modern art, where a work can challenge what counts as art and potentially redefine the entire field of what art can be: ‘because art is what it has become, its concept refers to what it does not contain’.42 Yet another example would be that of ‘civil courage’ (Zivilcourage) or the courage to act publicly, to make a universal truth felt inwardly explicit against established laws or social norms: ‘The power of thinking not to go with the flow is the power to resist what has been previously thought. Emphatic thinking requires civil courage.’43
A more specific example from the latter category may help to bring this construction of ‘unheard-of’ possibilities into focus. The example is well known. In December of 1955, Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a standing white passenger, as required by law at the time in Montgomery, Alabama. As she recounted in a late interview, the policeman called to the scene asked her: ‘why don’t you stand up?’ – to which she replied: ‘I don’t think I should have to stand up.’ The particularity of the scene lies in the manner in which Parks marks her refusal. She is well aware of the law and the realities it defines: stand or suffer the consequences of the law. She does not deny the authority of the bus driver or the policeman, yet she acts rationally and intelligibly against the reality they represent. Of course, abstractly speaking, sitting and standing are just generic possibilities of human beings, as Aristotle himself points out. But in the social context described, the possibility of remaining seated does not just represent a generic real possibility and its circumstantial consequences; it also represents another reality, not at all actual, in which universal human equality would preclude the actual outcome. This is especially clear in the grammatical mood of Parks’ reply, which is optative in character: ‘I don’t think I should have to stand up’ as equivalent to ‘though with the force of law you say I must, another organization of reality is both imaginable and realizable in which I would not have to’. This implicit reference to another order of things is not mere wishful thinking, as the repercussions of her gesture later showed. It is as though refusing to stand operated on two levels at once: one, on which existing actuality just followed its course; and another, on which actuality could no longer follow its course. Such gestures reach for a possibility that the existing order denies, or that remains invisible and unrealized because conceptual blinkers put it out of sight. But once realized (admitting, of course, that once may not be enough), they can transform actuality and the possibilities it contains.
Generally speaking: any such profound transformation of actuality requires an appeal to an indeterminate possibility available at first ‘merely logically’ within the contradictions that plague actuality. (‘Merely logically’ because the possibilities in question contradict the apparent natural order of things and so may seem absurd or wishful.) Interestingly, this notion of possibility cannot be reduced to what is usually called real possibility. As opposed to merely logical possibilities, real possibility represents what is in fact actualizable according to actuality. But here, as the product of an ‘exact fantasy’, Adorno is asking us to look for possibilities beyond those sanctioned by actuality, in part because the real possibilities on offer are just what the existing order manipulates and uses to obstruct difference. (For example, one might consider the real possibility of changing careers as a way to better one’s lot, but in a world in which all labour is alienated, this possibility and the hope it names are no more than a screen that conceals rather than reveals the actuality of alienation.) Certainly, Adorno’s concept of possibility is a co-given horizon of the present, like real possibility. It is not pure fantasy, but rather exact fantasy, constructed out of the contradictions of lived existence. But precisely because such co-given horizons are viewed not from the ‘side’ that faces actuality, but rather from the ‘side’ that faces the different, they are likely to appear unreal. In this sense, Adornian possibility is the negative image of the distortions of real possibility. For example, it corresponds not to the apparent natural order of things but to the other actuality, conspicuous by its absence, in Rosa Parks’ ‘I don’t think I should have to …’. Hence possibility in this emphatic sense can be said to be heterogeneous, in contrast to the homogeneous possibilities pre-delineated within actuality. As Adorno puts it: ‘utopian thinking is thinking that thinks the difference [Differenz] from what exists’.44 The term ‘heterogeneous possibility’ names this difference. (Ἕτερος signifies, among other things, ‘of another kind, different’.) To summarize: heterogeneous possibility, as the product of an ‘exact fantasy’ or an ars inveniendi, is essentially a middle term between real and logical possibility that proposes a transformation of our vision of actuality and the real possibilities it contains.
Adorno’s philosophy thereby formulates a demand not only that we ‘ontologically’ accept that such possibilities exist but that we make an effort to imagine them and to realize them, rather than succumbing to the social reinforcement of the status quo or to the metaphysical prejudices that underpin it. In other words, Adorno asks that we think the horizon of the horizon of experience, or the possibility of other possibilities. It is only on the supposition of such heterogeneous possibilities that the otherwise mind-boggling final lines of the introduction to Negative Dialectics become intelligible:
[Utopia], the consciousness of possibility [das Bewußtsein der Möglichkeit], clings to both the concrete and the undisfigured. Utopia is blocked by what is possible [das Mögliche], never by immediate actuality [das unmittelbar Wirkliche]; that is why what is possible seems abstract in the midst of what exists. Inextinguishable colour comes from non-being. Thought, a piece of existence, serves non-being, which thought reaches, however negatively.45
Given the arrangement of terms in the passage, it is clear that two concepts of possibility are in play. The ‘consciousness of possibility’, i.e., utopia, cannot be equivalent to ‘what is [really] possible’, because what is really possible is just what makes change seem ‘abstract’, extravagant, and out of reach – even impossible. As for immediate actuality, it is precisely immediate actuality that solicits us and calls for its interpretation. It is not Marx’s twenty yards of linen or forty pounds of coffee as such that block utopia, but rather the commodity structure and what it rules in or out, what it makes possible and impossible. Utopia names the possibility of exactly imagining heterogeneous possibilities that liberate us from lived contradiction and suffering. In this way, thought serves the ‘non-being’ of heterogeneous possibility, rather than the restricted selection of real possibilities on offer in actuality.
Implicitly, then, Adorno argues for the priority of possibility over actuality, and for a society that safeguards this priority rather than the status quo. Why is this priority legitimate and necessary? The short answer is that actuality’s self-expression is not a reliable guide to what is really possible. (For example, the fact that universal human equality has never yet been realized does not reliably confirm or reflect a natural or socially necessary inequality.) Thus while Adornian materialism stands radically opposed to Heideggerian ontology, a startling similarity between their two philosophies nevertheless begins to come into view.
What they seem to have in common is this specific thought: there is a kind of possibility that is superior to actuality and real possibility, traditionally conceived. To put it differently, what we usually call real possibility is only a subset of possibilities that are opposed to merely logical possibilities.
For Adorno, as we have seen, it is not immediate actuality but rather real possibility that blocks possibility in a larger sense. In conversation with Ernst Bloch, he explores the thought further:
Utopia, insofar as it can be represented, is indeed the transformation of the whole. … Yet, to put it simply, it seems as though human beings have lost the capacity, subjectively speaking, that is, in terms of consciousness, to imagine the whole as something that could be utterly different.
Human beings are bound as though by oath to the world as it is. To be sure, this blocked consciousness of possibility has a very deep cause. … My view of the matter is that all human beings, whether they admit it or not, know deep down that things could be different, that they could not only live in a world without hunger – and quite likely fear – but also as free beings. But at the same time, over against human beings and around the world, the social apparatus has now become so sclerotic that the palpable and patent possibility of fulfilment, which is there for all to see, manifests itself to us as radically impossible.46
Thus, in order to counter the ways in which the ‘world as it is’ represents non-homogeneous possibilities as impossible or unreal, i.e., in order to counter ideology, we must develop or rediscover the capacity to retrieve ‘the consciousness of [heterogeneous] possibility’ from actuality through immanent critique, for it is only this capacity that can break the spell of actuality. For this one simple reason, possibility must have priority over actuality. Adorno thereby urges us to see reality as ‘more’ than it appears to be, not in the manner of a hidden being-in-itself, but rather modally.
As for Heidegger, the priority of possibility is clearly stated from early on: ‘higher than actuality stands possibility’.47 The thought is repeated in many ways around that time, for example, ‘within the ontological sphere the possible is higher than everything actual’.48 We have also seen how Heidegger’s later conception of being is elaborated in terms of a possibility that is more basic than possibility as governed by actuality. The subordination of possibility to actuality is accordingly a metaphysical error that goes hand in hand with erroneous interpretations of being in terms of beings. In Mindfulness, Heidegger further develops this thought: ‘According to the conventional estimation, what in the highest sense “is”, is a being as actual. What supremely counts is “actuality” in the sense of the extantness of the effective [Vorhandensein des Wirkenden]; effectiveness and nothing else.’49 What results from this is the ‘strange opinion that the higher a being stands within the metaphysical order of stages from the material-physical [ὕλη] to the spiritual [εἶδος], the more powerless [machtloser, i.e., because power/potentiality fulfils itself in actuality] a being becomes’.50 (This latter claim is evidently a restatement of Aristotle’s priority of actuality, which in part depends upon things being ‘for the sake of’ their ends, like the boy who exists ‘for the sake of’ being a man. An examination of the Aristotelian concept of possibility is sadly beyond the scope of the present paper, but the essential point is that the ontological priority of the actual consigns possibility to the service of existing beings and their co-given potentialities.51)
Heidegger’s alternative, the priority of possibility over actuality, can be shown in at least two related ways. First, the ontological priority of possibility stems, as shown above, from a necessary possibilizing that drives the nexus of actuality and possibility as Husserl conceives it. Possibility as the refusal of be-ing signifies the inevitable loss or return to the immeasurable potentiality that is proper to being. In particular, the analysis of horizonality showed that the synthesis of actuality and co-given potentialities presupposes an abiding and inexhaustible reserve of horizonality beyond what is co-given at any given moment. This is what Heidegger calls be-ing or possibility (Möglichkeit in the eminent sense).
Another way of showing the priority of possibility is sketched in the ‘Letter on Humanism’, dating from 1946 but harking back both to Being and Time and to the experimental period in which the Contributions and Mindfulness were written.52 In a passage that refers the reader to themes from Being and Time, Heidegger critiques the ‘public realm’ as ‘the metaphysically conditioned establishment and authorization of the openness of beings in the unconditional objectification of everything’.53 This metaphysical conditioning is such, he continues, that ‘language comes under the dictatorship of the public realm [Diktatur der Öffentlichkeit], which decides in advance what is intelligible and what must be rejected as unintelligible’.54 But this distribution of the intelligible and the unintelligible is not merely an ordering of actuality; it is actuality as it is experienced by us and as illuminated in advance by metaphysics, science, technology, and their popular manifestations. In this way, ‘language surrenders itself to our mere willing and trafficking as an instrument of domination over beings’ and ‘beings themselves appear as actualities [das Wirkliche] in the interaction of cause and effect’.55 To this ‘devastation of language’, Heidegger counters that the human being must find a way ‘to exist in the nameless [im Namenlosen]’.56
No doubt this seems rather abstract, but the problem is a specific one: we are misled by the apparent fixity of beings in everyday language, rather than being led by the matter at hand, whatever that might turn out to be. In one passage, Heidegger takes this to be the root cause of misunderstandings of his work: the language of Being and Time, he says, ‘was not rethought by readers from the matter particularly to be thought; rather, the matter was conceived according to the established terminology in its customary meaning’.57 But the claim is more far-reaching insofar as what and how a being is or can be is generally determined in advance by a preestablished way of thinking that does not let beings be what they are. We judge things by their apparent ends and effectiveness, by the measure of what already has a name, not by what falls outside these ends, by what runs counter to effectiveness, or by what has of yet no pre-established name (das Namenlose).
To this, Heidegger opposes another vision of possibility as implicitly founding the kind of possibility determined by actuality. To glimpse it, he asks us to consider how we first come to concern ourselves with things:
To concern oneself with a ‘thing’ or a ‘person’ in their essence means to love them, to favour them [sie lieben: sie mögen]. … Such favouring [Mögen] is the proper essence of the capacity [Vermögen] not merely to achieve this or that, but also to let something essentially unfold in its provenance, that is, let it be. It is by the ‘power’ of this capacity [»kraft« dessen] for favouring that something is properly able to be.58
This is no maudlin appeal to irrationality or to Romantic sensibilities. What the passage means can be summarized fairly readily: things show themselves to be the things they are when we concern ourselves with what they might be beyond pre-existing notions, known effects, and instrumental utility. In other words, Heidegger is giving a short account of possibility as prior to pre-determined forms or ends:
This capacity [Vermögen] is what is properly ‘possible’ [das »Mögliche«], whose essence resides in favouring. From this favouring being enables [vermag] thinking. The former makes the latter possible [ermöglicht]. Being is the enabling-favouring, the ‘may be’ [das »Mög-liche«]. Being is the element, the ‘quiet power’ [»stille Kraft«] of the favouring-enabling, that is, of the possible. Of course, our words möglich [possible] and Möglichkeit [possibility], under the dominance of ‘logic’ and ‘metaphysics’, are thought solely in contrast to ‘actuality’. … When I speak of the ‘quiet power of the possible’ I do not mean the possibile of a merely represented possibilitas, nor potentia as the essentia of an actus of existentia; rather, I mean being itself, which in its favouring holds power over thinking [über das Denken … vermag].59
This passage takes up some of the ideas already developed above. But Heidegger adds a crucial element: to think being as possibility is not a purely formal gesture, but rather the necessary precondition for responding adequately to the public realm and the general fixity of beings in language. The question that Heidegger is implicitly posing is the following: in being concerned with beings, is there not always an ‘excess’ possibility that accompanies more obvious possibilities, that is, a possibility that actuality does not acknowledge in its determination of possibility? The ‘quiet power of the possible’ is this ‘excess’ possibility, understood as being ‘itself’ enabling and holding power over thinking (vermögen, über das Denken vermögen). As we saw in the analysis of Husserl’s cube, Heidegger is here asking us to consider how our determinations of beings are driven by possibilities in which I participate, but which are not up to me. Here, Heidegger adds that these possibilities form the driving force of a genuine experience of things, which includes the capacity (Vermögen) to be concerned (sich annehmen, mögen) with beings not merely as we take them to be (as pre-given actualities that govern certain potentialities) but also, more fundamentally, as always more than whatever we take them to be. In this regard, the critique of metaphysics in Heidegger is nothing more than a defence of possibilities that go beyond those generally acknowledged, and even beyond the general metaphysical view that possibilities are governed by actualities, i.e., pre-established forms or ends.
We have thus far explored two ways of denying the priority of actuality, corresponding to Adorno’s and Heidegger’s respective approaches. First strategy: to show that ‘unriddling actuality’ can generate heterogeneous possibilities that profoundly change the ‘distribution’ of the possible. This is essentially the approach of the materialist mode of interpretation that Adorno proposes. Alternatively, one could elaborate an ontology that shows that no actuality traditionally conceived – i.e., no pre-given interpretation of forms and co-given potentialities – has absolute priority over possibility; on the contrary, according to this ontology, co-given potentialities are only a subset of the possible understood more broadly. This is essentially what Heidegger proposes. Are these two ways of denying the priority of actuality independent of each other? More specifically, does Adorno’s priority of possibility not intersect with or even presuppose Heidegger’s concept of be-ing as possibility?
Unsurprisingly, Adorno expressly denies the validity of such questions. Answering the hypothetical objection that he tacitly presupposes Heideggerian ontology, he will say, for example: ‘I will not decide whether my theory is based on a definite conception of human beings and of Dasein. I deny the need to resort to this conception.’60
Yet Adorno will also write that ‘justice is done to the concept of being only if the genuine experience [genuine Erfahrung] that founds it is made intelligible: the philosophical urge to express the inexpressible [das Unausdrückbare auszudrücken]’61 – i.e., the ‘genuine experience’ of the ‘more’ suppressed within actuality. In other words, the inexpressible is not that which is strictly inexpressible, the ineffable. It is what Adorno elsewhere calls the conceptless (das Begriffslose).62 Much more like Heidegger’s idea of ‘existing in the nameless (im Namenlosen)’, ‘the urge to express the inexpressible’ refers to the experience of unheard-of (unheard-of because unexpressed, suppressed) possibilities not bound to actuality, to the world as it is. The passage therefore suggests that the only true concept of being is the one that allows us to express and realize heterogeneous possibilities.
How does this concept of being relate to Adorno’s utopia of the ‘consciousness of possibility’ and the capacity ‘to imagine the whole as something that could be utterly different’?63 As we have seen, scattered throughout Adorno’s philosophy we find references to the capacity to experience and give substance to the ‘more’ (the non-identical, the different, etc.) suppressed within actuality. But if that ‘more’ is neither delusional nor merely logical, then it is because this capacity does not operate in a frictionless void. On the contrary, materialism requires that possibilities for positive transformation be ‘in things, in states of affairs’. In short, it requires a concept of what it is to be a thing or a state of affairs – a concept of being – that authorizes critiquing the status quo in the first place. And indeed, this concept of being is very much present in Adorno:
What is, is more than it is. This ‘more’ is not imposed upon what is but remains immanent to it, as that which has been driven out of it. In this way, the non-identical would be the identity proper to the matter at hand as pitted against [gegen] its identifications.64
What are we to make of this passage? Just that the ‘more’ targeted by exact fantasy refers us to a notion of being (‘what is’) understood as possibility (‘more than it is’) withheld within metaphysical and instrumentalized interpretations of beings.65
Adorno’s philosophy requires such a concept of being. The reason is the following: for materialism to be properly imageless and for it to be effective as an open method of social and political emancipation, dogmatic affirmations of pre-established images of actuality have to be ruled out from the outset. But to rule out such affirmations from the outset, it cannot be enough merely to suspend local beliefs in order to correct injustices piecemeal – for why should we entertain the possibility in the first place that local beliefs and injustices are potentially unfounded and needless, that suffering is not inevitable? On the contrary, if imageless materialism is to function as a way of transforming the world without recourse to essentialisms or dogmatisms, then the world itself has to rule out the possibility of any ultimate claim to knowing how things ‘really are’. In other words, we have to be able to think of the matter at hand as always ‘more than’ and as ‘pitted against’ its identifications. Adornian materialism therefore presupposes a minimal anti-realist ontology, like Heidegger’s, in which possibility stands higher than actuality.
Does this mean that in some sense Adorno ‘needs’ Heidegger? In one very important sense, no: of course Adorno does not need Heidegger. He is well within his rights to ‘deny the need’ to resort to Heidegger’s characterization of being. One might even say that Adorno’s philosophy is proof that one need not resort to Heideggerian language at all in order to arrive at a notion of possibility richer and more productive than what is on offer in the tradition. Moreover, it is no trivial matter that Adorno tries in his work to address pressing social and political problems rather than limiting his reflections to the structural relations of possibility to actuality. But none of this implies that for Adorno to be right, Heidegger must be wrong. Regarding the priority of possibility, it implies only that true thoughts can and indeed must be thought more than once and differently: ‘Thinking has the element of the universal. What once was thought cogently must be thought elsewhere, by others.’66 In other words, if there is any truth to the priority Heidegger gives to possibility, then it should also be expressible outside that philosophy, in another context – perhaps even in a way that corrects its defects and avoids its pitfalls. Adorno’s critique of Heidegger notwithstanding, this attempt to think the priority of possibility is just what Adorno undertakes in his philosophy.
In another sense, without prejudice to valid concerns expressed in Adorno’s critique of Heidegger, we cannot continue to act as though there were an inviolable barrier separating these two thoughts from each other. If the preceding study has succeeded in shedding light on their related attempts to reverse the traditional priority of actuality over possibility, then in part it is because both Adorno and Heidegger have something else in common: the claim that the matter at hand (die Sache selbst, die erst zu denkende Sache, etc.) must be allowed to guide thinking, rather than the status quo. Thus while we can well understand many of Adorno’s reasons for critiquing Heidegger, we cannot continue to use that historical context indefinitely as a reason not to explore the qualified complementarity of their approaches. Especially in light of the publication of manuscripts unknown to Adorno, such as those referenced above (Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness), it is time to let the matter at hand once again guide thinking and to investigate what we might yet learn from Heidegger – while remaining critical where necessary. More than any other issue broached by Adorno in his critique of Heidegger, the priority of possibility deserves a closer look.
While awaiting this closer look, we might at least consider the following: perhaps the dispute between Adorno and Heidegger should no longer call to mind the exclusive disjunction: Adorno or Heidegger, materialism or ontology. If the priority of possibility for which they both argue is legitimate, no doubt a better way of framing the alternative would be: either (i) the priority of possibility and the minimal anti-realist ontology it presupposes; or (ii) essentialism, formalism, fetishism, totalitarianism, and, in general, the priority of rigid actuality.
If indeed we are better off with the second of these alternatives, in the sense that it would be philosophically more productive and less partisan, the conclusion of the present study should come as no surprise. What really matters is the consciousness of heterogeneous possibilities and, more generally, the experience of things viewed from the standpoint of the possibility of other possibilities, rather than in terms of purported essences and actualities. At root, it is this thought – and its future development – that counts, not that it was thought by two thinkers as historically opposed to each other as Heidegger and Adorno.
1 For orientation in contemporary aspects of the debate, see Iain Macdonald and Krzysztof Ziarek (eds) Adorno and Heidegger: Philosophical Questions (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). The first attempt at a systematic treatment of the question was of course Hermann Mörchen, Adorno und Heidegger. Untersuchung einer philosophischen Kommunikationsverweigerung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1981). (See too the prior study, Hermann Mörchen, Macht und Herrschaft im Denken von Heidegger und Adorno (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980).) The best (sadly, also very brief) attempt to date to do justice to the stakes of the debate is certainly Dieter Thomä, ‘Verhältnis zur Ontologie. Adornos Denken des Unbegrifflichen’, in Theodor W. Adorno. Negative Dialektik, ed. Axel Honneth and Christoph Menke (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2006). Nota bene: unattributed translations are my own. I have also taken the liberty of making minor modifications, where necessary, to existing translations.
2 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophische Terminologie (2 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1973), Vol. 1, p. 160.
3 ‘I have read nothing by him. Hermann Mörchen once tried to talk me into reading him. I never did’ (Richard Wisser, ‘Das Fernseh-Interview’, in Günther Neske (ed.) Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger (Pfullingen: Verlag Günther Neske, 1977), pp. 283–4).
4 Ibid., p. 283.
5 Ibid., p. 284. Adorno saw very early on that this distinction between philosophy and sociology was at the root of his disagreement with Heidegger. See Theodor W. Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, in The Adorno Reader, ed. Brian O’Connor, trans. Benjamin Snow (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), p. 35; Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (20 vols, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), Vol. 1, p. 340. The Gesammelte Schriften are hereafter referred to by the abbreviation GS.
6 Wisser, ‘Das Fernseh-Interview’, p. 284.
7 Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy: From Enowning, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), §139, p. 183; Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975– ), Vol. 65, p. 260. The Gesamtausgabe is hereafter referred to by the abbreviation GA.
8 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, pp. 24–39; Adorno, GS, 1:325–44.
9 Thomä, ‘Verhältnis zur Ontologie: Adornos Denken des Unbegrifflichen’, p. 46.
10 Aristotle, Metaphysics, ed. Jonathan Barnes, trans. W. D. Ross, The Complete Works of Aristotle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), θ 8, 1049b4ff.
11 ‘Wollte man das Unmögliche doch versuchen und das Wesen des Seyns mit Hilfe der »metaphysischen« »Modalitäten« fassen, dann möchte man sagen: Die Verweigerung (die Wesung des Seyns) ist die höchste Wirklichkeit des höchsten Möglichen als des Möglichen und damit die erste Notwendigkeit, doch abgerechnet die Herkunft der »Modalitäten« aus der οὐσία’ (Heidegger, Contributions, §127, p. 172; Heidegger, GA, 65:244. The definition is given twice, in fact, in very similar forms; see too Heidegger, Contributions, §169, p. 207; Heidegger, GA, 65:294.)
12 Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology, trans. Dorion Cairns (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1960), §19, p. 45; Edmund Husserl, Husserliana (The Hague, Dordrecht, and New York: Martinus Nijhoff, Kluwer Academic Publishers, and Springer Verlag, 1950– ), Vol. 1, p. 82. The Husserliana are hereafter referred to by the abbreviation HUA.
13 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §19, p. 45; Husserl, HUA, 1:82.
14 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §19, p. 44; Husserl, HUA, 1:81–2.
15 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1962), H41.
16 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §19, p. 45; Husserl, HUA, 1:82.
17 Heidegger says this of Hegel, but it applies to Husserl and to the Idealist tradition more generally. See Heidegger, GA, 68:10–12, 37–8.
18 Heidegger, GA, 68:47.
19 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §19, p. 45; Husserl, HUA, 1:82.
20 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §19, pp. 45–6; Husserl, HUA, 1:83.
21 Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, §20, p. 46; Husserl, HUA, 1:84.
22 Canny readers of Husserl will notice that I have limited myself to ‘internal’ horizons, leaving aside the concept of ‘external’ horizon that is sketched in Ideas I and developed in The Crisis of European Sciences. But the concept of external horizon – as the ‘field of things’ and ultimately the world-horizon – does nothing to mitigate a Heidegger-inspired critique. As Husserl himself says: the worldhorizon ‘exhibits itself to me in every case through a nucleus of “original presence” (this designates the continuously subjective character of what is directly perceived as such) as well as through its internal and external horizon-validities’ (Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970), §47, pp. 162–3; Husserl, HUA, 6:165–6). The emphasis on the ‘nucleus’ of ‘original presence’ always given ‘subjectively’ shows that it is again the ego and intentionality that are fundamental in the experience of the external horizon. See also Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy: First Book, trans. F. Kersten (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1982), §27, p. 52; Husserl, HUA, 3.1:57.
23 Jacques Derrida, Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl’s Theory of Signs, trans. David B. Allison (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 104; Jacques Derrida, La voix et le phénomène. Introduction au problème du signe dans la phénoménologie de Husserl (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1967), p. 117.
24 Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter, revised edn (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1982), p. 308; Heidegger, GA, 24:438.
25 Heidegger, Contributions, §127, p. 172; Heidegger, GA, 65:244.
26 Heidegger, Contributions, §169, p. 335; Heidegger, GA, 65:475. My italics.
27 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London/Evanston: Routledge & Kegan Paul/Northwestern University Press, 1973), p. 27; Adorno, GS, 6:431.
28 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), p. 84; Adorno, GS, 6:92. Ashton mistakenly substitutes mundus sensibilis for Adorno’s mundus intelligibilis, which of course renders the sentence incomprehensible.
29 Heidegger, Being and Time, §§35–7, H167–75.
30 Adorno, Jargon, pp. 11–2; Adorno, GS, 6:420–1.
31 There are, of course, notorious exceptions concerning Heidegger’s political involvement. Nevertheless, for present purposes, it is important to bear in mind that the vast majority of Adorno’s objections to Heidegger are philosophical, not political.
32 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 207; Adorno, GS, 6:207.
33 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 207; Adorno, GS, 6:205.
34 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 207; Adorno, GS, 6:205.
35 Theodor W. Adorno, Ontologie und Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2002), p. 33.
36 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 31; Adorno, GS, 1:334.
37 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 31; Adorno, GS, 1:335.
38 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 33; Adorno, GS, 1:337.
39 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 38; Adorno, GS, 1:343.
40 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 37; Adorno, GS, 1:342.
41 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 37; Adorno, GS, 1:342.
42 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 3; Adorno, GS, 7:12.
43 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Notes on Philosophical Thinking’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 132; Adorno, GS, 10.2:604.
44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 313; Adorno, GS, 6:308.
45 ‘[Utopie], das Bewußtsein der Möglichkeit, haftet am Konkreten als dem Unentstellten. Es ist das Mögliche, nie das unmittelbar Wirkliche, das der Utopie den Platz versperrt; inmitten des Bestehenden erscheint es darum als abstrakt. Die unauslöschliche Farbe kommt aus dem Nichtseienden. Ihm dient Denken, ein Stück Dasein, das, wie immer negativ, ans Nichtseiende heranreicht’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 56–7; Adorno, GS, 6:66).
46 Rainer Traub and Harald Wieser (eds) Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1975), p. 61.
47 Heidegger, Being and Time, H38.
48 Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, p. 308; Heidegger, GA, 24:438.
49 Martin Heidegger, Mindfulness, trans. Parvis Emad and Thomas Kalary (London: Continuum, 2006), p. 165; Heidegger, GA, 66:187.
50 Heidegger, Mindfulness, p. 167; Heidegger, GA, 66:189.
51 Suffice it to point the reader to two particularly relevant treatments of this theme. See Charlotte Witt, ‘The Priority of Actuality in Aristotle’, in T. Scaltsas, D. Charles, and M. L. Gill (eds) Unity, Identity, and Explanation in Aristotle’s Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). See too Jaakko Hintikka, ‘Aristotle on the Realization of Possibilities in Time’, in Time and Necessity: Studies in Aristotle’s Theory of Modality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973).
52 The ‘Letter on Humanism’ was written in 1946 and first published in 1947 alongside ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, then again in a separate edition in 1949. It was subsequently included in Pathmarks (Wegmarken) in 1967. In a marginal note to the 1949 edition, Heidegger writes: ‘What is said here was not first thought up when this letter was written but is based on the course of a path that was begun in 1936, in the “moment” of an attempt to say the truth of being in a simple manner. The letter continues to speak in the language of metaphysics, and does so knowingly. The other language remains in the background’ (Martin Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, in Pathmarks, ed. Will McNeill, trans. Frank A. Capuzzi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 239. Heidegger, GA, 9:313).
53 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 242; Heidegger, GA, 9:317/149.
54 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 242; Heidegger, GA, 9:317/149.
55 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 243; Heidegger, GA, 9:318/150.
56 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 243; Heidegger, GA, 9:318–19/150.
57 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, p. 271; Heidegger, GA, 9:357/188.
58 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, pp. 241–2; Heidegger, GA, 9:316/148.
59 Heidegger, ‘Letter on Humanism’, pp. 242–3; Heidegger, GA, 9:316–17/148.
60 Adorno, ‘The Actuality of Philosophy’, p. 37; Adorno, GS, 1:342–3.
61 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 108; Adorno, GS, 6:114. See the discussion of this passage in Thomä, ‘Verhältnis zur Ontologie. Adornos Denken des Unbegrifflichen’.
62 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, pp. 8–10; Adorno, GS, 6:20–1.
63 Traub and Wieser (eds) Gespräche mit Ernst Bloch, p. 61. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 313; Adorno, GS, 6:308.
64 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 161; Adorno, GS, 6:164.
65 This ontology may in some ways recall the Kantian view regarding appearances and the thing-in-itself. But Adorno strenuously resists the temptation to relate the ‘more’ to the thing-in-itself. For although the thing-in-itself marks ‘a blind spot in thinking’, it remains ‘arcane and indeterminate’ and an explanatory ‘deus ex machina’ (Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 254; Adorno, GS, 6:251).
66 Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Resignation’, in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 293; Adorno, GS, 10.2:798.
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