Theodor Adorno
The ontologies in Germany, Heidegger’s in particular, remain effective to this day. Traces of the political past are no deterrent. Tacitly, ontology is understood as readiness to sanction a heteronomous order that need not be consciously justified, and that such interpretations are denied in higher places—as misconceptions, declines to the ontical sphere, deficient radicalism in formulating the question—serves but to enhance the dignity of their appeal. Ontology seems the more numinous the less it can be laid down in definite contents that would give the meddlesome intellect something to latch on to. Intangibility comes to be unassailability. He who refuses to follow suit is suspect, a fellow without a spiritual fatherland, without a home in Being—not so much different from the “baseness” for which the idealists Fichte and Schelling used to excoriate resisters to their metaphysics. In all its embattled trends, which mutually exclude each other as false versions, ontology is apologetical. Yet its effect would be unintelligible if it did not meet an emphatic need, a sign of something missed, a longing that Kant’s verdict on a knowledge of the Absolute should not be the end of the matter.
The need was crudely but openly manifest in the early days of the neo-ontological movements, when theological sympathizers would talk of the resurrection of metaphysics. There was a touch of it in Husserl’s will to replace the intentio obliqua with the intentio recta; what had delimited the cognitive possibilities in the critique of reason was nothing but the recollection of the cognitive powers themselves, a recollection which the phenomenological platform initially meant to dispense with. Plainly stirring in the “draft” of the ontological constitution of topical fields and regions, and finally of the “world as the entirety of all there is,” was the will to grasp the whole without any limits being placed on its cognition. Husserl’s εἴδη—later turned into “existentialia” by the Heidegger of Being and Time—were to anticipate encompassingly what those regions were, up to the highest. The implication behind them was that rational drafts might pre-design the structure of all the abundance of Being. It was a second reprise of the old philosophies of the Absolute, their first reprise having been post-Kantian idealism.
Yet the critical trend remained at work at the same time, though not so much as counter to dogmatic concepts. It continued as an effort in which the absolutes, now deprived of their systematic unity and delimited from each other, would no longer be posited or construed but received, accepted, and described in a posture following the lines of the positivistic scientific ideal. Once again, as for Schelling, absolute knowledge became intellectual visuality. One hoped to delete the transmissions instead of reflecting them. The nonconformist motive that philosophy need not resign itself within the bounds of an organized, usable science recoiled into conformism. The categorial structure that had been uncritically accepted as such, as the skeleton of extant conditions, was confirmed as absolute, and the unreflective immediacy of the method lent itself to any kind of license. The critique of criticism became pre-critical. Hence the mental posture of a permanent “back to.” The Absolute became what it would least like to be, and what critical truth does call it: a matter of natural history that would quickly and crudely provide the norm of adjustment.
In comparison, the idealistic academic philosophy denied what will be expected of philosophy by anyone who goes in for it unprepared. That was the reverse of its Kant-enforced scientific self-responsibility. The awareness that a philosophy carried on as a specialty no longer has anything to do with people—with the people it trains to stop asking, as futile, the only questions for whose sake they turn to it—this awareness was already stirring in German idealism; it was voiced without professional discretion by Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche challenged any kind of accord with academicism. But what the present ontologies have done under this aspect is not simply to adopt the antiacademic philosophical tradition by asking, as Paul Tillich phrased it once, about that which concerns one absolutely. They have taken the nonacademic pathos and established it academically. They combined a pleasant shudder at the world’s imminent end with a soothing sense of operating on solid ground, perhaps even on philologically fortified ground. Audacity, ever the prerogative of youth, knew itself covered by general agreement and by the most powerful educational institution. The movement as a whole became the opposite of what its germs seemed to promise: the treatment of relevant things relapsed into an abstractness unsurpassed by any neo-Kantian methodology.
This development is inseparable from the problematics of the ontological need itself. It can no more be quenched by that sort of philosophy than it could once be quenched by the transcendental system. This is why ontology has become shrouded in vapors. In line with an older German tradition, it puts the question above the answer; where it keeps owing what it promised, it has consolingly raised failure as such to existential rank. The weight of questions in philosophy differs indeed from the weight they have in special sciences, where the solution of questions removes them, while in philosophical history their rhythm would be more that of duration and oblivion. But this does not mean that—as some keep parroting Kierkegaard—the truth lies in the questioner’s existence, in his mere futile search for an answer. Rather, in philosophy the authentic question will somehow almost always include its answer. Unlike science, philosophy knows no fixed sequence of question and answer. Its question must be shaped by its experience, so as to catch up with the experience. Its answers are not given, not made, not generated: they are the recoil of the unfolded, transparent question.
This is precisely what idealism would drown out in its constant endeavor to produce, to “deduce,” its own form and, if possible, its every content. But thought does not preserve itself as an origin, and it ought not to hide the fact that it does not generate—that it merely returns what it already has as experience. The expressive moment in thought keeps it from proceeding more mathematico and serving up problems followed by pseudo-solutions. In philosophy, words like “problem” and “solution” have a mendacious ring because they postulate the thought’s independence from thinking precisely where thinking and the thought transmit each other. Only the truth can really be philosophically understood. Our fulfilling concurrence in the judgment in which we understand something is the same as a decision about True or False. If we do not personally judge the stringency or nonstringency of a theorem, we do not understand it. The theorem’s claim of such stringency is its own content of meaning, the very thing that is to be understood.
This distinguishes the relation of understanding and judgment from the usual order of time. The fact that we can no more understand without judging than we can judge without understanding invalidates the schema that the solution is the judgment and the problem is only the question, based on understanding. What is transmitted here is the fiber of the socalled philosophical demonstration, a mode of proof that contrasts with the mathematical model. And yet that model does not simply disappear, for the stringency of a philosophical thought requires its mode of proceeding to be measured by the forms of inference. Philosophical proof is the effort to give statements a binding quality by making them commensurable with the means of discursive thinking. But it does not purely follow from that thinking: the critical reflection of such cogitative productivity is itself a philosophical content.
In Hegel’s case, despite the extreme enhancement of his claim to derive the nonidentical from identity, the thought structure of the great Logic implies the solutions in the way the problems are put, instead of presenting results after striking a balance. While Hegel’s critique of analytical judgments is exacerbated to the thesis of their “falseness,” everything is to him an analytical judgment, a turning to and fro of the thought without citation of anything extraneous to it. It is a moment of dialectics that the new is the old, and otherness is familiarity. The connection of that moment with the identity thesis is evident, but it is not circumscribed by the thesis. Paradoxically, the more a philosophical thought yields to its experience, the closer its approach to an analytical judgment. To grow fully aware of a desideratum of cognition is mostly to achieve the cognition itself; this is the counterpart of the idealistic principle of perpetual production. That it is by no means the Absolute is asserted in philosophy by doing without the traditional machinery of proof, by accentuating a knowledge that is known already.
The ontological need can no more guarantee its object than the agony of the starving assures them of food. But no doubts of such guarantees plague a philosophical movement once destined for better things; it was for this reason as much as for any other that it became untruthfully affirmative. “Dimming the world never takes us to the light of Being.”1 In the categories to which fundamental ontology owes its echo—and which it therefore either denies or sublimates until they will no longer serve for any unwelcome confrontation—we can read how much they are the imprints of something missing that is not to be produced, how much they are its complementary ideology. Yet the cult of Being, or at least the attraction of the word as of something superior, lives by the fact that in reality, as once upon a time in epistemology, concepts denoting function have more and more replaced the concepts denoting substance. Society has become the total functional context which liberalism used to think it was: to be is to be relative to other persons and things, and to be irrelevant in oneself. This frightening fact, this dawning awareness that it may be losing its substantiality, prepares the subject to listen to avowals that its unarticulated being—equated with that substantiality—cannot be lost, that it will survive the functional context.
What the conjurers of ontological philosophizing strive, as it were, to awaken is undermined by real processes, however: by the production and reproduction of social life. The effort to justify “man” and “being” and “time” theoretically, as primal phenomena, cannot stay the fate of the resurrected ideas. Concepts whose substrate is historically at an end have always been duly criticized as dogmatic hypostases, even in the specifically philosophical realm—as Kant, for example, criticized the transcendence of the empirical soul, the aura of the word Dasein, in his chapter on paralogisms, and the immediate recourse to Being in his chapter on the amphiboly of reflexive concepts. But the exponents of the new ontology do not make that Kantian critique their own. They do not carry it forward by reflection. Instead, they act as if that critique belonged to a rationalistic consciousness of whose flaws genuine thought had to be cleansed as in a ritual bath.
Despite this, trying to hitch their wagon to critical philosophy as well, they directly impute to this philosophy an ontological content. Heidegger’s reading of the anti-subjectivist and “transcending” element in Kant was not quite unwarranted: in the Preface to the Critique of Pure Reason Kant does programmatically stress his objective way to pose questions, and leaves no doubt of it as he performs the deduction of pure intellectual concepts. The Copernican turn registered in conventional philosophical history does not exhaust him; the objective interest retains primacy over the subjective interest in the mere occurrence of cognition, in a dismembering of consciousness in empiricist style. By no means, however, can we equate this objective interest with a hidden ontology. Arguing against such an equation is not only Kant’s critique of rationalist ontology—which might allow for the conception of another, if need be—but the train of thought of the critique of reason itself. Following this train of thought, we find that objectivity, the objectivity of knowledge as well as that of the totality of all things known, is subjectively transmitted. It allows us to assume an “in itself” beyond the subject-object polarity, but it intentionally leaves this assumption so indefinite that no sort of interpretation whatsoever would be able to extract an ontology from it. If Kant meant to rescue that kosmos noetikos which the turn to the subject was attacking, and if, therefore, there is an ontological element in his work, it is still an element, and not the central one. His philosophy is an attempt to accomplish the rescue by means of that which menaces what he would save.
A fact supporting the objectivistic resuscitation of ontology would indeed be the least compatible with its idea: the fact that to a great extent the subject came to be an ideology, a screen for society’s objective functional context and a palliative for the subjects’ suffering under society. In this sense—and not just today—the not-I has moved drastically ahead of the I. In Heidegger’s philosophy the fact is detoured but registered; in his hands that historical primacy becomes an ontological precedence of “Being” pure and simple over all ontical and real things. He prudently refrained from reversing the Copernican turn, the turn to the idea, in plain view of all. He zealously set off his version of ontology from objectivism, and his anti-idealistic stand from realism, whether critical or naïve.2 Unquestionably, the ontological need could not be planed down to an anti-idealism along the battle lines of academic debate. And yet, of all the impulses given by that need the most enduring may have been the disavowal of idealism.
The anthropocentric sense of life has been shaken. The subject in its philosophical self-reflection has, so to speak, made the centuries-old critique of geocentrism its own. This motive is more than a matter of weltanschauung, however easy it was to exploit as a weltanschauung. Extravagant syntheses between developments in philosophy and in the natural science are odious, of course; they ignore the increasingly independent language of physical-mathematical formulas, a language that has long ceased to be retrievable into visuality or any other categories directly commensurable to the consciousness of man. And yet, the results of recent cosmology have radiated far and wide. All notions to make the universe resemble the subject, if not indeed to derive it as positing the subject, have been relegated to a naïveté comparable to that of Boeotians or paranoiacs who regard their hamlet as the center of the world. The ground of philosophical idealism, the control of nature, has lost the certainty of its omnipotence precisely because of its immense expansion during the first half of the twentieth century; also because human consciousness has limped behind, leaving the order of human affairs irrational, and finally because it took the magnitude of the attainments to let us measure their infinitesimality in comparison with the unattainable. There is a universal feeling, a universal fear, that our progress in controlling nature may increasingly help to weave the very calamity it is supposed to protect us from, that it may be weaving that second nature into which society has rankly grown.
Ontology and the philosophy of Being are modes of reaction in which—along with other and cruder modes—consciousness hopes to escape from that entanglement. But they contain a fatal dialectics. The truth that expels man from the center of creation and reminds him of his impotence—this same truth will, as a subjective mode of conduct, confirm the sense of impotence, cause men to identify with it, and thus reinforce the spell of the second nature. Faith in Being, a dim weltanschauung derived from critical premonitions, really degenerates into a bondage to Being, as Heidegger incautiously defined it once. Feeling face to face with the cosmos, the believer clings without much ado to any kind of particular, if only it is forceful enough in convicting the subject of its weakness. The subjects’ readiness to cringe before the calamity that springs from the subjective context itself is the punishment for their futile wish to fly the prison of their subjectivity. The philosophical leap, the primal gesture of Kierkegaard, is the very license from which the subject dreams it may escape by its submission to Being.
The spell is diminished only where the subject, in Hegel’s language, is “involved”; it is perpetuated in whatever would be the subject’s downright otherness, just as the deus absconditus always carried some of the irrational features of mythical deities. The corny exoticism of such decorative world views as the astonishingly consumable Zen Buddhist one casts light upon today’s restorative philosophies. Like Zen, they simulate a thinking posture which the history stored in the subjects makes impossible to assume. Restricting the mind to thoughts open and attainable at the historical stage of its experience is an element of freedom; non-conceptual vagary represents the opposite of freedom. Doctrines which heedlessly run off from the subject to the universe, along with the philosophy of Being, are more easily brought into accord with the world’s hardened condition and with the chances of success in it than is the tiniest bit of self-reflection by a subject pondering upon itself and its real captivity.
The popular success of ontology feeds on an illusion: that the state of the intentio recta might simply be chosen by a consciousness full of nominalist and subjectivist sediments, a consciousness which self-reflection alone has made what it is. Heidegger, of course, saw through this illusion. He circumvents the alternative by way of the doctrine of Being that prevails beyond intentio recta and intentio obliqua, beyond subject and object, beyond concept and entity. Being is the supreme concept—for on the lips of him who says “Being” is the word, not Being itself— and yet it is said to be privileged above all conceptuality, by virtue of moments which the thinker thinks along with the word “Being” and which the abstractly obtained significative unity of the concept does not exhaust.
Presupposed by the talk of Being—though no longer referred to by the mature Heidegger, at least—is Husserl’s doctrine of categorial visuality or essence perception. It is solely by such perception that the structure which Heidegger’s philosophy ascribes to Being could, in the terminology of the school, be “unsealed” or “unveiled”; Heidegger’s emphatic Being would be the ideal of what yields to ideation. The critique that lies in Husserl’s doctrine—of a classifying logic as the significative unity of whatever the concept covers—remains in force. But Husserl wished to have his cake and eat it too: he kept his philosophy within the bounds of the division of labor and left the concept of strict science alone until his late phase, despite all of the so-called “foundation questions,” and yet he sought to apply the strict rules of the scientific game to whatever critique of these rules has its own meaning. What his explicitly propounded method sought to do to classifying concepts, by the mode of their cognitive ascertainment, was to imbue them with that which as classification, as the mere arrangement of given things, they cannot have—to imbue them with what they would have only by grasping the thing itself, which in Husserl’s case oscillates between an intramental thing and one contrary to the immanence of consciousness. Husserl cannot, as was customary in his lifetime, be accused of irrationalism on the ground that his categorial vision is unscientific; his work as a whole is a stand against irrationalism. But what can be held against his work is its contamination with science.
Heidegger noticed this and took the step Husserl shrank from. However, in doing so he discarded the rational moment which Husserl preserved, and—more like Bergson in this respect—he tacitly followed a procedure in which the relation to the discursive concept, an inalienable element of thought, was sacrificed. At the same time he covered Bergson’s weakness, his juxtaposition of two disconnected, disparate modes of cognition: Heidegger, mobilizing the alleged higher dignity of the part of categorial vision, removes the epistemological-critical question as pre-ontological, along with the question whether that part is legitimate. Discontent with the preliminary epistemological question comes to justify its outright elimination; dogmatics simply turns into a higher truth, as against the traditional critique of dogmatics. This is the root of Heidegger’s archaicism. The ambiguity of the Greek words for “being”—an ambiguity that dates back to the Ionians’ failure to distinguish between materials, principles, and the pure essence—is not listed as a defect but as original superiority. Its mission is to heal the concept “Being” of the wound of its conceptuality, of the split between thoughts and their content.
What appears as if it were located in the eon before the Fall, however—the Fall of both subjectifying and objectifying metaphysics—will turn, contre coeur, into a stark “in itself.” A self-denying subjectivity recoils into objectivism. No matter how painstakingly such thinking shuns the criticist controversy by adding the two antithetical positions alike to the loss of Being, the sublimation of its concepts will be a ceaseless continuance of Husserl’s reductions. What is meant by Being is stripped as much of all individuated existence as of all traces of rational abstraction. This Being ends up in a tautology from which the subject has been evicted: “But Being—what is Being? It is Itself.”3 There is no way for Being to avoid the tautology, and we do not improve it if with prudent candor we opt for it and pronounce it a pledge of profundity.
Intentionally or not, every judgment—even an analytical one, as shown by Hegel—carries with it the claim to predicate something that is not simply identical with the mere concept of the subject. If it ignores this requirement, the judgment breaks the contract it has previously signed by its form. But the concept of Being as handled by the new ontology cannot help breaking that contract. In this ontology, Being must be defined by itself alone because it is held to be neither comprehensible in concepts—in other words, neither “transmitted”—nor immediately demonstrable after the model of sensory ascertainment. In lieu of any critical authority for Being we get a reiteration of the mere name. The residue, the supposedly undisfigured essence,4 is like an ἀρχή of the type which the motivated thought movement had to reject.
As Heidegger once pointed out against Sartre,5 a philosophy’s denial that it is metaphysics does not settle the question whether or not it is, but it does justify the suspicion that untruth may hide in the refusal to admit its metaphysical content. A new beginning at an alleged zero point is the mask of strenuous forgetfulness—an effort to which sympathy with barbarism is not extraneous. The decay of the older ontologies, of the scholastic ones as well as of their rationalistic successors, was not a contingent change in weltanschauung or thinking style; to believe in that change is the same historical relativism to which the ontological need used to take exception. No sympathy with Plato’s enthusiasm as against Aristotle’s touch of resignation to the special sciences can refute the objection that the doctrine of ideas duplicates the world of things; no plea for the blessings of order will remove the difficulties caused in Aristotelian metaphysics by the relation of τόδε τι and πρώτη οὐσία. These difficulties spring from the disjoint definitions of Being and entity, which the new ontology resolutely and naively restores. Nor would the demand, however legitimate, for objective reason alone enable us to think Kant’s critique of the ontological argument for God out of existence. Compared with hylozoism, the Eleatic turn to the presently glorified concept of Being was already a sort of Enlightenment, something less appreciated by Heidegger. But to wipe this all out by regressing to sacred primordiality, behind the reflection of critical thought—this intention would solely circumvent philosophical compulsions which, once understood, barred the quenching of the ontological need. The will not to accept evasions, the will to learn essential things from philosophy, is deformed by answers tailored to the need, by answers that lie in twilight between the legitimate duty to provide bread, not stones, and the illegitimate conviction that there must be bread because it must be.
That a philosophy based on the primacy of method will acquiesce in so-called preliminary questions—and that, therefore, it may possibly even feel secure as a basic science—serves only to deceive us about the fact that the preliminary questions and philosophy itself have virtually no cognitive consequences any more. Reflections on the instrument of scientific knowledge have long ceased to touch its substance; they only touch upon what may be cognoscible at all, on the validity of scientific judgments. To such reflection, any definite knowledge is subaltern, a mere constitutum. While resting its claims on its immersion in the general constitution of knowledge, the reflection leaves knowledge indifferent.
The first formula to express this was Kant’s famous line that the “transcendental idealist” is an “empirical realist.”6 Admirers of the critic of pure reason, and of his attempt to find reasons for experience, were deaf to this admission of bankruptcy: that the immeasurable strain of that critique was ἀδιάφορον with respect to the content of experience. Encouraged are only the normally functioning intellect and the corresponding view of reality— Heidegger, by the way, still opts for the “normally thinking human being.”7 Few of the intramundane views and judgments of common sense are withdrawn from circulation. “What Kant wished to prove, in a way that would offend ‘all the world,’ was that ‘all the world’ was right—this was that soul’s secret joke. He wrote against the scholars and in favor of the prejudices of the people, but he wrote for scholars, and not for the people.”8 Defeatism paralyzes the specifically philosophical impulse to blast a hidden truth out from behind the idols of conventional consciousness. The chapter on amphibolies mocks the brazen desire to know the inside of things, and this self-satisfied, manly resignation of a philosophy settling down in the external mundus sensibilis is not just the Enlightenment’s No to a metaphysics that confuses the concept with its own reality; it is also the obscurantist No to every refusal to capitulate to the façade.
Surviving in the ontological need is some remembrance of this greatest virtue, which critical philosophy did not so much forget as zealously eliminate in honor of the science it sought to establish— a remembrance of the will not to let thoughts be robbed of that for the sake of which men think them. Since the sciences’ irrevocable farewell to idealistic philosophy, the successful sciences are no longer seeking to legitimize themselves otherwise than by a statement of their method. Their self-exegesis makes a causa sui of science. It accepts itself as given and thereby sanctions also its currently existing form, its division of labor, although in the long run the insufficiency of that form cannot be concealed. The intellectual sciences in particular, due to their borrowed ideal of positivity, lapse into the irrelevance and nonconceptuality of countless special investigations. The cuts between special disciplines such as sociology, economics, and history make the cognitive interest vanish in pedantically drawn, inflatedly defended trenches.
Ontology recalls this, but it has become cautious enough not to try to breathe the essence into the thing by speculative thinking. The essence is to spring forth like something given, rather, in tribute to the rules of positivity, which the need would transcend. Some initiates of science expect it to be decisively supplemented by ontology without their having to touch the scientific procedures. If Heidegger, in the later phase of his philosophy, claims to rise above the traditional distinction of essence and fact, he is reflecting a justified irritation at the divergence of essential and factual sciences, of mathematical-logical and substantive disciplines, which in scientific activity thrive side by side, disconnected, although the cognitive ideal of one group would be irreconcilable with that of the other.
But the antagonism between exclusive scientific criteria and the absolute claim of a doctrine of essence—or, later, of Being—will not vanish at the doctrine’s bidding. The doctrine opposes its counterpart abstractly, displaying the same flaws of a labor-dividing consciousness which it pretends to cure. What it enlists against science is not scientific self-reflection, nor, as some seem to think, is it something qualitatively different whose necessary motion would superimpose it on science. According to the old parable Hegel used against Schelling, the doctrine comes out of a gun: it is an addition to science, a summary disposal that effects no valid change in science itself.
The doctrine’s noble turn away from science finally serves only to confirm the universal rule of science, not unlike the way irrationalist slogans under fascism served as a counterpoint to scientinc-technological activities. To pass from a critique of the sciences to their essential concerns—as to Being—is to disregard in turn whatever might be of the essence in the sciences; it is a move that robs those in need of ontology of what ontology appears to give them. With a detachment from all things substantive that is more anxious than Kant’s ever was, ontological philosophizing permits less unregimented insight than Schelling’s idealism, or even Hegel’s. Especially tabooed as heterodoxy, as dealing with mere entity and μετάβασις εἰς ἀλλο γένος, is social consciousness, which precisely in the ontologies of Antiquity was inseparable from the philosophical one. In his hermeneutics, Heidegger adopts the turn against epistemology which Hegel inaugurated in the Preface to Phenomenology of the Mind.9 But the reservations of transcendental philosophy against a substantive philosophy that forbids substance to cross its threshold as merely empirical—these reservations survive, for all protestations to the contrary, in Heidegger’s program to distinguish Being from entity and to explicate Being itself.10
Not the last reason for the aloofness of fundamental ontology is that an ideal of the “purity” of Being in contrast to entity—an ideal derived from the methodologization of philosophy, with Husserl as the last connecting link—will be maintained, and yet philosophizing will go on as though about matters of substance. This habitude and that purity could be reconciled only in a realm that blurs all definite distinctions, indeed every content. Scared by Scheler’s weaknesses, Heidegger refuses to have the prima philosophia crassly compromised by the contingency of material things, by the transciency of the eternities of the moment. But neither will he do without the concretion originally promised by the word existence.* The distinction of concept and matter is called the original sin while it perpetuates itself in the pathos of Being.
Not to be underestimated among the many functions of Being is that, while flaunting its higher worth against entity, it simultaneously carries with it the memory of the entity from which it wants to be set off, as a memory of something precedent to differ entiation and antagonism. The lure of Being is as eloquent as the rustle of leaves in the wind of bad poems. But what that rustle praises will slide out of reach rather harmlessly, while in philosophy it is insisted on like a possession over which the thought that thinks it has no power. Dialectics—in which pure particularization and pure generality pass into each other, both equally indistinct—is shrouded in silence and exploited in the doctrine of Being. Indistinctness makes a mythical cuirass.
Heidegger’s philosophy is like a highly developed credit system: one concept borrows from the other. The state of suspense thus created gives an ironic touch to the bearing of a philosophy that feels close enough to the soil to prefer the Germanic “thinking” to the foreign word “philosophy.” The debtor, says a faded joke, has it all over the creditor, who must depend upon the debtor’s will to pay—and so, for Heidegger, blessings flow from everything he owes. That Being is neither a fact nor a concept exempts it from criticism. Whatever a critic would pick on can be dismissed as a misconception. The concept borrows from the factual realm an air of solid abundance, of something not just cogitatively and unsolidly made—an air of being “in itself.” From the mind which synthesizes it, entity borrows the aura of being more than factual: the sanctity of transcendence. And this very structure hypostatizes itself as superior to the reflective intellect, which is accused of dissecting entity and concept with a scalpel.
The very meagerness of what all this leaves in Heidegger’s hands is recoined into an advantage. One of the invariants that pervade his philosophy (though never called invariants, of course) is that each substantive deficiency, each absence of a cognition, will be revalued into a sign of profundity. Involuntary abstractness is presented as a voluntary vow. “Thinking,” it says in the tract on Plato’s doctrine of truth, “is on its descent to the poverty of its provisional essence”11—as if the emptiness of the concept of Being were the fruit of original monastic chastity, not of conditioning by cogitative aporias. And yet, this Being which is supposed to be no concept at all, or at least a very special concept, is the aporetical concept pure and simple.12 It transforms that which is more abstract into that which is more concrete and thus more true. Heidegger’s own language confesses, in phrasings that are more critical of him than the most malevolent critic, what his asceticism is about: “Thinking, by its saying, lays unobtrusive furrows into the language. They are even less obtrusive than the furrows drawn through the field by the slow-gaited yeoman.”13
Despite such affectations of humility, not even theological risks will be taken. The attributes of Being do indeed, like those of the absolute idea of old, resemble the traditional attributes of the deity; but the philosophy of Being bewares of divine existence. The whole, however archaicist, is not to be an admission of being unmodern. Instead, it participates in modernity as an alibi of entity—of that to which Being transcended, but which is to be sheltered in Being just the same.
Since Schelling, substantive philosophizing has been based on the thesis of identity. Unless the essence of entity, and ultimately entity itself, was a mental element reducible to subjectivity—unless concept and thing were identical on the superior level of the mind— there was no chance to proceed according to Fichte’s maxim that the a priori is at the same time the a posteriori. Yet the judgment which history passed on the identity thesis upsets Heidegger’s conception also. To his phenomenological maxim that the thought must bow to what is given or, finally, “sent” to it (as if the thought could not penetrate the conditions of such sending) the possibility of construction, of the speculative concept that was ingrained in the identity thesis, is taboo. Husserl’s phenomenology already suffered from a desire to transcend epistemology under the slogan “Back to things.” Husserl expressly described his doctrine as nonepistemological,** as Heidegger later called his own doctrine nonmetaphysical; but the thought of passing into subject-matter was more chilling to Husserl than to any neo-Kantian of the University of Marburg who might find the infinitesimal method helpful in such a passage.
Heidegger, like Husserl, sacrifices empiricism and ascribes to the unphilosophical factual sciences whatever would not be eidetic phenomenology, in Husserl’s language. But Heidegger extends the proscription even to Husserl’s εἴδη, those supreme, fact-free, conceptual units of a factuality with which traces of subject-matter are commingled. Being is the contraction of essences. Ontology’s own consistency takes it to a no man’s land. It must eliminate each a posteriori; it is not supposed to be logic either, in the sense of a doctrine of thought and a particular discipline; each thinking step would necessarily take ontology beyond the only point where it may hope to be sufficient unto itself. In the end, there is hardly anything it would dare aver any longer, not even about Being. What shows in this ontology is not so much mystical meditation as the distress of a thinking that seeks its otherness and cannot make a move without fearing to lose what it claims. Tendentially, philosophy becomes a ritualistic posture. Yet there is a truth stirring in that posture as well: the truth of philosophy falling silent.
The historic innervation of realism as a mode of mental conduct is not foreign to the philosophy of Being. Realism seeks to breach the walls which thought has built around itself, to pierce the interjected layer of subjective positions that have become a second nature. There are vibrations of this in Husserl’s program, and Heidegger agreed with it.14 The performance of the subject, which establishes idealistic cognition, has the irritating quality of a dispensable ornament after idealism has declined. In this respect fundamental ontology remains, like phenomenology, an involuntary heir to positivism.15 Heidegger’s realism turns a somersault: his aim is to philosophize formlessly, so to speak, purely on the ground of things, with the result that things evaporate for him. Weary of the subjective jail of cognition, he becomes convinced that what is transcendent to subjectivity is immediate for subjectivity, without being conceptually stained by subjectivity. In analogy to such romantic currents as the later “Jugendbewegung,” fundamental ontology mistakes its protest against the confining and dimming subjective element for anti-romanticism; it wants to conquer subjectivity by belligerent speech, from which Heidegger does not shrink either.16
Since the transmissions of our subjectivity cannot be thought out of the world, we want to return to stages of consciousness that lie before the reflection upon subjectivity and transmission. This effort fails. When we believe we are, so to speak, subjectlessly clinging to the phenomenality of things, are original and neorealistic and at the same time doing justice to the material, we are in fact eliminating all definitions from OUT thought, as Kant once eliminated them from the transcendent thing-in-itself. Definitions would be equally offensive to us as works of mere subjective reason and as descendants of a particular entity. Contradictory desiderata collide and destroy one another. Because we are neither to think speculatively, to have any thoughts that posit anything whatever, nor the other way round to admit an entity—a bit of the world, which would compromise the precedence of Being—we really dare not think anything but a complete vacuum, a capital X far emptier than the ancient transcendental subject which always carried “egoity,” the memory of a consciousness in being, as its unit of consciousness.
This new X, absolutely ineffable and removed from all predicates, becomes the ens realissimum under the name of Being. In the inevitability of aporetical concept formation the philosophy of Being becomes the unwilling victim of Hegel’s judgment about Being: it is indistinguishably one with nothingness. Heidegger did not deceive himself about this. But what should be held against existential ontology17 is not the nihilism which the left-wing Existentialists later interpreted into it, to its own horror; to be held against that ontology is its positive presentation of the downright nihility of its supreme word.
No matter how nondimensional we may make Being, how we may compress it into a point by the permanent exercise of caution in both directions, the procedure does have its fundamentum in re. Categorial vision, the growing awareness of a concept, reminds us that categorially constituted facts, which traditional epistemology knew as syntheses only, must always have a corresponding moment beyond the sensory ὕλη. They always have something immediate about them, something resembling visuality. A simple mathematical theorem would not apply without the synthesis of the figures between which the equation is set up, and neither—this is what Kant neglects—would a synthesis be possible if the relation of elements were not in line with this synthesis, regardless of the trouble in which such a manner of speaking entangles us, according to current logic.
To put it drastically, in a way that invites misunderstanding: there could be no synthesis if the two sides of the equation were not actually alike. To talk sensibly about this link apart from the cogitative synthesis is no more possible than a rational synthesis could be without that correspondence. It is a classic case of “transmission,” as suggested by the fact that in reflection we waver whether thought is an activity or whether the very strain of it does not make it a self-adjustment, rather.
Inseparably therefrom, spontaneous thoughts are phenomena. Heidegger’s stress on their phenomenal aspect against its total reduction to thought would be a salutary corrective of idealism. But his procedure is to isolate the factual moment, to conceive it, in Hegel’s terminology, as abstractly as idealism conceives the synthetic moment. Hypostatized, it ceases to be a moment and comes to be what ontology in its protest against the split between concept and entity would least like it to be: it becomes a thing. And yet, its own character is genetical. The mental objectivity which Hegel taught, that product of the historic process, allows something like a visual relation to things of the mind, as some idealists (the late Rickert, for instance) were to rediscover. The more intensely our consciousness feels assured of such an evolved objectivity of the mental sphere—instead of attributing it as a “projection” to the contemplating subject—the closer its approach to a binding physiognomy of the mind. To a thinking which does not draw all definitions to its side, which does not disqualify its vis-à-vis, structures of the mind turn into a second immediacy.
This is what the doctrine of categorial vision too naïvely relies upon: it confuses that second immediacy with a first immediacy. Hegel’s logic of essences went much farther; it treated the essence equally as grown out of Being and as independent of Being, as a kind of Dasein. By the demand which Husserl set forth and Heidegger tacitly adopted, on the other hand, that mental facts be purely described—that they be accepted as what they claim to be, and as nothing else—by this demand such facts are so dogmatized as if reflecting on things of the mind, re-thinking them, did not turn them into something else. The unhesitant supposition is that thinking, an inalienable activity, can really have an object that will not be made a product by the mere thought. Idealism, already conserved in the concept of the purely mental fact, is thus potentially reshaped into ontology. With the substruction of purely acceptant thought, however, the phenomenological thesis to which the entire school owed its effect broke down: that phenomenology is exploring and describing things rather than thinking them up; that it is not epistemology; in short, that it does not bear the stigma of a reflecting intelligence. Yet Being, the arcanum of fundamental ontology, is nothing but the categorial fact, offered in alleged purity and raised to the supreme formula.
To phenomenological analysis it was long known that there is something receptive about a synthesizing consciousness. What belongs together in a judgment is recognized in examples, not merely in comparisons. The immediacy of insight as such is not deniable, only its hypostasis. Primary clarity about some side of a specific object throws the clearest light upon the species, a light that dissolves the tautology of knowing nothing of the species save its definition. Without the moment of immediate insight, Hegel’s line that the particular is the universal would remain pure avowal. Phenomenology, from Husserl on, has saved that line, albeit at the cost of the reflecting element that complements the line.
Its essence perception, however—the late Heidegger carefully shuns the slogan of the school that made him—involves contradictions that cannot be settled for the sake of peace and quiet, neither in the nominalistic direction nor in the realistic one. On the one hand, ideation has an elective affinity for ideology, for the surreptitious acquisition by indirect things of a directness vested with the authority of absolute, unimpeachable, subjectively evident being-in-itself. On the other hand, essence perception is our word for the physiognomic view of mental facts—a legitimate view because things of the mind are not constituted by the cognitive intentionality of consciousness but are based objectively, far beyond the individual author, on the collective life of the mind, in accordance with its imminent laws.
That mental objectivity corresponds to the moment of direct vision. Pre-shaped in itself, it can be viewed like things of the senses. Only, this view is no more absolute and irrefutable than our view of sensory things. Husserl, without much ado, credits both the physiognomic flash and Kant’s synthetic a priori judgments with scientific necessity and generality; but what categorial vision contributes to—fallibly enough—would be the understanding of the thing itself, not its classification. The ψεῦδος of categorial vision is its dogmatic scientification, not its unscientific nature. Astir beneath the ideating view is the transmission that had congealed in the seeming directness of mentally given things; in this respect, essence perception is close to allegorical consciousness. As the experience of what has come into being in things which supposedly merely are, essence perception would be the almost diametrical opposite of the end it is used for. Rather than a faithful acceptance of Being, it would be its critique; rather than a sense of the thing’s identity with its concept, it would be an awareness of the break between them. What the philosophy of Being boasts about, as if it were the organ of positivity pure and simple, has its truth in negativity.
Heidegger’s stress on Being, which is not to be a mere concept, can be based upon the indissoluble content in judgments, as Husserl previously based himself on the ideal unity of the species. The positional value of such an exemplary consciousness is apt to rise historically. Günther Anders remarked that the more socialized the world, and the more tightly the network of general definitions covers its objects, the greater will be the tendency of individual facts to be direct transparencies of their universals, and the greater the yield a viewer obtains precisely by micrological immersion. This, of course, is a nominalistic kind of fact directly contrary to the ontological intention, although the essence perception may unwittingly have been occasioned by it. If the procedure nonetheless keeps exposing itself to the special-scientific objection, to the long since automatized charge of false or premature generalization, the fault lies not only with thought habits that have long caused men to misuse their scientific ethos, to use the principle of arranging facts modestly from outside as a rationalization of their failure to understand those facts from within. Insofar as the anticipations of the concept, the medium of exemplary thought, are confronted by empirical inquiry with concrete proof that the quasi-direct categorial view of a particular is not universal, the Husserl-Heidegger method—which avoids this test and yet flirts with a scientific language that sounds as if the test were submitted to—stands convicted of its failing.
It is asserted that Being, precedent to each abstraction, is no concept, or at most a qualitatively eminent concept. Ignored in this assertion is the fact that no immediacy—of which Hegel’s Phenomenology already taught that in all its transmissions it keeps reproducing itself—is the whole of cognition. Each immediacy is a moment. No ontological draft can do without absolutizing single, culled-out moments. If cognition is an interaction of the synthetic cogitative function and that which it is to synthesize, with neither independent of the other, the direct insight stipulated by Heidegger as the sole title to a philosophy worthy of Being will not succeed either, unless by the spontaneity of thought which Heidegger disdains. If there were no substantial reflection without immediacy, the immediacy would linger noncommittally and arbitrarily without reflection—without the thinking, distinguishing definition of what is meant by the Being that is alleged to show purely to a passive, nonthinking thought. The decorative sound of the pronouncements about things “unhiding” or “clearing” is due to the fictitious character of the claims. If the alleged primal word cannot be defined and fulfilled in thinking, if it cannot be critically confronted with its aims, the impossibility indicts all talk of Being. It has not been conceived because in the indistinctness it requires it cannot be conceived.
But that the philosophy of Being turns the unworkability into untouchability, that it turns the exemption from the rational process into a transcendence of the reflecting intellect—this is an act of violence as desperate as it is prudent. More resolute than phenomenology, which stops halfway, Heidegger wants to break out of the immanence of consciousness. But his outbreak is an outbreak into the mirror. Blinded to the moment of synthesis in the substrate, he ignores the fact that the mind—which in Heidegger’s adored Eleatic philosophy of Being confessed to identity with Being—is already implied in the meaning of what it presents as the pure selfhood it would be confronting. Objectively, Heidegger’s critique of philosophical tradition comes to run counter to its own promise. This critique tacitly ignores the subjective mind and thus necessarily the material, the factuality which any synthesis acts upon; it feigns a unity and absoluteness of what is articulated in it along these lines; and so it turns into the reverse of “destruction”—of the challenge to disenchant the manmade concepts.
Instead of recognizing human conditions in the concepts, Heidegger’s critique confuses the conditions with the mundus sensibilis. It conserves, by repetition, what it is rising against: the screening thought structures for whose removal its own program calls. On the pretext of bringing to light what underlies them, those structures are once more, imperceptibly, turned into the “in itself” which a reified consciousness makes of them anyway. What pretends to crush fetishes is crushing nothing but the conditions of their recognition as fetishes. The seeming jailbreak terminates in what the flight is from; the Being it flows into is θέσει. As Being, which the mind transmits, is ceded to receptive vision, philosophy converges with a flatly irrationalist view of life.
A sign of irrationality would not by itself be the same as philosophical irrationalism. Irrationality is the scar which the irremovable nonidentity of subject and object leaves on cognition— whose mere form of predicative judgment postulates identity; it is also the hope of withstanding the omnipotence of the subjective concept. Like the concept, however, irrationality itself remains a function of the ratio and an object of its self-criticism: what slips through the net is filtered by the net. The philosophemes of irrationalism too depend on concepts, and thus on a rational element incompatible with them. One of the motives of dialectics is to cope with that which Heidegger evades by usurping a standpoint beyond the difference of subject and object—the difference that shows how inadequate the ratio is to thought. By means of reason, however, such a leap will fail. We cannot, by thinking, assume any position in which that separation of subject and object will directly vanish, for the separation is inherent in each thought; it is inherent in thinking itself. This is why Heidegger’s moment of truth levels off into an irrationalist weltanschauung. Today as in Kant’s time, philosophy demands a rational critique of reason, not its banishment or abolition.
When men are forbidden to think, their thinking sanctions what simply exists. The genuinely critical need of thought to awaken from the cultural phantasmagoria is trapped, channeled, steered into the wrong consciousness. The culture of its environment has broken thought of the habit to ask what all this may be, and to what end; it has enfeebled the question what it all means—a question growing in urgency as fewer people find some such sense self-evident, as it yields more and more to cultural bustle. Enthroned instead is the being-thus-and-not-otherwise of whatever may, as culture, claim to make sense. The weight of existing culture ends all insistence on the reality of its asserted meaning, or on the legitimacy of that meaning. On the other hand, fundamental ontology makes its appearance as spokesman for the pilfered interest, for all that has been “forgotten.” This is not the least of its reasons for being averse to epistemology, which tends to list that interest among the prejudices.
Even so, fundamental ontology cannot annul epistemology at will. The doctrine of Dasein—of subjectivity—as the royal road to ontology resurrects the old subjective inquiry that had been humbled by ontological pathos. The phenomenological method claims to strip the tradition of Western philosophizing of its power, but it is at home in that tradition and well aware of the fact; for its main effect, its seeming originality, it has to thank the strides of obliviousness among the ones it appeals to. Phenomenology is the source of a turn in the question what Being means, or in its traditional variant: “Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?” The question is now ceded to the analyzers of the meaning of a word: “Being.” What this word, or the word “Dasein,” might possibly mean is said to be one with the meaning of Being or Dasein: an immanent cultural component such as the meaning which semanticists decipher in the various languages is treated as if it had escaped from the relativity of products as well as from the senselessness of a mere entity. This is the function of Heidegger’s version of the doctrine of the primacy of language.
That the sense of the word “Being” should be the direct sense of Being is bad equivocation. True, equivoques are not merely imprecise expressions.18 The consonance of words always points to a sameness. The two meanings of “meaning” are entwined. Concepts, instruments of human thought, cannot make sense if sense itself is a negation, if every memory of an objective meaning beyond the mechanisms of concept formation has been expelled from the concepts. Positivism, to which concepts are nothing but accidental, interchangeable tokens, took the consequence and honored truth by extirpating truth. Taking the contrary position, the philosophy of Being does indeed rebuke positivism for the folly of its reason, but the unity of equivoques can be seen only through the veil of their implicit differences. In Heidegger’s talk of “sense” this is discarded. He follows his inclination to hypostasis: findings made in the conditioned sphere have a semblance of unconditionality conferred upon them by the mode of their expression.
What makes this possible is the oscillating character of the word “Being.” If we conceive true Being radically χωρίς from entity, it is identical with its meaning: we need only state the sense of the essence, “Being,” to have the sense of Being itself. We do not notice that in following this schema the attempt to break out of idealism is revoked and the doctrine of Being turned back into one of thought, a doctrine which strips Being of everything other than pure thought. In order to get it to make any sort of sense—now felt by its absence—a compensatory summons goes out to the field which in analytical judgment is set up from the outset as the realm of sense: to the theory of meanings. It is a fact that if concepts are to be concepts at all they must mean something, and this fact serves as a vehicle for the thesis that their ὑποκείμενον, Being itself, must be meaningful because it is not given otherwise than as a concept, a linguistic meaning. That this concept is not to be a concept, that it is supposed to be immediate, rather, shrouds the semantic sense in ontological dignity. “Our talk of ‘Being’ never understands this name in the sense of a species to whose empty generality the historically offered doctrines of entity belong as individual cases. ‘Being’ speaks ever and ever as sent and hence pervaded by tradition.”19 This is the source from which such a philosophy draws its comfort. It is the magnet of fundamental ontology, far beyond its theoretical substance.
Out of the human mind, ontology wants to restore the order shattered by the mind, along with the authority of that order. Its tendency freely to deny freedom shows when the expression Entwurf (draft, design) is traced to the verb werfen (to throw): transsubjective commitment is placed into a subjectively positing act—an all too tangible absurdity which Heidegger could later put down only in dogmatic fashion, when the memory of subjectivity was eliminated from the concept.20 Added to the mythologization of Being as the sphere of “sending”21 was Heidegger’s mythical hubris, his proclamation of the subject’s decree as a plan of supreme authority and his disguise of his own voice as that of Being. Any consciousness that fails to go along was disqualified as “oblivious of Being.”22
Such a claim, such a prescription of order, is in full accord with Heidegger’s thought structure. Its only chance is to do violence to thinking; for the loss that echoes in the corny tremolo of the phrase “obliviousness of Being” was no stroke of fate. It was motivated. The mourned object, a legacy from the early ἀρχαί, dissipated for a consciousness wresting itself from nature. The myth itself showed up as a delusion; delusion alone, and command, can bring it to mind. The self-stylization of Being as a Beyond, a thing beyond the critical concept, is supposed, after all, to give the myth the legal title which heteronomy requires as long as a residue of the Enlightenment survives.
Suffering under that which Heidegger’s philosophy calls “loss of Being” is not merely untrue; else he would scarcely look to Hölderlin for succor. Society’s own concept says that men want their relations to be freely established; but no freedom has been realized in their relations to this day, and society remains as rigid as it is defective. All qualitative moments whose totality might be something like a structure are flattened in the universal barter relationship. The more immense the power of the institutional forms, the more chaotic the life they hem in and deform in their image. The production and reproduction of life, along with whatever the name superstructure covers, are not transparencies of reason—of that reason whose reconciled realization alone would be as one with a nonviolent order, an order worthy of men. The old, nature-spawned orders have either passed away or outlived their legitimacy in the direction of evil. By no means is the course of society anywhere as anarchic as it appears in the accidental and always irrational form of an individual fate. But its objectified legality is the converse of a state of Dasein in which men could live without fear.
This is felt in the ontological drafts. They project it on the victims, the subjects, and they frantically drown out premonitions of objective negativity with their message of order-in-itself, up to the most abstract order, the structure of Being. In place after place the world is set to shift to the horrors of order—not, as apologetic philosophy overtly or covertly complains, to the opposite. That freedom has largely remained an ideology; that men are powerless against the system, cannot rationally determine their lives and the life of the whole, cannot even think of such a determination without adding to their torment—this is what forces their rebellion into the wrong, invidious form of preferring the bad to a semblance of the better. And this is what the up-to-date philosophies are glad to toil for. The tragic Hitlerian pose of lonely valor makes them feel already in tune with the dawning order of the most powerful interests. Their posturing as metaphysically homeless and nothingness-bound is ideology, an attempt to justify the very order that drives men to despair and threatens them with physical extinction. The resonance of the resurrected metaphysics is anticipatory consent to an oppression whose potential triumph is inherent in Western society, and which has long triumphed in the East, where the thought of having gained freedom is twisted into unfreedom. Heidegger promotes slave thinking. With the standard gesture against the marketplace of public opinion he spurns the word “humanism,” taking his place in the united front of thunderers against all “isms.” The current talk of humanism is awful enough, but one may well ask whether Heidegger would not end the talk solely because his doctrine would end the matter.
Despite its authoritarian intentions, however, the new ontology, now several experiences richer, will seldom be as frank in its praise of hierarchy as in the days when a disciple of Scheler’s published a treatise on “The Medieval World and We.” The tactics of covering every flank is in harmony with a social phase whose states of dominion are only half-heartedly based on a past stage of society. Those who seize power reckon with the anthropological end products of bourgeois society. They need those products. As the Führer rises above an atomized nation, as he thunders against social prejudice and, to perpetuate himself, will change the guard on occasion, so will the hierarchic leanings from the early days of the ontological renaissance fade out in the omnipotence and solitude of Being.
This too is more than ideology. The anti-relativism that goes back to Husserl’s Prolegomena to Pure Logic, the work that established logical absolutism, blends with an aversion to static, reified thought—an aversion expressed in German idealism and by Marx, but initially neglected by the early Scheler and the first rudiments of the new ontology. Anyway, relativism has gone somewhat out of style. You do not hear so much twaddle about it either. An imperceptible change has taken place in the philosophical need: from a need for substance and solidity it has turned into a need to avoid the spiritual reification which society has carried out and categorically dictated to its members. And the means to avoid this is a metaphysics that condemns such reification, limits it by appealing to an origin we cannot lose, but actually does no more serious harm to reification than ontology does to the scientific bustle.
Of the compromised eternal values nothing remains but trust in the sanctity of Being, the essence before all things. Because in view of Being—which is supposed to be dynamic in itself, to be “happening”—the reified world is contemptibly unintrinsic, it is considered not worth changing, so to speak; the critique of relativism is enhanced to branding the progressive rationality of Western thought, and all subjective reason, as heresy. The affection against the subversive intellect, tried and tested and already rekindled by public opinion, combines with that against material alienation. There has always been an interaction between the two. Heidegger is anti-thing and anti-functional in one. Under no circumstances is Being to be a thing, and yet, as the metaphors keep indicating, it is to be the “ground” and something solid.23 Coming to light in this is the fact that subjectification and reification do not merely diverge. They are correlates. The more knowledge is functionalized and made a product of cognition, the more perfectly will its moment of motion be credited to the subject as its activity, while the object becomes the result of the labor that has congealed in it—a dead thing.
The reduction of the object to pure material, which precedes all subjective synthesis as its necessary condition, sucks the object’s own dynamics out of it: it is disqualified, immobilized, and robbed of whatever would allow motion to be predicated at all. Not in vain did Kant call a class of categories “dynamics.”24 Even devoid of dynamics, however, the material is not flatly immediate. Despite its seeming absolute concreteness it is transmitted by abstraction— impaled, as it were, to begin with. Life becomes polarized, wholly abstract and wholly concrete, although it would be only in the tension between them. The two poles are equally reified, and what is left of the spontaneous subject, the pure apperception, ceases to be a subject; in the hypostatized logicity of a Kantian cogito, detached from any living I, it is covered by the all-controlling rigidity.
Only, in Heidegger’s critique of reification, what originates in reality is placed without much ado upon the shoulders of whichever intellect repeats the cogitative performance—although this intellect itself, along with the world of its experience, is reified by the reality. What the mind does is not the fault of presumptuous irreverence; rather, the mind passes on what it is forced to pass on by the real context in which it is but a moment. It takes untruthfulness to push reification back into Being and into a history of Being, to mourn and consecrate as “fate” what might perhaps be changed by self-reflection and by the action it kindles. The doctrine of Being does indeed—legitimately, insofar as it goes against positivism—hand down the fundament of the entire philosophical history it slanders, notably Kant’s and Hegel’s: the view that the dualisms of within and without, of subject and object, of essence and appearance, of concept and fact, are not absolute. But their reconcilement is projected into the irretrievable origin, and thus dualism itself, the target of the whole conception, is steeled against the reconciling impulse. The dirge about obliviousness of Being sabotages reconcilement; a mythically impervious history of Being, to which hope may cling, denies reconcilement. Its fateful character could and should be dispelled as a context of delusions.
This delusive context extends not only to the ontological drafts, however. It extends equally to the needs which the drafts are to meet, to the needs into which the drafts inexplicitly read something like a warrant for their theses. The need itself—the spiritual no less than the material—is subject to criticism now that even hardboiled naïveté can no longer depend on it that social processes will go directly by supply and demand, and thus by needs. Needs are not invariant and undeducible, and neither do they guarantee their satisfaction. The semblance and the illusion that they must be met wherever they appear can be traced back to the same faulty consciousness. Be they ever so tangible, needs that are heteronomously produced participate in ideology.
Nothing real, of course, can be neatly peeled out of its ideological shell if the critique itself is not to succumb to ideology: to the ideology of a simple natural life. Real needs can objectively be ideologies without entitling us to deny them. For in the needs of even the people who are covered, who are administered, there reacts something in regard to which they are not fully covered— a surplus of their subjective share, which the system has not wholly mastered. Material needs should be respected even in their wrong form, the form caused by overproduction. The ontological need too has its real moment in a state in which men can neither recognize nor admit the rationality, the sense, of the necessity that rules their conduct. The faulty consciousness of their needs aims at things not needed by subjects, human beings who have come of age, and thus it compromises every possible fulfillment.
Added to the faulty consciousness is that it makes us believe in the attainability of unattainable things, complementary to the possibility of meeting needs the fulfillment of which is denied us. At the same time, inverted needs of that sort also spiritualize our unconscious suffering under the material denial. This suffering is as bound to press us to reverse the denial as the need alone will not reverse it. A thought without a need, a thought that wished for nothing, would be like nothing; but a thought based on a need becomes confused if our conception of the need is purely subjective. Needs are conglomerates of truth and falsehood; what would be true is the thought that wants the right thing. If there is any truth to the doctrine that human needs cannot be told by a state of nature, only by the so-called cultural standard, the conditions of social production along with their bad irrationality are also part of that standard. Its irrationality must be ruthlessly criticized against the needs of the mind, the substitute for all that has been withheld.
The new ontology in itself is a substitute: what is promised as lying beyond the idealistic approach remains a latent idealism and a barrier to the incisive critique of idealism. Not only the primitive wish fulfillments which the cultural industry feeds to the masses—who do not really believe in them—are generally substitutes. Delusion is boundless in the field in which the official culture canon deposits its assets, in the supposedly sublime field of philosophy. Its most urgent need today appears to be the need for something solid. This need inspires the ontologies; it is what they adjust to. Its right lies in the will of people to be safe from being buried by a historical dynamics they feel helpless against. The immovable is to conserve the old and condemned. The more hopeless this longing, blocked by the extant forms of society, the more irresistible the trend of desperate self-preservation to a philosophy that is to be both in one: desperate and self-preserving. The invariant frames are made in the image of an omnipresent terror, of the dizziness that overcomes a society threatened by total destruction. If the threat vanished, its positive reversal—itself nothing but its abstract negation—would probably vanish with it.
A more specific need is that for a structure of invariants as a reaction to an idea drafted by conservative culture critics in the nineteenth century and popularized since: that the world has become formless. The idea fed on art-historical theses like the one of an extinguished style-building force; originating in aesthetics, it spread as a view of the whole. The basic assumption of the art historians—that this loss is in fact a loss, and not indeed a powerful step toward unshackling the productive forces—is by no means established. Esthetically revolutionary theoreticians such as Adolf Loos still dared to say so at the beginning of the century;25 it has been forgotten only by the frightened culture critics, oathbound since to the existing culture. The lament about the loss of ordering forms increases with their very power. Institutions are more powerful than ever; they have long since produced something like the neon-lit style of the culture industry, a style that covers the world as the turn to the baroque did once upon a time. The conflict between subjectivity and forms is undiminished, but under the universal rule of forms a consciousness that feels impotent, that has lost confidence in its ability to change the institutions and their mental images, will reverse the conflict into identification with the aggressor.
The lament about a world-wide loss of forms is the arsis to the call for a binding order, which the subject tacitly expects to come heteronomously, from outside. That loss, insofar as its assertion is more than mere ideology, is not the fruit of the subject’s emancipation; it is the fruit of the failure of emancipation. What appears as the formlessness of a Dasein modeled solely after subjective reason is in fact that which enslaves the subjects: the pure principle of being-for-something-else, of being merchandise. For the sake of universal equivalence and comparability this principle depreciates qualitative definitions everywhere; its tendency is to bring all things down to one level. Yet the same merchandise character—the indirect rule of men over other men— consolidates the subjects’ state of tutelage. Their coming of age and their freedom to think qualitatively would go together.
Under the searchlight of modern art, style itself reveals its repressive moments. The need for form that has been borrowed from style fools people about the bad, coercive side of form. If a form does not prove by itself, by its transparent function, that it is entitled to live—if it is merely posited in order that there be form— such a form is untrue and thus inadequate even as a form. The mind which is to be persuaded that it is sheltered in forms is potentially beyond them. The effort so to arrange the world that it would stop obeying formal categories contrary to the most advanced consciousness has failed, and it is only because of this failure that the prevailing consciousness must frantically champion those categories as its own cause. Because the mind cannot wholly repress their inadequacy, however, it opposes the present, starkly visible heteronomy with another heteronomy, whether past or abstract, with values that are viewed as causae sui, and with the phantasm of their reconcilement with the living.
Radical modern art is hated—with restorative conservatism and fascism always in blissful accord—because it reminds us of missed chances, but also because by its sheer existence it reveals the dubiousness of the heteronomous structural ideal. The subjective consciousness of men is socially too enfeebled to burst the invariants it is imprisoned in. Instead, it adapts itself to them while mourning their absence. The reified consciousness is a moment in the totality of the reified world. The ontological need is the metaphysics of that consciousness even when its doctrinal content leads it to exploit the critique of reification that has nowadays become so cheap. The form of invariance as such is the projection of what has congealed in the reified consciousness. Incapable of experiencing things not already contained in the repertory of eversameness, that consciousness recoins immutability into the idea of something eternal—of transcendence.
In a state of unfreedom no one, of course, has a liberated consciousness. But such a consciousness which would have power over itself, which would really be as autonomous as it so far always only pretended to be, would not need to be continually afraid of losing itself to something else—secretly, to the powers that rule it. The need for support, for a supposed substantiality, is not so substantial as its self-righteousness would have it be. It is a sign of the weakness of the I, rather, known to psychologists as a presently typical human impairment. A man no longer oppressed from without and within himself would not be looking for support, perhaps not even for himself. Subjects who managed to save some of their freedom even under heteronomous conditions suffer less of a lack of support than do the unfree, who are only too glad to charge that lack to freedom, as freedom’s fault. If men no longer had to equate themselves with things, they would need neither a superstructure of things nor an invariant picture of themselves, after the model of things.
The doctrine of invariants perpetuates how little has changed; its positivity perpetuates what is bad about it. This is why the ontological need is wrong. It is probably not until after the invariants have fallen that metaphysics would dawn on the horizon. But this consolation does not help much. An idea whose time has come has no time to waste. To wait in the clutch is to go along with the separation of temporality and eternity. The separation is wrong, and yet the answers that would be required are blocked off at the historic hour—hence the antinomical character of all questions aimed at consolation.
* Years ago, Günther Anders already pilloried the pseudo-concreteness of fundamental ontology (“On the Pseudo-Concreteness of Heidegger’s Philosophy,” Philosophical and Phenomenological Research, vol. VIII, Nr. 3, pp. 337ff.). The word “concretion,” most affectively occupied in German philosophy between the two World Wars, was drenched with the spirit of the times. Its magic used the feature of Homer’s nekyia, when Ulysses feeds blood to the shadows to make them speak. Presumably it was not at all as an appeal to roots that “Blood and Soil” was so effective. The ironic undertone that accompanied the formula from the beginning shows a sense of the threadbareness of such archaicism at the finance-capitalistic stage of industrial production. Even Das Schwarze Korps snickered at the old Teutonic beards. Instead, the lure was the semblance of concreteness as non-interchangeability, as nonfungibility. This was the phantasm that rose amidst a world bound for monotony. It was a phantasm because it left the basis of the barter relationship untouched—else the longing ones would have felt even more menaced by what they called equalitarianism, by the capitalist principle of which they were unaware while taxing its opponents with it. Obsession with the concept of concreteness joined with inability to reach it in thought. The conjuring word replaced the thing. Heidegger’s philosophy, of course, exploits even the pseudos of that sort of concretion: because τόδε τι and οὐσία are undistinguishable, he proceeds—as Aristotle projected already—to substitute one for the other, according to requirement and thema probandum. Mere entity becomes nonentity; rid of the stain of being an entity, it is raised up to Being, to its own pure concept. Being, on the other hand, devoid of any content that would restrict it, no longer needs to appear as a concept. It is held to be immediate like οὐσία, in other words, to be concrete. Once isolated absolutely, the two moments have no differentia specifica from each other and become interchangeable. This quid pro quo is a main feature of Heidegger’s philosophy.
** In the phenomenological “fundamental consideration” of Ideas [Ideas—General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, trans. by W.R. Boyce Gibson, London, 1931] Husserl expounds his method as a structure of operations, without deducing it. The arbitrariness he thus concedes— and sought to remove only in his late phase—is inevitable. If it were deduced, the procedure would reveal itself precisely as that “from above” which Husserl did not want, which at all costs he wished to prevent it from being. It would violate his quasi-positivistic “Back to things.” Yet things do by no means compel the phenomenological reductions, which therefore get a touch of being posited at random. In spite of all the preserved “jurisdiction of reason” they lead to irrationalism.
1. Martin Heidegger, Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens, Pfullingen 1954, p. 7. {GA 13}
2. Cf. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, Frankfurt am Main 1949, p. 14—The Essence of Reasons, trans. Terrence Malick, Northwestern University Press, Evanston 1969. {GA 9}
3. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, 2nd ed., Bern 1954, p. 76.—Plato’s Doctrine of Truth, trans. J.Barlow, in Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, Vol. 3, New York 1962. {GA 9}
4. Heidegger, Was heisst Denken? Tübingen 1954, p. 57.—What is Called Thinking? trans. Fred D.Wieck and J.Glenn Gray, Harper & Row, New York 1968. {GA 8}
5. Ibid., p. 72f.
6. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Works IV, p. 233.
7. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, Tübingen 1958, p. 31. {GA 40}—Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Ralph Manheim, Yale University Press, New Haven 1958.
8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Gesammelte Werke, Munich 1924, vol. 12, p. 182.
9. Cf. Heidegger, Holzwege, Frankfurt am Main 1950, p. 121ff. {GA 5}
10. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 6th ed., Tübingen 1949, p. 27.—Being and Time, trans. J. Macquarrie and E.Robinson, Harper & Row, New York 1962.
11. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, p. 119.
12. Cf. Theodor W.Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, Stuttgart 1956, p. 168.
13. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, p. 119.
14. Cf. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 35.
15. Cf. Adorno, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie, p. 135ff.
16. Cf. Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, p. 155.
17. Ibid., p. 154f.
18. Cf. Theodor W.Adorno, Drei Studien zu Hegel, Frankfurt 1963, p. 127ff.
19. Heidegger, Identität und Differenz, 2nd ed., Pfullingen 1957, p. 47—Identity and Difference, trans. Joan Stambaugh, Harper & Row, New York 1969. {GA 11}
20. Heidegger, Platons Lehre von der Wahrheit, p. 84.
21. Ibid., p. 75.
22. Ibid., p. 84.
23. Cf. Heidegger, Vom Wesen des Grundes, pp. 42, 47.
24. Cf. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Works IV, p. 95.
25. Cf. Adolf Loos, Sämtliche Schriften, vol. 1, Vienna and Munich 1962, p. 278 and passim.
Theodor Adorno - The Ontological Need
From Negative Dialectics (1966).
Original PDF.