Negative dialectics and fundamental ontology

Heidegger's philosophical project was an attempt to move beyond neo- Kantian transcendental idealism, without thereby accepting Hegelian ‘speculative identification of subject and object or falling back into subjectivist or objectivist dogmatism' (Jarvis 1998: 201).

Heidegger argues that in modernity, the forgetting of Being took the form of an opposition between res cogitans and res extensa, which transformed the way in which modern humans acted and understood the world. In effect, humanity defined thus became a special kind of super being that had control over all other beings which were subject to technology to extract their resources and store them for later retrieval, which Heidegger terms standing reserve. Of course, this also led to the problem of humans slowly conceiving of themselves as just another kind of entity with particular properties and hence also amenable to conversion into a kind of standing resource, exemplified by the term 'human resources'. Heidegger argued that this problem could be addressed in a number of ways,

Firstly, he suggested that a destruction or dismantling (Destruktion) of the previous history of ontology was a necessary precondition of any new “fundamental ontology” Such an ontology could not be built from scratch. It was inevitably implicated in the forgetting of being from which it sought to wake up.

Heidegger's attention to the question of the transcendence of Being concentrates on this issue, yet he argues that the meaning of Being can only be approached through an analysis of what he calls 'Dasein', the finite temporal character of human beings in their mortal and historical particularity. The ability of Dasein to think the truth of Being - that is, to ask the question of Being - requires the dismantling, both in our thought and in our relations with the world, of the previous ontology within which we are located. Here, the similarities with Adorno's work are clear, although Adorno continues to use the language of subject and object. This is because for Adorno, access to truth is always subjectively and historically mediated, and the subject does not create its object (Jarvis 1998: 202). Adorno argues we are not yet able to think the priority of the object, that is, not to confuse our concepts with the object itself, because to do so requires that we have already developed a critique of the fallacy of the 'constitutive subject' together with the demise of the 'absolutized production which this fallacy both reflects and sustains' (Jarvis 1998: 202). Again, Jarvis supplies a cogent overview of the differences between Heidegger and Adorno, he argues that,

especially important is Adorno's contrast between Heidegger's interest in “historicity” and that of negative dialectics in history. For Adorno Heidegger's insistence on Dasein's historicity repeats the structure of the relation between the question of being and particular entities: historicity is prior to and qualitatively distinct from any merely ontic history. Historicity thus becomes the opposite of what it was supposed to be. It becomes a de facto invariant, because any historical particular is just as far away from “historicity” in general as it is from an invariant “nature” Heidegger's history thus becomes an “epochal history of Being”; for Heidegger, the succeeding ontologies testify to the structuring first principles (archai) of all life in the epochs which they govern. For Adorno, on the other hand, there can be no history of Being without a history of beings.

Adorno claims that Heidegger's philosophy translates the problems of the current social reality into metaphysical questions; in other words, Heidegger ignores that metaphysics is historically and socially located. That is, that 'to speak about the meaning of Being as Heidegger's... attenuated metaphysical philosophy does is to miss the historical materialist conditions which, according to historical materialism, shape existence through and through' (O'Connor 2013: 95). Adorno further argues, ‘the term “Being” means altogether different things to Marx and to Heidegger, and yet there is a common trait: in the ontological doctrine of Being's priority over thought, in the “transcendence” of Being, the materialist echo reverberates from a vast difference. The doctrine of Being turns ideological as it imperceptibly spiritualizes the materialist moment in thought by transposing it into pure functionality beyond any entity - as it removes by magic whatever critique of a false consciousness resides in the materialist concept of being' (Adorno 2004a: 200). In contrast to the dangers of what Adorno identifies as an unacknowledged theologically infused metaphysics in which Heidegger appears to be unable to accommodate the ability for humans to fundamentally alter the world in which they live, Adorno argues that ‘the processes that unfold in the history of domination are not inevitable and they should not, for that reason, be construed to be irreversible' (O'Connor 2013: 100). Indeed, Adorno's work is an attempt to uncover the complex processes that operate under the ‘appearances of a disconnected society' in order, through criticism, that they can be changed.

Adorno's materialism addresses the problem of givenness or immediacy. That is ‘all attempts to get beyond idealism - claims of the type that thought constitutes, shapes, or is identical with, its objects appear to run the opposite risk of claiming access to immediacy, to a transcendence which is just a “given”' (Jarvis 1998: 149).

The lesson which Adorno draws is that whether thinking is really materialist is not decided by how often the word “materialism” is repeated, but by what actually happens in that thinking. Materialist thinking would need to ask how it would be possible to think about that which appears to escape conceptuality. (Jarvis 1998: 150)

We cannot ignore how problematic it is to attempt a metaphysical invoca­tion of an immediate access to transcendence, nor by inventing a new philo­sophical language, rather the language of concept and intuition, subject and object will still need to be used but within a critical approach. Thus, the relation to history is crucially important in a materialist approach that recognizes its social-historical sources which mediate the possibility of meaning. Adorno explains,

If it is the case that no metaphysical thought was ever created which has not been a constellation of elements of experience, then, in the present instance, the seminal experiences of metaphysics are simply diminished by a habit of thought which sublimates them into metaphysical pain and splits them off from the real pain which gave rise to them. (Adorno, quote in O'Connor 2013: 105)

Metaphysics must nonetheless be defended as a space of thinking not reducible to sheer givenness. Indeed, metaphysics needs to be reformulated such that it still 'refer[s] to transcendence as an intramundane or immanent space. What [Adorno's concept of] nonidentity thinking aims at is the particularity of the object. That particularity lies beyond conceptuality - it is analogous to the absolute of traditional metaphysics... but is nonetheless within the space of historical-material reality' (O'Connor 2013: 108).