Ståle Finke
With our modernist commitments and problems, we cannot avoid epistemology. Epistemology represents the ways in which modern subjectivity and our rational, discursive self-conceptions are articulated and defended; it both preserves something authentic about subjectivity and conceals it. This concealment, Adorno thinks, results from a misconception that must be corrected since it neglects the dependence of both subjectivity and meaning on an embodied and finite experience of nature and things.
Adorno’s critique of epistemology also involves rethinking the claims of ontology. Appreciating Kant’s critique of ontology as something that transcends the bounds of possible sense or conceptual intelligibility, Adorno cannot revert to ontological assumptions in the Aristotelian tradition. Yet he does not endorse Kant’s rejection of ontology, which makes intelligibility a mere question of the subject’s conceptually articulated experience and normative self-authorization. Instead, Adorno presents us with a critical self-consciousness which reminds us that nature, our form of life, the lives of other beings, and the nature of things intrinsically evade our discursively articulated experiences and claims.1 In the mature formulations of Negative Dialectics, the conception of ourselves as belonging to a natural life-world also involves acknowledging the problematic status of all ontological claims. We must acknowledge ourselves and our claims as indebted to an affinity with things and other beings which are recognized as finite individuals. An ontological claim to wholeness or completion cannot be defended; we can defend only individual expressions of particularity that invoke the whole without stating it.
A tension exists between epistemology and ontology in Adorno’s thought. This tension cannot be resolved, or even presented coherently, within philosophical systems since experience, and our discursive authorizations of it, are necessarily intertwined with nature. To balance the claims of thought and conceptuality with the unthought ontological assumption of nature’s particularity, Adorno undertakes a critical reading of the premisses of both epistemology and ontology in Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Edmund Husserl; these philosophers lodge a claim to systematic philosophy in the sense of prima philosophia, while simultaneously aiming to overcome the one-sidedness of the modern epistemological tradition. In their critique of epistemology and the philosophy of subjectivity, Kant, Hegel and Husserl implicitly exhibit a sense for what Adorno calls the non-identical. The non-identical, however, is merely a placeholder for several critical intuitions and claims that can be understood only by examining how different philosophies have tried to overcome the non-identity of concepts and things within experience.
In what follows, I shall address Adorno’s arguments against epistemology, and his intention to both overcome and preserve it, by elaborating on the idea of the non-identical. We shall examine this idea in order to make sense of Adorno’s attempt to recover a certain modified ontological claim, a claim for nature, or for individuals and their natural affinities. This reconstruction may rely upon arguments and conceptual resources that were somewhat alien to Adorno – not the least in order to make a case for his contemporary relevance. But, as I hope to make clear, we should not conceive Adorno’s key concepts as fixed or analytically determined theoretical ideas. Instead, we should understand them by taking on the hermeneutic task of reinterpreting – or engaging in dialogue with – the central texts of the philosophical tradition so as to make these texts and Adorno’s ideas our own, while at the same time disowning them, immersing ourselves in their ideas and ambivalent claims.
In the first sections of this chapter, I shall deal with Adorno’s metacritique of epistemology, with his attempt to recover, through a critical reading of Husserl’s phenomenology, a conception of experience and subjectivity that is embedded in a linguistic form of life and practice. Thereafter, I shall turn to Adorno’s epistemic claims for the non-identical, and the way in which this notion turns on a phenomenological sense of things and individual natures. Finally, I shall address his idea of a mimetic language of things – a language that expresses both subject and object, and the affinities between them prior to their conceptual form.
Adorno’s metacritique of epistemology is intrinsically related to his negative dialectics in a way that does not make the former a mere propaedeutic to the latter. Metacritique, as Adorno states, is “nothing other than the confrontation of judgement with the mediations inherent in it” (AE: 153). Epistemology, on the other hand, often takes the form of a philosophy of consciousness or subjectivity where the subject’s “inner givens”, or ideas, are considered fundamental for knowing external objects. But what is mediation in Adorno’s conception of metacritique? And how does it apply to Husserl’s phenomenology?
For Adorno, the foundational project of modern epistemology, which is based on the premisses of a philosophy of a subject that has privileged access to self-evident inner meanings, is untenable. Against this, he argues that the realm of mental representations is itself embedded in contexts of judging and conceptual inferences where subject and object are already interrelated and mediated through linguistic practices. Subjective meaning should be conceived as equiprimordial with intersubjective linguistic practices of expression and justification which provide for the intrinsic correctibility of all meaning and claims to knowledge. This criticism also applies to Husserl’s phenomenology, which fails to acknowledge the importance of the grammatical or language-specific determination of thought when it treats all meaning as equivalent to inner givenness and immediacy. For Adorno, mediation through language entails the mediate character of even the supposedly immediate: “Husserl calls the mediate immediate because he believes in the datum: he wants to detach the mediate . .. from the mere possibility of being fallacious” (HPI: 132).
Now, this criticism might be thought to rest on a misunderstanding of Husserl’s phenomenology and its explicit attempt to avoid the epistemic gap between mind and world, or the separation of experience into inner pictures and outer realities. According to Husserl: “Despite its transcendence, the spatial thing we see is perceived; we are consciously aware of it as given in its embodied form. We are not given an image or sign in its place.”2 Thus phenomenological reflection does not retreat into an inner realm, but simply treats the outer realm as something in which consciousness always already participates – the objectivity of experience that is prior to subjective, inner or private givenness.
However, Adorno does not overlook this important dimension of Husserl’s phenomenology. Instead, he objects to the epistemic or foundational character of Husserl’s methodology. To reveal phenomena in their originary givenness, Husserl prescribes an epoché, that is, a withdrawal from all worldliness, or reality commitment in judgement.3 This withdrawal is not sceptical: it does not deny or doubt the world, but attempts to recover its givenness for consciousness.
To clarify how everything can simultaneously be withdrawn and yet recovered, Husserl appeals to an interesting analogy between theoretical experience and aesthetic experience. When participating in the play of aesthetic forms and lines, one brackets judgement – with its commitment to articulate things or objects as being thus and so – and turns towards subjectivity.4 As aesthetic consciousness tears itself away from an intramundane reality orientation, and becomes theoretical in the sense of being reflexively occupied only with itself, an internal play of forms is disclosed. Similarly, the phenomenologist brackets the object in its thus and so existence, and attempts to reveal the forms of intentional consciousness that constitute the experience of it.5
For Husserl, then, there seems to be a privileged realm of analysis related to the givenness of the inner – and a corresponding reflection or phenomenological “seeing” – which finds its “ultimate source of justification” in the mere idealities or possibilities of intentional directedness.6 Against this, Adorno agrees with many of the conclusions reached in the post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of language, such as the impossibility of disclosing a cognitively relevant sense of inner meanings from which knowing can proceed to conclusions about objective “states of affairs”.7 Cognition is already part of an expressible linguistic practice; it manifests procedures of justification, judgement and the reflexive authorization of inferential entitlements, and intrinsically refers to the externalities of things beyond the scope of mere subjective meaning.
What Adorno calls “peephole metaphysics” abstracts from contexts in which expressions such as “this looks to me such and such”, or “appears as so and so”, reflexively modify claims in accordance with an understanding of the limitations of a specific viewpoint or epistemic situation. As is clear from practices such as these – which involve judging and modifying a claim – the determination of the inner depends upon conceptual practices that determine the outer world of things. Hence Adorno declares: “There is no peeping out. What would lie in the beyond makes its appearance only in the materials and categories within” (ND: 140, tr. mod.).8
Although Husserl explicitly wants to close the epistemological gap between mind and world, Adorno argues that his phenomenology becomes a victim of its own methodology. By turning consciousness into a self-sufficient realm of meaning, Husserl withdraws it from the lived experience he wants to recover, thereby neglecting the ways in which ordinary language is embedded in forms of life and practice. In ordinary conceptual practices, meaning is always revisable and subject to unique authorizations through singular judgements and inferences that cannot be conceived as given, or evidentially enclosed, within the realm of pure subjectivity.
For Adorno, there can be no ultimate fulfilment in a natural language of what is thought, or taken to be, such and such, since the very act of judging entails commitments to further acts of judging to reveal the meaning of what is expressed. To vary one of Adorno’s own examples (HPI: 129): arguments for or against a liberal government (for example: “a liberal government is the only human form of government”) rely upon agreement about what “liberal”, “government” and “human” mean – together with the common understanding presupposed in claiming a liberal government as the only human one. Now, such agreements and understandings are not self-evident or immediately revealed to me in reflection on what I meant by my claim. They cannot be understood in abstraction from contexts in which agreements are claimed and achieved. For Adorno, rather, “the notion of intentionality implies only that we can mean the objective essences in the stream of consciousness; it implies nothing about their being” (HPI: 129).
Meaning something thus implies a claim to attunement with others in judgement, meaning something rightly; it implies common commitments to further applications and uses of concepts, and to the meanings that words may acquire. Again, the point is that I cannot articulate an “original” meaning – and its essential fulfilment (Evidenz) – in abstraction from the practices of expression, judging and sense-giving that make up the grammar of an ordinary language. Meaning is something to be achieved rather than already fixed or intuitively determined.9 In agreement with Adorno, Ludwig Wittgenstein notes the following: “We want to say: ‘When we mean something, it’s like going up to someone, it’s not having a dead picture (of any kind)’. We go up to the thing we mean.”10 In other words, meaning something does not proceed from self-authorizing inner givens, but is something attained, fulfilled or confirmed through living practice as it develops. The meaning of concepts cannot be determined independently of such practice.
Adorno’s problem is not with the central place that Husserl gives to subjectivity in experience, but with his adoption of an epistemological or foundational construction of subjectivity. In a certain sense, Husserl retains too little of subjectivity because he views it as transparent to itself and its meanings in phenomenological reflection: “Too much subjectivity in Husserl implies at the same time too little of the same. By assuming it is itself a pregiven and constitutional condition of all objectivity, this subject renounces intervention in both knowing and practice; it merely registers, in contemplative and uncritical passivity, the world of things.”11
Moreover, Husserl draws a sharp distinction between pure meaning (Bedeutung) and its grammatical variability, or the dependence of meaning on concrete contexts of expression.12 His descriptive analysis concerns objectivity as a formal possibility; it brings into pure eidetic intuition only the formal structures of possible meaning and intentionality. His turn “to the things themselves” (zur Sachen selbst) explicitly turns against the factical judgements and conditions of subjectivity, or the “unsteadiness of meanings”, and tries to recover meanings as “ideal unities”.13
Against this, Adorno argues that Husserl ignores the subject’s place within conceptual practices and thus neglects its unique responsibilities. The propositional and conceptual articulation of a thing, which gives it a logical form or structure, is inseparable from the conditions under which that thing is articulated and conceived to be thus and so. This articulation is the result of certain commitments to factical inferences, as well as to judgemental and conceptual orientations; it also exhibits attunement in judgement, achieved agreement. Knowing the meaning of words implies forming judgements – or material inferences14 – in which intersubjective linguistic practice as a whole determines what is meant. Linguistic intentions are subject to criteria that belong to this practice – not to inner convictions or fulfilment. Again, the fulfilment of meaning is accomplished only in linguistic practice itself. Through participation in such practice, I become aware of the sense of my intentions, of what is entailed in meaning something with a determinate sense.
Hence Adorno objects that formal articulation by conceptual consciousness requires subjective judgement and factical inference in which meaning is continually articulated, determined and revised in light of authorizations made in each singular or unique judgement, or the claims to rightfulness or appropriateness in each execution. The conditions of execution are themselves of a practical nature, and are thus not available in a reflective and descriptive analysis that concerns itself with pure meanings. In this way, the subject attains to both more and less than Husserl’s pure eidetic subject since it does not merely register objective meanings, but must be conceived as spontaneity all the way through to the discriminations and judgements which make consciousness responsive to experience:15 “The thought of truth . .. demands the relation of the subject to states-of-affairs. And this relation – and thus the objectivity of truth – likewise comprises thinking subjects . .. The objectivity of truth really demands the subject. Once cut off from the subject, it becomes the victim of sheer subjectivity” (AE: 72).
Importantly, then, even if all inner modifications of subjectivity – that is, all its inner apprehensions – are mediated through the external constraints of an expressive form of linguistic practice, one cannot avoid subjectivity because the subject’s orientation towards meanings and things expresses its unique responsiveness to things. This responsiveness also involves recognition of a thing’s independent existence outside thought. The inner and the outer evade one another. Genuine experience is attained by acknowledging thought’s dependence on its other – the world of natural objects and things. And this acknowledgement is a subjective accomplishment, so that a sense of the inner must be retained because it refers to a unique relation. A reconstruction of Adorno’s conception of experience will thus have to balance a twofold claim: that subjectivity is embedded in linguistic practices of expression, interpretation and a normatively authorized space of inferences, and that it has an epistemic responsibility for its relation to the world.
The factical dimension of subjectivity entails a history of conceptual practices and their constitutive role in language and meaning. And it was precisely this perspective on experience to which Husserl wanted to draw attention in his later work.16 To be fair to Husserl, then, one ought to show how his phenomenological method itself motivates a turn towards a genetic phenomenology, and rejects an epistemological stance altogether. Indeed, Husserl seems to have been the first to undertake a metacritique of the epistemological premisses of his own thinking.
For instance, in his 1927 Natur und Geist, the conceptual articulation of an object or object-domain is conceived as a rationalization of an originary and unitary stream of “mute experience” from which conceptual consciousness emerges.17 Hence, according to Husserl, the constitution of objectivity first finds its fulfilment in being referred back to this unity of worldly experience – which makes the idealities of intentional consciousness less a matter of givenness than of genetic or historical becoming. In the late work, this explicitly involves a critique of what Husserl calls “the sedimented conceptual system” from which phenomenological reflection begins in order to “animate concealed historical meaning” in its unattained becoming.18 All this could be matched to aspects of Adorno’s own thinking: he calls for a critical hermeneutics which discloses sedimented historical life and meaning within conceptual forms that present themselves as givens, as forms of nature. He wants to grasp “historical being in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural being” (INH: 260, emphasis added).
Even if Adorno was not taking on board later developments in Husserl’s thought and its affinities to his own thinking, his argument remains relevant to the extent that there is a conflict in Husserl’s phenomenological methodology and its search for a foundation – a search retained even in The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology. For Adorno, the turn to the “things themselves” cannot consist in the analysis of the fulfilment of phenomena: meaning and aboutness are constituted in conceptual practices and their historicality. And the medium of such mediation is language.
Accordingly, what is crucial in Adorno’s reading of Husserl’s philosophy – with respect to both its critique of epistemology and its importance for the development of Adorno’s work as a whole – is how Husserl also challenges the premisses of a philosophy of consciousness. For Adorno, Husserl’s philosophy both remains “within the range of subjective immanence”, and prepares for a hermeneutics or mode of reading which aims “to use concepts to unseal the non-conceptual, without making it their equal” (ND: 10–11). When performing the epoché, Husserl tries to disclose the field of pure meaning, things in their possibility and abstract ideality – which is analogous, as we have seen, to the contemplative stance or attitude underlying experiences of the beautiful in art. Yet the analogy between the experience of beauty and the phenomenological attitude can also be turned against Husserl.
The idealities of meaning disclosed in an artwork certainly withhold judgement about the factical being of the things they represent (as Kant makes clear, a judgement about beauty is based exclusively upon disinterested and free pleasure). Thus, attention is drawn to the play of these meanings within the compositional whole which makes up the canvas. In this sense, it is correct to speak of figurations and motifs as mere possibilities, abstract idealities whose sense is determined as aesthetic play unfolds. Yet, even if they disclose important aspects of things – as well as their sense and importance to us, our encounters with them, and their proximity to our form of life – aesthetic forms and appearances cannot be said to grasp or disclose things themselves since the latter are outside art.
One might say that the artwork pays attention to things, even lets them show themselves, but not that they are somehow fully grasped in virtue of the art-immanent forms of aesthetic subjectivity. What art discloses depends on the meanings derived from conceptual and interpretive practices; these practices determine the conditions under which concepts acquire meaning. But, if art discloses an “essence”, this essence is not fulfilled in art; its truth lies beyond the scope of immanent appearances. Similarly, the truth of phenomena is not revealed in pure phenomenological description; truth manifests itself only when the phenomenological attitude is broken, that is, in the return to a linguistic form of life, to factical existence in language.
In this sense, Husserl’s epistemic ambition amounts to what Adorno calls an identity philosophy in which the objects of philosophical explication are identified with an epistemically defined subject. Adorno writes: “The identity of spirit with itself and the subsequent synthetic unity of apperception, is projected on things by the method alone . .. This is the original sin of prima philosophia” (AE: 10). To heed Husserl’s ambition to “break through the walls of idealism” (HPI: 133), to continue his announced “breakthrough to the things themselves”, requires a different turn in thinking, an acknowledgement of things as determining thought from without.
By now it should be clear that Adorno never subscribed to the premisses of a philosophy of consciousness.19 Indeed, the aim of Against Epistemology is precisely to show the limits of this sort of philosophy in the case of Husserl. Importantly, though, Adorno’s reading of Husserl is not intended merely to unmask the false premisses of his philosophy of consciousness by pointing to the intersubjective nature of conceptual consciousness or, say, to the grammar involved in the inferential entitlements that are authorized and justified in linguistic practice. Adorno thus cannot be said to agree with recent pragmatism in the philosophy of language which exhausts the meaning of experience in a discursively articulated idea of objectivity.20 For Adorno, “[t]he criterion of truth is not its immediate communicability to everyone . . . Truth is objective, not plausible” (ND: 41).
As already noted, Adorno was sympathetic to Husserl’s ambition of recovering a sense of things themselves in experience. However, he was critical of Husserl’s ideal sense of things, their reduction to inner givenness. Adorno’s turn towards things themselves is conceived as the need to acknowledge the “preponderance of the object”: “Carried through, the critique of identity is a groping for the preponderance (Vorrang) of the object” (ND: 183).
Doubtless, the project of negative dialectics requires an understanding of this preponderance. As we shall see, the development of Adorno’s negative dialectics, and the very idea of non-identity as a placeholder for a retained epistemic claim, rest on the turn towards things themselves. What Adorno retains in this phenomenological turn is just the idea of a thing as an “in-itselfness”, as non-identical to thought. But how is non-identity to be recovered? And, how does thingliness constitute itself for conceptual consciousness? Since Negative Dialectics centres more around Kant’s and Hegel’s conception of experience than Husserl’s, we should remind ourselves of their idealist commitments, and of why Adorno finds them both superior to Husserl’s conception and insufficient in view of the promise to rescue things.
Adorno tries to show that the things to be rescued are prey to idealist premisses – either to the epistemic construction of experience, as in Kant, or to an ontological sublation of things to their logical form, as Adorno holds against Hegel (arguably, somewhat insensitively). With Kant, the whole problematic of experience is detached from substantive or ontological concerns, so that what is at stake is how concepts and intuitions are brought into an epistemically justifiable relation. The object is the result of a “synthetic unity” of possible judgement.21 It is a projected unity, that is, a unity presented in sensibility by the productive imagination of a disparate manifold (itself merely epistemic in character). As such, no ontological claims about the nature of individual things can be made.22
The problem with this, for Adorno, is that it neglects the substantiveness of things in their bodily presence. This presence is not to be conceived as an ultimate given (and, in this, Kant was right): “What we may call the thing itself is not positively and immediately at hand. Whoever wants to know it must think beyond . .. the ‘synthesis of the manifold’ which is no thinking at all. Yet, the thing itself is no product of thought: it is nonidentity through identity” (ND: 189). The conception of intuitions as a disparate manifold dissolves things into a manifold of subjective impressions and intuitions, thereby separating form, as accomplished by consciousness and the imagination, from content, or sensible givens without substantive coherence (ibid.: 187).
To retain substance, Kant had to introduce the “thing-in-itself” as a mere limiting concept, the idea of a ground beyond appearances.23 Yet, for Adorno, who follows Hegel here, this idea is incoherent to the extent that (1) any possible sense of a thing’s in-itselfness must be demonstrable within the bounds of sensibility if it is not to be empty. The idea of the noumenon thus entails only a formal recognition of something heterogeneous to thought, a “recognition of non-identities in form” (ND: 26). Moreover (2), the conditions of possible experience are turned into subjective conditions, so that experience cannot be said to be objective, but concerns only appearances (and there is no meaningful or epistemic sense in which appearances can be related to their ground).24 Kant is therefore incapable of overcoming the premisses of the epistemological tradition; he reintroduces into his analysis of consciousness a view of cognition as picture-thinking when he claims that the productive imagination, after apprehending impressions, brings “the manifold of intuition into the form of an image”.25
Hegel offers an alternative conception of experience in Phenomenology of Spirit. His idea of testing knowledge claims – their standards, as measured by the ideal of exhausting the conceptual and normative conditions under which possible experience and objectivity make sense – discloses objects as conceptual determinations which unfold through critical presentation. Thus self-consciousness becomes the ground of objectivity. This “self-recognition in otherness” achieves what Kant’s transcendental critique could not: the conformity of the object of experience to the conditions of experience. These conditions are no longer subjective, but objective determinations of thought and spirit. As Hegel proclaims in his Science of Logic: “As science, truth is pure self-consciousness in its self-development and has the shape of the self, so that the absolute truth of being is the known Notion and the Notion as such is the absolute truth of being.”26
With Hegel, a thing’s particularity is recognized as Dasein (therebeing, sometimes rendered as “being there”) in its own right, and not merely as a manifold to be unified by conceptual consciousness.27 However, as Hegel’s idealist conception of discursivity and logic unfolds, particularity is not conceived in abstraction from conceptual determination, but is itself a moment or aspect of the concept.28 By turning particularity into a logical moment, Adorno thinks that Hegel again repeats the idealist mistake (implicitly an epistemological one) of subordinating a thing under a conceptual form; a thing merely expresses a conceptual articulation of self-consciousness – the latter thus has priority. Adorno states: “The Hegelian system in itself was not a true becoming; implicitly, each single definition in it was already preconceived.” Moreover, Hegel failed to acknowledge the integrity or non-identity of things, since “the thought he discusses always extracts from its objects only that which is a thought already” (ND: 27). Although Hegel may be read more generously, he does not turn conceptual consciousness against itself so as to release a thing’s particularity.29
Yet Adorno’s turn towards things as non-identical to thought must take its departure from Hegel’s idea of experience: since “the concept is experienced as nonidentical, as inwardly in motion, it is no longer purely itself; in Hegel’s terminology, it leads to otherness without absorbing that otherness” (ND: 157). Again, things are supposed to have priority, not conceptual consciousness. The meaningfulness of experience is therefore not exhausted in the discriminating relations of inferentially and propositionally determined thought which make it possible for conceptual consciousness to be about something in the epistemic sense. Instead, such aboutness entails its own fulfilment in what is other than thought, in a unique nature and in-itselfness that limits consciousness from without. The determinations and transitions of conceptual consciousness, its logic, are indebted to a thing’s nature, to its power of showing itself, so that a thing’s givenness or in-itselfness is not a unity of conceptual discriminations, but rather their limiting condition. The thing enacts its own capacities for change and sameness.
But would the priority of a thing over and against its conceptual determinations not simply regress behind Hegel’s insight into the determination of all particularity by conceptual consciousness? And if it is prior to conceptual thought, what is a thing? For an adequate understanding of Adorno’s epistemic and ontological claim for the non-identical and the preponderance of the object, we shall return to his concerns with Husserl’s phenomenology.
Husserl attempts to preserve things in their givenness for consciousness. Hence a thing is not the result of a conceptual synthesis of the manifold, but an individual, an “embodied presence”: “The spatial thing to which we attend is, in its transcendence, a perceived, corporeal given for consciousness.”30 Thus a thing is conceived both as an individual and in its “mode of givenness”. This corresponds to Aristotle’s sense of a thing, its tode ti, which involves its individual being-thereness (its “thisness”) and its “whatness”, that is, its being thus and so. The crucial question is whether the ti, or “whatness”, in ti einai, is revealed adequately through its mode of givenness, or whether one must at the outset presuppose that the being of the thing is an individual nature prior to form, that is, a hypokeimenion (that which grounds).31 In Husserl, this problem is conceived as involving a duality between the form of intentionality and the embodied presence of a thing.32
Husserl’s appeal to the difference between the mode of givenness of a thing and its transcendence is ambivalent. In Ideen II, his account of things makes them the result of a passive form of constitution; this involves the embodied interaction between a subject and things and the causal influences of things upon an experiencing subject: “Reality, or what is the same, substantiality and causality belong together inseparably . .. Real properties are thus eo ipso causal ones. To know a thing therefore means to know through experience how it behaves . .. in the nexis of its causalities.”33 A thing’s mode of being is not exhausted in its ideality for consciousness: since it is constituted through the passive apprehension of causal capacities, a thing seems to be a self-presence in virtue of its causal coherence, or of a mode of being that is not brought about by intentional consciousness in the active sense.34
An embodied “thing-experience” also underlies Adorno’s idea of “non-identity”: “[T]he non-identical moments show up as matter, or as inseparably fused with material things. Sensation [is] the crux of all epistemology . .. There is no sensation without a somatic moment” (ND: 193). In keeping with this, one might say that Adorno wants to take Husserl at his word by preserving the transcendence of things that is inherent in their embodied self-givenness. Yet Adorno objects that Husserl’s retreat to the premisses of a philosophy of consciousness undermines the recovery of things in their “originariness” (Urgegebenheit). For the unity of a thing as a transcendent object is understood as an accomplishment of consciousness that confers unity on an infinite manifold of adumbrations (Abschattungen). A thing’s transcendence is thus effected by consciousness, and is part of the sphere of what presents itself in evidential givenness.
For Adorno, the phenomenological recovery of things must go all the way to express things in their integrity, or their mode of being; it must not rest content with abstract conceptions of things as intentional correlates of consciousness, as mere forms, or the result of a fulfilment of form, because such conceptions strip things of their “dignity” as “absolutely existing” entities (AE: 140). Here Adorno is rehearsing an objection, already much debated by Husserl’s own students (by Hedwig Conrad-Martius, among others), which points to an immanent problem in Husserl’s constitutional analysis: that of the duality of the mode of being and the givenness of a thing. Importantly, though, Adorno’s argument is not primarily ontological – it does not concern the duality of being – but rather deals with experience and the non-identity of things qua individuals.
The attribution of an invariant eidos – essence or form – to the tode ti has a long history. Agreeing with Aristotle, Husserl conceived the essence of an individual thing to be what it has yet to become (to ti en einai). A thing is always in the process of becoming, of actualizing itself. In this sense, the embodied and conceptual histories of things are intertwined. For Adorno, however, it is crucial that the becoming of a thing not be conceived as a conceptually articulated unity, but preserved in all its individuality. Conceiving of a thing in dynamic terms, as having been and being in becoming, entails a perspective in which conceptual determinations are turned inside out by showing their dependence on things.
According to Adorno,
when things in being are read as a text of their becoming . . . idealistic and materialistic dialectics touch. But while idealism sees in the inner history of immediacy its vindication as a stage of the concept, materialism makes that inner history the measure, not just of the untruth of concepts, but even more of the immediacy in being. The means employed in negative dialectics for the penetration of its hardened object is possibility – the possibility of which their reality has cheated the objects and which is nonetheless visible in each one.
(ND: 52, emphasis added)
Without pretending to unravel this passage in detail, one should note its concern for possibility, for the individual nature of things as being always not yet. In their capacity for change, things reveal their nonidentity. Their non-identity is the condition of the possibility of any discursively articulated experience.
Hence there is a phenomenological sense of the mode of being of things that transcends the limited standpoint of epistemology. As conceived by conceptual consciousness – and this corresponds to an epistemic determination – a thing is a transcendent idea (and its unity is ideal), but, as bodily presence, a thing is transcendent in virtue of its possibilities and self-presence. This non-identity of a thing is not epistemological since a thing makes a claim to having a being or nature of its own – a being or nature that differs from that of concepts. Adorno’s epistemic ambition, however, is to reverse the idealizations of epistemology, and preserve the otherness of things. The question is whether this makes any difference to experience, or whether things should be sacrificed for the sake of the autonomy of concepts.35
By preserving Husserl’s idea of turning to the things themselves beyond the scope of conceptual consciousness, Adorno hopes to show that embodied experience promises to recognize things in their own right, expressing them mimetically rather than representationally.36 By invoking the classical notion of mimesis, he wants to rehabilitate a mode of presenting things by likening – that is, by expressing things through forms of sensuous presentation in which they appear, or are made present in their absence – as a form of knowing. Such knowing is based neither on the epistemic model of picture-thinking nor on Kant’s idea of a discursively articulated objectivity. Rather, in mimesis, the subject immerses itself in the things it attempts to present; it strives to disappear in things (ND: 189). Only through the subject’s involvement in its presentation of things, which also involves the things presented, can the modern epistemological stance be overcome (AE: 144).
Mimesis is an attitude towards things; it is effected by an epoché which allows things themselves to come into view. This mimetic and expressive turn to things is in fact a return, since conceptually articulated experience already presupposes that language and things are sedimented in our form of life. Indeed, things are not merely seen (or “seen-as”), but require a language of their own if they are to be known at all. And this language would feed on a sensitivity to words, to how things dwell within them – a sensitivity that is not argumentative, inferential or strictly analytical, but attentive to the ways in which things show themselves in language. As Adorno states: “to comprehend a thing, not just to fit and register it in its system of reference, is nothing but to preserve and confirm (gewahren) the individual moment in its immanent relations to other things”. Negative dialectics, then, ought to reverse conceptual idealizations and recall “the coherence of the nonidentical” (ND: 25–6, tr. mod.).
To discriminate between things and to conceptually articulate such discriminations, a subjective responsiveness is needed to provide “a haven for the mimetic element of knowledge, for the element of elective affinity between the knower and the known” (ibid.: 45). This allusion to Goethe is, of course, not superfluous, as diverse elective affinities are based upon mutual attractions and resistances. In mimetic acknowledgement, things are experienced as limiting conditions, and as individual natures interwoven both with other individual natures and with the experiencing subject.
To defend a mimetic language of things, Adorno must counter Plato’s one-sided solution to the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry, his downgrading of mimesis to either arbitrary wilfulness or mythical dependence. Surely a mimetic presentation of things has its originary form in mythical invocations of natural powers through rite and play. Released from its mythical context, however, and transposed into forms of artistic beauty, mimesis recovers an experience of things that has been displaced by logos. Natural beauty reveals things in their physiognomic aspects, values and forms that recall or reinstate our dependence on them.37 Hence Adorno pays special attention both to the “expressive moments” of art and to the subject’s receptivity (which underlies the physiognomic nature in which things reveal themselves). Subjective expression makes things present and, as such, retains its significance for knowledge of objects (CM: 250).
In artworks, things show themselves through a second nature, which consists in the logic of the materials inherent to the medium that reveals their physiognomic aspects. The artwork is thus a doubling of nature to the extent that it relies upon its own disclosive power to make the hidden visible. Mimesis is thus conceived as a form of participation in which the subject transcends itself towards things so as to release them in their otherness to subjectivity. Through mimesis, a thing both withdraws and reconstitutes itself. Only as absent, as determining the mimetic presentation by simultaneously withdrawing from it, are things present at all. As Aristotle also made clear, in poetry, things and figures are articulated as mere possibilities.
Mimetic presentation thus has an ideality of its own. Kant, Husserl and the neo-Kantians showed that consciousness continually strives towards objects, objects that are to be conceptually and mathematically grasped and articulated as ideas. However, Adorno argues that these formal idealizations of consciousness – while constitutive for an epistemically determined objectivity – neither exhaust objects, nor are they ontologically preponderant.38 Instead, the object preponderates: it exists prior to form as a limiting condition, or there-being, constituting the ground of all conceptual determination, and of the elective affinities between things. In natural beauty, itself a residual moment within artistic form, Adorno finds an original articulation of things, not as “givens”, but as possibilities (AT: 66).39
The sensuous forms of physiognomic traits – which shift with the expressive attentiveness of the experiencing subject – reveal things in their otherness to conceptual consciousness. That is, they reveal things as conditioning appearances. In this sense, mimesis is a reminder of the mutuality of things and language; it also reminds us that language can never be entirely sublimated into pure forms. For Adorno – and this brings him close to thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger and Hans-Georg Gadamer – this limitation is not an obstacle to knowing but a salutary corrective to an epistemic (metaphysical, according to Wittgenstein) misconception.
Whether Adorno transcends epistemology towards ontology is a difficult question. It cannot be answered fully without considering his criticisms of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology in some detail. Without pursuing this topic here, however, we may conclude by noting that Adorno, at least in his later writings, gradually seems to become more sympathetic to Heidegger’s thought, in particular to his famous turn towards things in his essay on art.40 Unlike Heidegger, however, Adorno does not infer ontological commitments from the nature or being of things. If being is historical, sedimented historicality in concepts, the being of beings can neither be expressed as a whole, nor dissolved into a primordial stream of life. Rather, the elective affinity of things is based on their individuality, and nonidentity demonstrated only in its individual manifestations. As such, nature is dappled diversity, not unity.41
Consequently, Adorno’s metacritique of epistemology cannot be conceived in ontological terms, either in the classical or the Heideggerian sense, since its aim is to avoid unity and dwell only with particularity. Still, as we have seen, Adorno cannot rest content with epistemology, as epistemology fails to do justice to things themselves. The turn towards things themselves obtains its evidential authority only through experience; and experience for Adorno is something to be achieved rather than something given, an achievement of “togetherness in diversity” (ND: 150). Experience entails a promise to things of remembrance and acknowledgement.
1. Still, Adorno denies neither the idealist claim to normative self-authorization, nor the attempts to articulate a normative self-conception within epistemic, moral, political and aesthetic contexts of experience which Robert Pippin defends in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (1990).
2. Edmund Husserl, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1969), 136 (Ideas I). Translations of this, and other texts, are altered where appropriate.
3. Ibid., 98.
4. Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. Second Book: Studies in the Phenomenology of Constitution (1989), 10–11 (Ideas II).
5. Husserl, Ideas I, 107.
6. Ibid., 75.
7. Most prominently formulated, perhaps, by Wilfrid Sellars: “in characterizing an episode or a state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons”. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1997), 76. See also Charles Taylor, “Overcoming Epistemology”, Philosophical Arguments (1995).
8. Sellars formulates this as follows: “The point I wish to stress . . . is that the concept of looking green, the ability to recognize that something looks green, presupposes the concept of being green, and that the latter concept involves the ability to tell what colours objects have by looking at them.” Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, 43. Hence there is no privileged description of what “looks to me such and such” that does not already imply the conceptual practice in which things are determined as “being such and such or thus and so”: “looks-talk” is derived from linguistic practice; it is not a non-inferential premiss for knowing.
9. For a similar analysis, see Herbert Schnädelbach, “Phänomenologie und Sprachanalyse”, Philosophie in der modernen Kultur (2000), 240ff.
10. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953), §455. Fruitful comparisons can be made between Adorno’s metacritique and Wittgenstein’s grammatical investigations. See, for example, Christoph Demmerling, Sprache und Verdinglichung (1994).
11. Adorno, “Zur Philosophie Husserls”, Gesammelte Schriften 20.1 (1998), 63.
12. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations, vol. 1 (1970), 258. (The English vol. 1 includes vol. 2 of the German edition.)
13. Ibid., 322–3.
14. Sellars introduced this notion of material inference to capture the non-formal use of “subjunctive conditionals” in ordinary language. Their use permits inferences on the basis of our interaction with natural objects (in an interest-related perspective), such as “If I drop a stone on this piece of chalk, it will break”. Sellars claims that material rules of inference are “essential to the language we speak, for we make constant use of subjunctive conditionals”. See Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds: The Early Essays of Wilfrid Sellars (1980), 273. The conception of material inference is here extended to include the inferential nature of all judging as embedded in human life, capturing the grammatical sensitivity for revisability and judgement-bound authorization that governs the use of concepts in ordinary linguistic practice.
15. This point echoes an argument by John McDowell: “Experience enables the lay-out of reality to exert rational influence on what a subject thinks”, Mind and World (1994), 26.
16. Yet some commentators argue that Husserl’s early methodological aim – his Cartesian claim to have a self-evident and self-sufficient foundation – conflicts with his later genetic phenomenology which undermines the insistence upon a Cartesian foundation. See Iso Kern, Kant und Husserl (1964), 196ff.
17. Edmund Husserl, Natur und Geist (2001), 15.
18. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Science and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological Philosophy (1970), 71.
19. Here I am arguing against Peter Dews in Logics of Disintegration: Post-structuralist Thought and the Claims of Critical Theory (1987), 227ff.
20. Cf. Robert B. Brandom: “[T]alk about the representational dimension of the conceptual content of intentional states should be understood in terms of the social dimension of their inferential articulation.” See Making it Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment (1994), 586.
21. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (1929), B161.
22. Ibid., B148–9.
23. Ibid., B311.
24. Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic (1969), 46ff. For an excellent account of Hegel’s case against Kant’s “subjectivism”, see William F. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique (2007), 38ff.
25. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A120.
26. Hegel, Science of Logic, 49.
27. Ibid., 115. Adorno remarks: “to Kant, multiplicity and unity were already categories side by side; Hegel, following the model of the late Platonic dialogues, recognized them as two moments of which neither is without the other” (ND: 158).
28. Ibid., 39.
29. Some readings of Hegel’s conception of experience and his logic avoid the strong idealist claim of a philosophy of consciousness by viewing the category of reality as a form of fullfilment in practices that retain their particularity and contingency. See, for example, Paul Franco, Hegel’s Philosophy of Freedom (1999).
30. Husserl, Ideas II, 90.
31. For an excellent discussion of this problem in the context of Husserl’s Ideas, see Roman Ingarden, Einführung in die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls – Osloer Vorlesungen 1967 (1992), Lectures 6–8.
32. Husserl, Ideas I, 113–14.
33. Husserl, Ideas II, 48.
34. Ibid., 61: “in all perception and experience, the body is involved. . . as [a] freely moved totality of sense organs, and . . . on this original foundation, all that is thingly-real in the surrounding world of the Ego has its relation to the Body”.
35. This question, I take it, underlies much of Robert Pippin’s criticism of Adorno. Pippin rejects the idea that experience entails commitment to an otherness or non-identity prior to concepts since the preponderance of things undermines the idealist commitment to autonomy and normative self-authorization. See, for example, The Persistence of Subjectivity (2005), 98–120. While I share Pippin’s worries about Adorno’s rather abrupt claims regarding the “falseness” of idealist philosophy in general (and its complicity with a culture distorted by the commodity-form), the following section tries to make sense of the claim that respect for the non-identity of things offers an experience of finitude and self-limitation; such respect acknowledges, rather than knows, things and their proximity to our form of life (in language).
36. Martin Seel speaks of an “acknowledging cognition” (anerkennenden Erkenntnis) which employs concepts by “taking up a relation of recognition in which the knower and the known are there for one another without dominating the other”. Adornos Philosophie der Kontemplation (2006), 59. Espen Hammer also discusses Adorno’s ideas about mimesis in this volume (Chapter 4).
37. Ernst Cassirer, who figures in Adorno’s polemic against neo-Kantianism, provided an analysis of “expressive-perception” which demonstrates its importance for the objective constitution of natural things. For Cassirer and Adorno, this level of expressivity, entwined with the physiognomic appearances of things, underlies aesthetic experience. See, in particular, Cassirer’s “Mythischer, ästhetischer und theoretischer Raum”, Gesammelte Werke 17 (2004), 411–32.
38. Adorno would therefore be sceptical of Günter Figal’s attempt to conceive the non-identical as entailed by the “open identity” of language (Plato’s dialogos as infinite articulation) because the thought of unity – even if endlessly postponed – implies a sense of “wholeness” that would displace the sedimentation of particulars within concepts (in a natural language). From a Platonic perspective, non-identity would retain its significance only as an idea (of the Good). However, the ideality of the non-identical through mimesis needs to be understood, not as an unattained idea in Plato’s sense, but as an unattained promise to things, the promise of recognizing finitude, or Einmaligkeit. See Wolfram Ette et al. (eds), Adorno im Widerstreit (2004), 13–23.
39. Adorno’s notion of natural beauty is thus more indebted to Friedrich Schiller than to Kant or Hegel (who dismiss natural beauty and mimesis, or the Nachahmung der Natur, in favour of the pure expressive significance of artistic beauty). According to Schiller, “natural beauty is not nature itself but its imitation in a medium which is completely different from the imitated material. Imitation is the formal affinity of materially different things”. See J. M. Bernstein (ed.), Classic and Romantic German Aesthetics (2003), 178.
40. Cf. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, Poetry, Language, Thought (1971). For Adorno’s comments on Heidegger, see “Art and the Arts”, Can One Live after Auschwitz? (2003). For a detailed account of the importance of this turn in Heidegger, see Günter Figal, Gegenständlichkeit (2006), 126–41.
41. Interestingly, Adorno’s implicit pluralistic endorsement of “individual natures” agrees with at least some aspects of recent neo-Aristotelian work in the philosophy of science, such as Nancy Cartwright, The Dappled World (1999).