to annihilate the contingent individual. In the same spirit as Kierkegaard, Husserl betrayed a fundamental yearning for ontological certainty. In attacking his “reductive” method, which sought eternal essences through a phenomenological exploration of consciousness, Adorno, like Horkheimer, argued for the importance of mediation (Vermittlung).
Husserl’s search for first principles revealed an inherent identity theory, despite his anti-idealistic pretensions. The need for absolute intellectual certainty, Adorno argued, was likely to be a reflex of personal insecurity: “freedom is never given, always threatened. . . . The absolutely certain as such is always unfreedom. . . . It is a mistaken conclusion that what endures is truer than what passes.”120 A true epistemology must end the fetish of knowledge as such, which, as Nietzsche demonstrated, leads to abstract systematizing. The truth was not what was “left over”121 when a reduction of subject to object, or vice versa, took place. It resided instead in the “force field”122 between subject and object. Absolute realism and absolute nominalism, both of which could be found in Husserl’s work, led to equally fallacious reifications. As Adorno wrote in another article on Husserl, “whoever tries to reduce the world to either the factual or the essence comes in some way or other into the position of Münchhausen, who tried to drag himself out of the swamp by his own pigtails.”123
By seeking the immutable, Husserl implicitly accepted the reality of the current “administered world.”124 Husserl, Adorno wrote, was “the most static thinker of his period.”125 It was not enough to look for the permanent within the transient, or the archaic within the present. A true dialectics, Adorno argued, was “the attempt to see the new in the old instead of simply the old in the new.”126 Although Husserl had tried to puncture the reified world by means of his reductive method based on intuition (Wesensschau), he had failed. Adorno admitted that intuition was a legitimate part of experience, but ought not to be elevated into an absolute method of cognition. In doing just that, Husserl had expressed an unconscious rejection of the “real world,” which was “ego-alien” to him.127 Being could no more be divorced entirely from the facts of perception than it could be equated with them.
From Husserl’s epistemology Adorno went on to criticize his mathematical realism and logical “absolutism.” The triumph of mathematical thinking in the West, Adorno argued, contained a mythical element. The fetish of numbers had led to a repudiation of nonidentity and a kind of hermetic idealism. Similarly, the reliance on formal logic as a mental absolute contained mythical traces. These modes of thought were also not without social significance. The reification of logic, Adorno asserted, “refers back to the commodity form whose identity exists in the ‘equivalence’ of exchange value.”128 Instead of formal logic, which perpetuated the false dualism of form and content, Adorno suggested a more dynamic alternative that referred back to Hegel. “Logic,” he wrote, “is not Being, but a process that cannot be simply reduced to the pole of ‘subjectivity’ or ‘objectivity.’ The self-criticism of logic has as its result dialectics. . . . There is no logic without sentences, no sentences without the synthetic mental function.”129 Formal logic with its laws of contradiction and identity was a kind of repressive taboo that ultimately led to the domination of nature.130 Adorno also strongly objected to a mimetic theory of perception, and he found it even in Husserl’s phenomenology, despite its stress on intentionality. The locus of truth, when correctly understood, he contended, “becomes the mutual dependency, the production through one another (sich durcheinander Produzieren) of subject and object, and it should no longer be thought of as static agreement—as ‘intention.’ ”131 By whatever means, Husserl’s attempt to uncover the essential truth, he argued, was in vain: “Only in the repudiation of every such illusion, in the idea of imageless truth, is the lost mimesis preserved and transcended (aufgehoben), not in the preservation of its [the truth’s] rudiments.”132
Husserl’s tendency to reify the given, Adorno argued, was related to advanced bourgeois society’s destruction of Erfahrung (experience) and its replacement by administered, lifeless concepts. The disappearance of true experience, which Benjamin had also stressed as a characteristic of modern life,133 corresponded to the growing helplessness of modern man. To Adorno, phenomenology thus represented the last futile effort of bourgeois thought to rescue itself from impotence. “With phenomenology,” he wrote, “bourgeois thought reached its end in dissociated, fragmented statements set against one another, and resigned itself to the simple reproduction of that which is.”134 In doing so, it turned against action in the world: “The denigration of praxis to a simple special case of intentionality is the grossest consequence of its reified premises.”135 But worst of all, the assumption of absolute identity and immediacy could well lead to the political domination of an absolute ideology. There was, Adorno suggested, a subterranean connection between phenomenology and fascism—both were expressions of the terminal crisis of bourgeois society.136
Among the members of the Frankfurt School Adorno perhaps most consistently expressed abhorrence of ontology and identity theory. At the same time, he also rejected naive positivism as a non-reflective metaphysics of its own, contrasting it with a dialectics that neither denied nor fully accepted the phenomenal world as the ground of truth. Against those who stressed an abstract individualism, he pointed to the social component through which subjectivity was inevitably mediated. He just as strongly resisted the temptation to acquiesce in the dissolution of the contingent individual into a totality, whether of Volk or class. Even Walter Benjamin, the friend from whom he learned so much, was not immune to criticism on this score. In an essay he wrote after Benjamin’s tragic suicide in 1940, Adorno complained:
His target is not an allegedly overinflated subjectivism but rather the notion of a subjective dimension itself. Between myth and reconciliation, the poles of his philosophy, the subject evaporates. Before his Medusan glance, man turns into the stage on which an objective process unfolds. For this reason Benjamin’s philosophy is no less a source of terror than a promise of happiness.137
In his persistent stress on nonidentity and contingency, Adorno developed a philosophy that was as “atonal” as the music he had absorbed from Schönberg.138
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