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3 Adorno and Husserl
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Kierkegaard and Heidegger both flee from the subject-object dialectic, albeit in diametrically opposed ways: Kierkegaard withdraws from the profane world into subjective inwardness so as to preserve his “personal meaning,” while Heidegger rejects subjectivity in his quest to recover the “meaning of Being.” Moreover, by rejecting one of the two poles in the subject-object relation, and therefore the determinacy that can only arise by maintaining the dialectical tension between them, Kierkegaard and Heidegger both end up advancing an identity theory (although, at least for Kierkegaard, identity theories, such as the alleged identity of thought and being in Hegel’s dialectic, are ostensibly an anathema). Husserl, in contrast, holds on to both the subject and object poles, both reason and reality. As a result, although Heidegger builds on Husserl’s phenomenology, it is actually Husserl, according to Adorno, who represents the high point of modern idealism. Echoing his position in “The Actuality of Philosophy,” in which he had stated that “Husserl purified idealism from every excess of speculation and brought it up to the standard of the highest reality within its reach,”1 Adorno states in “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” which was written nine years later (while living in the United States), that the value of [Husserl’s] whole procedure may consist in its turning against the idealist presupposition of the ultimate identity of subject and object. It appears to me that Husserl’s 59 3 Adorno and Husserl philosophy was precisely an attempt to destroy idealism from within, and attempt with the means of consciousness to break through the wall of transcendental analysis, while at the same time trying to carry such an analysis as far as possible.2 Although the point should not be pressed too strongly, there are a number of similarities between the philosophical programs of Husserl and Adorno. Husserl’s desire to get “back to the things themselves” anticipates Adorno’s desire to give the object its due, and thus Husserl, like Adorno, rejects the “constitutive subjectivity” of classical idealism, as well as all other forms of dogmatic rationalism. Despite this rejection , however, neither Husserl nor Adorno give up on idealism’s reliance on reason (although, of course, by “reason” they intend very different things). Conversely, both Husserl and Adorno also reject the positivistic implications of the empiricist tradition, which indiscriminately assents to “the facts” as the only imaginable truth. And, in fact, according to Adorno, it is Husserl’s attack on psychologistic positivism ’s “naive and uncritical religion of facts” that constitutes the element of truth in his philosophy.3 Thus, as this excerpt from “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism” suggests, Husserl, like Adorno, believed that it was necessary to reason through the problems of idealism, to “burst it open” from the standpoint of its deepest contradictions, as opposed to just setting it aside. Yet, ultimately, Adorno thinks that Husserl failed in this aim, for while “he rebels against idealist thinking ,” he “attempts to break through the walls of idealism with purely idealist instruments—namely, by an exclusive analysis of the structure of thought and of consciousness.”4 For this reason, in Against Epistemology : A Metacritique—Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, Adorno contends that, notwithstanding his intentions, Husserl ultimately falls behind classical idealist philosophers like Kant and Hegel. Although structured around Husserl’s philosophy, Against Epistemology considers the far broader question of “the possibility and truth of epistemology in principle” (AE, p. 1). And it is Adorno’s view that all epistemological endeavors, including, as we will see, Husserl’s, start with a privileged category, an originary concept or absolute foundation, on which firm knowledge, as opposed to mere belief, can be built. But this approach, which Adorno generally calls prima philosophia, is fundamentally misguided, for “the absolutely first,” which is necessarily 60 SARTRE AND ADORNO [44.204.94.166] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 01:53 GMT) held to be immediate, is itself, as a concept, mediated, and thus not “the absolutely first.” As a result, all attempts to justify knowledge by way of this privileged category become entangled in antinomy, for the subject himself, who comes into play when the first is made into the ground of certainty, does not stand in a relation of identity to the purported grounds of his knowledge: Philosophy of origins took shape scientifically as epistemology. The latter wished to raise the absolutely first to the absolutely certain by reflecting on the subject—not to be excluded from any concept of...