Human Destinies: Philosophical Essays in Memory of Gerald Hanratty

Chapter Twenty-three: Immanent Transcendence?

t w e n t y - t h r e e immanent transcendence? adorno’s reconception of metaphysics Brian O’Connor Contemporary philosophy generally sees itself as decisively postmetaphysical . it consciously avoids seeking to justify its explanations of the world or its phenomena in terms, concepts, or principles that might be understood to be in some sense “world transcending,” that is, metaphysical . in this respect it breaks quite deliberately with an explanatory procedure which sustained mainstream philosophical inquiry since its Western inception, yielding up, for instance, the Forms, the Cogito, transcendental categories, and Geist. this procedure has the disconcerting tendency to generate concepts which stand in dualistic opposition to the world they supposedly explain. in its understanding of explanations as necessarily world transcending, metaphysical philosophy is quite incompatible with an influential strand of modern philosophy, naturalism. naturalism holds that there is no feature of the world which philosophers seek to understand which cannot in principle be explained through the intraworldly business of science. insofar as metaphysics understands itself to be a unique kind of 563 564 Brian O’Connor activity necessarily different from the character or methodologies of those disciplines which yield empirical knowledge or logical-deductive propositions, it simply cannot be accommodated within this regulative framework. metaphysics is not assailed exclusively by naturalism. in another major tradition of contemporary Western philosophy—Continental philosophy—there is a pointed hostility to the otherworldliness into which metaphysics allegedly falls, an otherworldliness that shifts the foundations of the various normative and historical enterprises of our lives—our ethics, our politics—outside the human realm. this antimetaphysical position is historical materialism. the apparent convergence here between core commitments of analytic philosophy to naturalism and Continental philosophy to the materialist rejection of otherworldliness surely spells the end of metaphysics . even though materialism and naturalism diverge significantly on the role of scientific explanation in philosophy, they seem, between them, to deny any conceivable space for the kind of speculative concepts produced by metaphysical philosophy. Can metaphysics be rescued? should metaphysics be rescued? to answer the latter question first: it ought to be rescued if it can be shown that there is some valuable dimension of human experience which cannot be explained by either naturalism or historical materialism , at least in their current forms. How that is to be done is the other question. naturalism and historical materialism have, in principle, undermined the very possibility of metaphysical philosophy. that means that should we posit a realm of human experience which might be characterized metaphysically, as “transcending” given experience, we cannot seek to provide a philosophical account of it through the metaphysical arguments of the past. so either a new form of philosophy will need to emerge to accommodate these supposedly unexplained dimensions of human experience, or metaphysics will have to come from within the traditions which are critical of metaphysics. in spite of the apparent contradictoriness of the latter program, it is, in fact, the direction taken by a number of philosophers from within the Continental tradition. immanent transcendence? 565 One such effort—the subject of this essay—is proposed by theodor adorno. He is no doubt an unlikely proponent of metaphysics in that the fundamental principles of his philosophy are historical materialist . adorno himself speaks of materialism rather than historical materialism , which he associates with marx. However, it is a useful term which distinguishes the general framework of critical theory from the forms of materialism that emerged during the enlightenment and that are related in twentieth-century philosophy to physicalism. the theory of experience adorno develops emphasizes the need for philosophy to come to terms with particularity, the very opposite of what metaphysics , adorno himself alleges, has appeared ever to consider the proper business of philosophy. the sense of the particular here is not what sense-data theorists hold to be the primitive components of experience but the vast regions of life—of other people especially—that cannot be encapsulated within universal judgments. adorno’s desire to turn philosophy toward a theory of particularity informs his critical engagement with metaphysics: “the matters of true philosophical interest at this point in history are those in which Hegel, agreeing with tradition, expressed his disinterest. they are non-conceptuality, individuality [Einzelnen], and particularity [Besonderen]—things which ever since Plato used to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant, and which Hegel labeled ‘lazy Existenz.’”1 the point is not simply epistemological : it refers to the condition of particularity...