Sartre and Adorno: The Dialectics of Subjectivity

2 Adorno and Heidegger

While Adorno deals most extensively with Heidegger in The Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics, which were both written in the 1960s,1 his engagement with Heidegger’s philosophy traversed his entire career. As is evidenced by “The Actuality of Philosophy” and “The Idea of Natural History,” the rudiments of Adorno’s critique of Heidegger were already largely in place by the early 1930s. Of course, it is no doubt the case that in light of the revelations concerning Heidegger’s collusion with the Nazis, Adorno’s criticisms took on a more strident tone in his later works—The Jargon of Authenticity, in particular, stands out in this regard.2 But it does not then follow that Adorno’s opposition to Heidegger’s philosophy was primarily motivated by the latter’s disgraceful politics, which is what certain theorists who seek to promote a rapprochement between the two philosophers suggest.3 Accordingly, after explicating Adorno’s basic critique of Heidegger, which will be culled from The Jargon of Authenticity and Negative Dialectics, I shall look at some of the claims of these “rapprochement theorists,” who argue that despite their distinctive philosophical frameworks, Adorno and Heidegger had “common concerns and shared agonies” that run beneath “open denials or rejections.”4 I shall argue, conversely, that despite superficial similarities, the differences between these two thinkers are deep and irreconcilable. 37 2 Adorno and Heidegger ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER As the title Jargon of Authenticity suggests, Adorno is not only concerned with the basic categories of Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology ” but also the language that he uses to articulate them, for Heidegger ’s philosophy of language is a function of his “fundamental ontology,” a fact that Adorno emphasizes throughout the book. Of course, Adorno’s recognition that Heidegger’s account of language directly follows from his philosophical commitments is, in and of itself, not particularly interesting, for it is well known that Heidegger sought to use language in a way that would allow him to speak in terms that might evade the presuppositions of Western metaphysics, which had supplanted “the question of the meaning of Being” with an instrumentalizing , subject-centered epistemological framework. The significance of Adorno’s analysis lies, instead, in his recognition that Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language, as well as the ontology that it expresses, effectively operates as a cover for the existing ideology, the “untruth” of the times, and is thus at odds with its own initial impulse: “What is aesthetically perceived in the bad form of language, and interpreted sociologically , is deduced from the untruth of the content which is posited with it: its implicit philosophy” (JOA, p. xx). Although, for Adorno, the “bad content” of the times surely finds direct expression in Heidegger ’s language—his “existentials,” for instance, have a penchant for reflecting existing social deficits—it is the “bad form of language,” by virtue of its seemingly transcendent nature, that is especially “ideological .” The way that declarations are made, which includes the use not only of the right terminology but also the proper concernful intonation (heavily laden with theological overtones), gives the declaration an “aura” that seems to leave the mundaneness of empirical claims behind. Yet, despite its pretenses, the terms that comprise the declaration cannot be divorced from their sociohistorically engendered meanings, which are dragged unawares into the declaration itself. Consequently, these sociohistorically engendered meanings do not just bar the way to the recovery of some “original meaning,” but, far more problematically, tend to become identified with it.The existing sociohistorical reality is, in effect, ontologized. Adorno’s attack on what is ostensibly the transcendent moment in Heidegger’s thought should not be interpreted as an embrace of a more positivistic view of language, for Adorno does not want to deny that 38 SARTRE AND ADORNO language contains a transcendent moment. Ideally, according to Adorno, “philosophical language transcends dialectically in that the contradiction between truth and thought becomes self-conscious and thus overcomes itself” (JOA, p. 12). But by fraudulently making transcendence part and parcel of its own petrified dogma, Heidegger’s jargon effectively frustrates language’s transcendent impulse: The jargon takes over this transcendence destructively and consigns it to its own chatter. Whatever more of meaning there is in the words than what they say has been secured for them once and for all as expression. The dialectic is broken off: the dialectic between word and thing as well as the dialectic...