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IN SEARCH OF NON-IDENTITY: ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER By Andrea Walsh A DISSERTATION Submitted to Michigan State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Philosophy—Doctor of Philosophy 2018 ABSTRACT IN SEARCH OF NON-IDENTITY: ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF HEIDEGGER By Andrea Walsh This dissertation explores Theodor Adorno’s career-long critique of Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology toward understanding how the latter may be inherently supportive of a negative dialectical approach to social critique and change. Adorno’s negative dialectics is motivated by the assumption that ethical rationality is primordially rooted in non-identity thinking, and it proposes that three basic conditions must be met for non-identity thinking to be truly engaged: the subject must acknowledge that the object takes socio-epistemic priority in constructions of meaning; she must attend to the object’s particular qualities that resist circumscription by the totalizing concepts of modern autonomous reason; and she must resolve to relate to the object through a “mimetic” form of rationality, which is passively attuned to the playful and unfinished elements of experience as much as it is inclined to critically interpret the particular socio-material conditions that shape consciousness and its environments. Without meeting these conditions, rationality tacitly sanctions subjects to reify experience as it takes an idealist form. While emphasizing that the problem of reification is endemic to public life at large, Adorno foregrounds its correlation with the persistence of philosophical idealism within the academy, leading him to target the phenomenological and existential traditions in general, and Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology in particular, as inherently antagonistic to what he deems is philosophy’s central mission of normalizing non- identity thinking in both theory and praxis. Fundamental Ontology, he alleges, celebrates identity thinking, thus betraying its own endeavor to overturn traditional philosophical principles. Adorno locates the repercussions of this purported failure not only within theoretical understandings of how rationality and meaning are constituted, but within mundane forms of intersubjective relations that determine the ethics, discourse, and well-being of social collectives. He charges Fundamental Ontology with promoting an ethos in which subjects contribute to their own deprivations of the social conditions that, toward garnering robust understanding of how objectivity restrictively mediates subjectivity, would encourage recognition of new possibilities for subjectively mediating social conditions by amplifying individual and collective agency for de-normalizing identity thinking. This is largely because Adorno deems Heidegger’s concept of “authenticity” - an existential modality designated by recursive engagement in practices of disillusionment and self-actualization - to contradict itself by reaffirming atomization, alienation, and reification as social norms. Given that the majority of Adorno’s objections to Fundamental Ontology are briefed by his broader belief that it eschews non-identity thinking, the central task of this dissertation is to search for exceptions, that is, to ask after the plausibility of interpreting essential components of the Ontology so that non-identity not only “appears,” but assumes a critical position. This foremost involves examining the meaning of Being as a lived hermeneutic, the role of existential analysis for rediscovering what I call “authentic non-identity thinking” and its vitality to immanent social critique, and the possibility that a template for ethical relations inheres in or can be extrapolated from the Ontology. While the focus of the dissertation remains with Adorno and Heidegger, this is also to advance a more extensive understanding of the complex relationship between the First Generation Critical Theory and Existential Phenomenological traditions, including how they may be mutually supportive as they aim to negate ideology in both the academy and broader public life. To Sarah and Ava iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I’d like to acknowledge some of the folks who have supported me academically throughout the development of this dissertation, and who have helped to kindle my friendship with philosophy. First, thank you to my dissertation advisor, Christian Lotz, who has also been my academic advisor over these years. He has supported me to explore where my thinking is leading, even when we have differed on that thinking or in our articulations. And that matters. Sarah McClellan Bucey has been a well of inspirational support ever since we met in a 2006 Existentialism course. She has taken a keen interest in the development of this dissertation, provided eye-opening feedback, and continues to be my favorite dialogue partner. I am indebted to Iain MacDonald for his work on Adorno and Heidegger circa 2010. Encountering it in 2015 marked a turning point in my dissertation planning and longer interest in understanding the bond between critical theory and phenomenology. Thank you to Chris Long for his mentorship and continued guidance. I have valued our experiences of thinking and writing collaboratively, which have helped to refine my voice. I am also grateful for those whom provided generous feedback at two conferences at two critical stages of this dissertation: the 11th International Critical Theory Conference of Rome (2018), and Conventionalism: Heidegger’s “Anyone” and Contemporary Social Theory at the University of Vienna (2015). v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 CHAPTER ONE: Laying the Foundations for a Critically Fundamental (and Fundamentally Critical) Social Ontology ................................................................. 28 I. Fundamental Ontology in overview ......................................................................... 28 II. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and charge of idealism ............................................ 44 III. Dasein’s lived hermeneutic .................................................................................... 65 CHAPTER TWO: Disclosing Non-Identity as a Condition of Being Across Existential Modalities ......................................................................................... 107 I. Circling from and back to non-being: the hermeneutics of existential analysis ..... 107 II. Non-identity across existential modalities ............................................................ 136 CHAPTER THREE: Recovering Non-Identity as a Possibility for Being, Part One: Authentically Resolute for Critical Interpretation .......................................... 163 I. Dasein’s “progression” toward authenticity ........................................................... 163 II. Socio-historical Dasein and resoluteness for critical interpretation ...................... 178 CHAPTER FOUR: Recovering Non-Identity as a Possibility for Being, Part Two: Authentically Resolute for Social Critique and Care ..................................... 223 I. Heidegger’s existential analytic as critical social practice: next steps ................... 223 II. Immanent critique, freedom of consciousness, and Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity” ............................................................................................................... 238 III. Disillusionment and agency: authentic historizing as a structure of immanent critique ....................................................................................................................... 261 IV. Hermeneutically being-with: meta-critical reflections ........................................ 292 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 326 vi INTRODUCTION God could create only by hiding himself. Otherwise there would be nothing but himself. Holiness should then be hidden too, even from consciousness in a certain measure. And it should be hidden from the world. — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace The history of the relationship between First Generation Critical Theory1 and existential phenomenology has been fraught with times of unyielding animosity, and times of reserved indifference. While some scholars within each tradition have attempted to traverse what has often been regarded as an irreparable rift,2 many have also straightforwardly denied that the traditions are able to support each other in any significant way. Despite how complex and sensitive this relationship has proven to be throughout and beyond the twentieth century, and despite its periods of popular neglect, exploring the potential intersections of the two traditions deserves and continues to receive attention in scholarship today.3 The difficulty of engaging in such exploration finds one main reason in the fact that, while the traditions have developed alongside one another and appear to be aimed toward many common ends, they also appear to diverge greatly in regard to the particular questions each has claimed to be philosophically primary and the particular approaches each has established to pursue them. 1 First Generation Critical Theory is otherwise known as The Frankfurt School. I will refer to the tradition by both names. 2 Looking at it more broadly as the relationship between First General Critical Theory on the one hand, and phenomenology and existential phenomenology (or existentialism)