Hey Gary,
I heard on the grapevine that ‘Philosophical Conversations’ was mentioned in Samela Harris’s column in the Adelaide Advertiser. I don’t know what was said. I didn’t see the article, but guess what – we’re bickering away over Heidegger and Adorno and somewhere out there people are watching and reading.
Talking of bickering, here is a reply to your entry of June 15. It deals with the idea of death, which is central to Heidegger’s metaphysics, and is essentially a paraphrasing – with lots of quotations – of the lecture ‘On Dying Today’ from Adorno’s Metaphysics: Concept And Problems. It is in the sense specified here relating to the issue of death that I see Heidegger’s metaphysics as being dogmatic.
One of the first points Adorno makes in lecture is that the ‘failure of culture does not give thought a kind of free passage to some natural state’. There is no way to ‘appropriate metaphysics as a collection of pure categories which are immediate to consciousness, since knowledge can never disown its own mediateness, … its dependence on culture in every sense’. A metaphysics that proceeded ‘as if it were rendered immediate by some allegedly primal questions which elevate it above culture’ is blinded to its own conditions. Knowledge cannot repudiate its mediations but merely reflect them.
Death has been used as a way to break into metaphysics but the impotence of the metaphysics of death is neither to do with the fruitlessness of brooding nor with the belief that in the face of death a posture of readiness is seemly. The problem with this metaphysics is that it ‘necessarily degenerates into a kind of propaganda for death, elevating it to something meaningful, … in the end, preparing people to receive the death intended for them by their societies and states as joyfully as possible’. Reflections on death tend to be of ‘such a necessarily general and formal kind that they amount to tautologies’.
The inability of consciousness to extract meaning from death has to do not only with the absolute inaccessibility of the subject of the conversation and nor is it simply a consequence of the fact that the experience of death is ‘undoubtedly determined in part by society’. Beyond this, Adorno maintains, human consciousness is not able to withstanding the experience of death. Humans are the only animals with a general consciousness of the fact that they must die but, for reasons to do with social arrangements, ‘our mental organisation is not equal to this knowledge’. We are so governed by self-preservation and self-perpetuation ‘that we can only have this experience in a curiously abstract form’.
Consciousness is too weak to withstand the experience of death because it imagines itself to be something eternal, and so ‘it fortifies itself against anything which might remind it of its own unsteady floor, its own frailty’. Only when no human being fails to realise her or his potential might we be reconciled to death, and this is indicative of the extent to which the metaphysics of death is ‘bound up with history and with the deepest strata of humanity’s historical life’.
The metaphysics of death is more than merely solace because humans lost that which in earlier times made death bearable, ‘the unity of experience’. Resurrected metaphysical systems act as a kind of substitute for this, conveying the message that things are not so bad and trying to ‘reassure people about certain essentialities which … have become problematic’, above all time. People’s awareness of time, the possibility of their continuous experience of time, ‘has been deeply disrupted’. In response, ‘the current metaphysical systems are now attempting to rescue this conception of time, which is no longer accessible to experience, and to present temporality as a constituent of existence itself’. There is a tendency in such systems to conjure up that which is no longer experienced, and this is the reason why this kind of thinking is in sympathy with archaic conditions, especially ‘agrarian conditions or those of a simple, small-town barter economy’. Epic deaths are not possible because life no longer has any wholeness. In such circumstances, ‘the notion of wholeness is a kind of ersatz metaphysics’, attempting to underline notions of meaningful existence with ‘the positivist credentials of something immediately given’. It is this idea of completeness and meaningfulness that must be abandoned.
As people become aware that they have not really lived, death becomes more frightening, taking on the guise of a misfortune. ‘It is as if, in death, they experienced their own reification: that they were corpses from the first… The terror of death today is largely the terror of seeing how much the living resemble it. And it might therefore be said that if life were lived rightly, the experience of death would also be changed radically, in its innermost composition… Death and history form a constellation.’ This brings to mind the title of Céline’s book, Death On The Installment Plan, an image of death as average everyday life.
It is this constellation of death and history that is missing from Heidegger’s theory and necessarily so because once it is taken into account the whole edifice of his metaphysics collapses. Without the historically untarnished experience of death there is no way of defining authentic existence, and whether this is fleshed out in terms of inward withdrawal or social interrogation it matters not. There is just the same nothing other than reified history dressed up as existential categories.
I have also been discussing this with W. and I find the same difficulty with him that comes up in conversation with you, and that is a certain equivocation over concepts such as that of anxiety. It seems to me that both of you want to see anxiety as an historical and an existential category. I’m not saying that Heidegger does this but I do feel that somehow there is a struggle between history and metaphysics that is never quite resolved in Heidegger’s philosophy.
I don’t see this as in any way making Heidegger into a whipping boy. It is a perfectly reasonable philosophical criticism. Adorno may be wrong on some point or points. If he is I am sure it will come up in future discussion and we’ll explore the matter further. It is certainly making me look much more closely at what Adorno is saying. That is good in itself.
Before I forget, there is one other point I want to take up. You say that Heidegger ‘delivered on what Adorno only gestured to in his Dialectic Of Enlightenment: an alternative to an instrumental reason that dominates nature.’ I am not sure that this is quite the right way of seeing what is going on in this book – I presume you mean the book by Horkheimer and Adorno, and not just the concept of the dialectic of enlightenment.
The book turns on an historical thesis regarding the role of enlightenment in the development of European culture. This concept of enlightenment doesn’t just point at a period towards the end of the 18th century but at something that reaches back to the origins of this culture. It refers to a process of rationalisation that leads to the demythologisation and secularisation of culture, but this is not a straightforward process. Rather, enlightenment can only be conceived as a struggle of opposites, on the one hand seen as the rational realisation of the sovereign individual, and on the other as a nihilistic power opposed to life. In the Dialectic Of Enlightenment, this conception is attributed to Nietzsche. The danger in the dialectic of enlightenment is that it ever threatens to revert into myth. This is what Adorno sees happening at the present time.
Myth is always a response to the yearning for the eternal that is a part of the dialectic. I suppose that, put crudely (and this is me and not Adorno saying it), all accounts of universals are myths. In this one respect at least, Adorno is like Goodman and Quine – he is a committed nominalist. The current return of enlightenment to myth is because of a new universal – universal reason.
In Adorno’s view, this cannot be avoided by reverting to unreason, by giving up on the dialectic, as he sees Heidegger doing. Adorno is committed to the idea of enlightenment and that means turning the course of this dialectic back from the path of myth to the path of history, completing Kant’s project. Now, right or wrong, that seems to me fundamentally different from what Heidegger is doing.
Listen, Gary, one last point: you have to remember that I am a Medlinist – perhaps I am the only one. I won’t go into all the details now. It means nominalism, central state materialism and historical materialism, among other things. When I first read Adorno I was like a stranger in a strange land who suddenly comes across someone who speaks his language. I felt I knew him well. If I thought Heidegger was also speaking this language I’d go with him but I don’t think he is. But I’m not trying to whip him. I’m trying to say why I don’t think his is the path to take.