Trevor,
I'm due to catch a plane back to Canberra for another week of sittings in a few hours. It promises to be a long and hectic week possibly the last before the election is called.
Some of the issues on which Heidegger and Adorno are in dispute can be highlighted from reading this text. These issues are:
the subject object problem and the displacement of traditional epistemology
the nature of metaphysics
the existentialism of Heidegger
the nature of philosophical terminology and the use of philosophical language
the emancipatory potential of modernity and cultural modernism
No doubt there are more issues.
This opens up a pathway whereby the philosophical relationship between Adorno and Heidegger is overshadowed by, and collapsed into, politics. That has led a tendency in philosophy to view one from the perspective of the other or to tackle their work on the basis of crude caricatures. It is an approach that I have rejected.
Dunno if this helps. Just complicates matters I reckon. This textual background to Adorno's critique of Heidegger may be of some use.
On the subject object problem Heidegger argued that the metaphysical distinction between the knowing subject and the object of thought was completely artificial in the sense that a subject in always already en-worlded, embedded in the ‘objects’ it seeks to know. A human mind is therefore simply unable to step ‘outside’ of the sensible world in order to represent that world from the point of view of some kind of omniscient interpreter.
There is the givenness of our being in the world; we wake to ‘thrownness’, ("enowed by Being") and are ‘called’ to make some kind of response. That response is a form of freedom.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at June 20, 2004 05:18 PM | TrackBack