Adorno and Existence by Gordon Peter E

Author:Gordon, Peter E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2016-11-14T05:00:00+00:00

Toward a Primacy of the Object

According to Adorno, the philosophies of bourgeois interiority (as typified by Kierkegaard, Husserl, and Heidegger, alongside Hegel) exhibit a similar ambition to preserve the subject’s dominance over the object, a dominance that defeats itself when the subject fails to establish enduring contact with the exterior world. A truly critical philosophy, Adorno claims, would overcome the ambivalence of this idealistic legacy by insisting on what he calls “the primacy of the object [Vorrang des Objekts].”15 The reasoning that motivates this idea closely resembles a transcendental argument (as Brian O’Connor has proposed in his lucid reconstruction).16 Briefly, Adorno establishes the notion of the object’s primacy by examining the interrelation between subject and object. It turns out that this relation is not reciprocal; that is, “the subject falls to the object totally differently than the latter to the former.” On the one hand, it is clear that even to think the object requires a subject: there can be no thought without a subjectivity that thinks. But the object that is grasped in thought nonetheless (in Adorno’s phrase) “preserves itself.” Stated differently, the object retains a moment of objective identity even outside the event of its conceptualization. Yet on the other hand, it is no less clear that each and every subject is already also an object. This is so because, notwithstanding the subject’s capacity to conceptualize the world, the subject is also a worldly being and therefore at the mercy of its own material conditions (its corporeality, its sensual relation to its surroundings, its dependency on the human collective, and so forth). But this means that the relation between subject and object can never exhibit a thoroughgoing reciprocity: “In the meaning of subjectivity is also the reckoning of being an object; but not so in the meaning of objectivity, to be a subject.”17 Every object is an object even when it is not an object-for-a-subject, but every subject is necessarily also an object. Affirming the basic insight of materialism, the very category of objecthood therefore enjoys a certain primacy, or preponderance (Vorrang).

According to Adorno, then, we can only escape the authoritarian and affirmative implications of identity theory if we start out from the other direction by acknowledging the primacy of the object. This primacy points away from idealism and toward a broadly construed “materialism” that will grasp reality as a historically and socially changing landscape whose very richness and temporal movement must forever overwhelm the subject’s ambitions of conceptual totalization. But Adorno also claims that the primacy of the object is not only a social or materialist phenomenon; this primacy is in fact logically presupposed in the very concept of experience. This is something that Kant himself had already grasped: in transcendental idealism, the memory of the primacy of the object persists in the idea of the thing-in-itself. Perhaps more than the extravagant idealists who followed after him, who claimed to consummate the ambitions of his system only by abolishing the metaphysical residuum of the nonconceptual object, Kant

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.