Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School by Mikko Immanen

Author:Mikko Immanen [Immanen, Mikko]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Philosophy, Movements, Critical Theory, History, Europe, Germany, Individual Philosophers
ISBN: 9781501752384
Google: JkHJDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: CornellUP
Published: 2020-11-15T21:05:55+00:00

Adorno’s Rejection of the Question of the Human Being

The question of the human being, Adorno maintained, was “an idealist demand, that of an absolute beginning, as only pure thought by itself can accomplish.” Despite post-Husserlian phenomenology’s polemics against abstract Cartesianism, its question of human essence was itself “a Cartesian demand, which believes it necessary to raise thinking to the form of its thought presuppositions and axioms.” If philosophy used its energies to uncover these axioms, however, Adorno claimed, it can “reach them only formally, and at the price of that reality in which its actual tasks are laid.”52 Still, leaving the problem of formalism aside, one could ask why Adorno did not answer this question with his own conception of the human being. Moreover, did not Adorno’s critical theory presuppose, out of logical necessity, some sort of understanding of what it means to be human?

The discussion on “religious Urmotives” in 1931 leaves no doubt that Adorno certainly believed that human beings could break free from natural and social constraints to a far greater degree than Heidegger thought was possible. But to defend this materialist conviction, Adorno refused to follow Herbert Marcuse, who had argued against Heidegger that human beings could develop from being thrown objects of history to its active subjects through socialist revolution. Martin Jay points out that Adorno had good reasons to be cautious about the path taken by Marcuse, and Lukács before him. In setting the paradigm for Western Marxism, Lukács had drawn on Hegel to argue that the human being was not just the object but also the subject of history. Relying on a reading of Giambattista Vico’s verum factum principle, according to which the human being knows best that which she has made, Lukács sought to raise the working class to “class consciousness” of the fact that history was a human creation. Adorno saw several downsides in advancing materialist social criticism in this way. First, Lukács used the idea of class consciousness to legitimate Bolshevism, which meant surrendering the working class and critical intellectuals under authoritarian party rule. Second, Lukács’s position was in danger of falling back to idealism because it held its insight into history as a new answer to the age-old question of the thing-in-itself. Third, Adorno was afraid that the legitimate emphasis on historical practice as the means to undo alienation could turn into a celebration of material labor as human essence. By refusing to articulate a socialist conception of the human being, Adorno saw himself defending Marx’s dream of the realm of freedom from turning into a realm of production for production’s sake.53

Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss underscore that a crucial element in Adorno’s thought was his concern with the “first nature.” This did not refer to any irrational primal forces, advocated by Lebensphilosophie, but to the world of suffering bodily creatures desiring fulfillment and happiness. Marxism was supposed to be the prime guardian of these concerns. Yet, orthodox Marxism’s overemphasis on an increase in the forces of production as an

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