Adorno's "Against Epistemology"

[Paul Murphy]

My apologies if this is too belated to be of interest; I have been away
from this list for a while.

Dennis R Redmond writes:

>In re Adorno's closet masterpiece, I have to disagree with the previous
>postings which write off Gegen Erkenntnistheorie as a superficial critique
>of Husserl. This just ain't so. Adorno wrote G.E. in the late
>Thirties, then revised it extensively and came up with one of the most
>powerful ideological critiques of the Erhard era imaginable (it was
>published in 1954, during the first years of the Wirtschaftswunder).

Nitpicking pedantry: the actual German title is _Zur Metakritik der
Erkenntnistheorie_. The English translation is a misleading
overdetermination, as the book is no simple 'contra', but just what the
title says: a 'metacritique'. Adorno does not just attack and expose
bourgeois epistemology from the outside (as it were), but rather attempts
to immerse himself in the theory so as to determine the theory's limits
from within. And such a delimiting critique is not just an exposure of
intrinsic falsity, but also a 'redemption' of the theory's (possible)
truth-content.

I agree somewhat with the 'topicality' of the book, much like the fact that
_Jargon of Authenticity_ is addressed quite explicitly to post-war German
rhetoric and ideology. In fact, ZMdE isn't really about Husserl -- it's
about the aporetic status of idealism as such. TWA admits in the
introduction to playing a bit fast and loose with the details of
Husserliana, but he's exaggerating to make a point about a whole 'style' of
philosophizing beginning with Kant. I don't have the book in front of me,
but I remember its centre of gravity to be a sustained critique of Kant, in
particular of Kant's aporetic account of transcendental imagination in the
schematism of the understanding, much of which gets carried over into
_Negative Dialectics_.

>Husserl was, above all, the theoretician of logical absolutism: kind of a
>Weimar-era Kantianism, which had its political expression in the failed
>national liberal parties of the era. He was, however, more dynamic and
>interesting than his erstwhile discipline Heidegger, whom instaurated the
>Fascist seize of power from within the concepts themselves, as it were
>(the infamous phrase is, die Destruktion der Philosophie -- literally, the
>destruction of philosophy: fascist thought liquidates its prehistory
>like the Nazis liduidated the Jews).

Whether Heidegger 'instaurated' anything (besides a nice skiing run during
his brief rectorship) is debatable, but it should be mentioned that the
'literal' translation of 'Destruktion' as 'destruction' is problematic. The
term itself is an oddity, if not a neologism, playing on the root
'Struktur'. De-structuring makes better sense -- what it means is the
stripping away of traditional sedimentation and distortion which covers
over the 'matter itself'; a quick read of Husserl's _Crisis_ would show
that EH had the same sort of project in mind. In any case, 'liquidation' is
a highly tendentious way of thinking about it.

Heidegger did however slip up in his Davos disputation with Cassirer by
mentioning "Zerstoerung", the much more common German for 'destruction' --
do with this what thou wilt.

Regards,
Paul N. Murphy
Graduate Student
Department of Philosophy
University of Toronto