Adorno - Against epistemology : a metacritque

Portions of an extensive manuscript produced in Oxford during my first years of emigration, 193437, have been selected and reworked. For I felt their scope and significance kept them above simple academic dispute. Without sacrificing contact with the subject matter and thus the obligation to argue effectively against a method designed to forego the need for argument, the question I shall broach by means of a concrete model is the possibility and truth of epistemology in principle. Husserls philosophy is the occasion and not the point of this book. Thus it is not to be presented as a completed whole and then subject to some sort of comparison. As is appropriate for a thought which does not submit to the idea of a system, I seek to organize what is thought around its focal points. The result was a discontinuous and yet most closely connected, mutually supporting set of individual studies. Overlapping was unavoidable.

This book inclines toward substantive philosophy. The critique of Husserl aims across his work at the tendency, which was of such emphatic concern to him and which he felt German philosophizing appropriated much more fundamentally than is currently admitted. The book is, nevertheless, not systematic in the sense of the traditional contrast to history. If it challenges the very concept of system, it also seeks to grasp an historical core inside the substantive question. For the historical/systematic distinction also falls under the critique of this book.

Nowhere do I pretend it is philological or hermeneutic. Secondary literature is ignored. A number of Husserls own texts, especially in the second volume of the Logical Investigations, are a densely complex thicket and certainly even ambiguous. Should my interpretation occasionally be in error, I would be the last to defend it. On the other hand, I could not respect programmatic declarations, and had to abide by what the texts themselves appeared to me to say. Thus I did not allow myself to be intimidated by Husserls assurance that pure phenomenology is not epistemology, and that the region of pure consciousness has nothing to do with the concept of the structure of the given in the immanence of consciousness (Bewutseinsimmanenz) as it was known to pre-Husserlian criticism. How exactly Husserl distinguishes himself from this criticism is just as much a matter of discussion as whether that distinction is binding or not.

My analysis is confined to what Husserl himself published, with preference for the authentic phenomenological writing on which the restoration of ontology was based over the later works, in which Husserls phenomenology betrayed itself and reverted into a subtly modified neo-Kantianism. Yet, since the revision of pure phenomenology came not from the convictions of its creator, but was rather imposed by its object, I thus felt free to turn to the Formal and Transcendental Logic and the Cartesian Meditations, whenever the drift of the discussion demanded it. All the pre-phenomenological writings have been ignored, in particular the Philosophy of Arithmetic, as well as the posthumous publications. Comprehensiveness was never my aim. The analyses Husserl actually carried through and to which he himself devoted his energy provoked my attention more than the total edifice.

Yet my intention was certainly not the mere critique of details. Instead of disputing individual epistemological issues, micrological procedure should stringently demonstrate how such questions surpass themselves and indeed their entire sphere. The themes which compose such a movement are summarized in the Introduction. The four studies alone, however, are responsible for the cogency of what I have developed.

Three of the chapters have appeared in Archiv fr Philosophie. Chapter 4 was published separately as early as 1938 under the title Zur Philosophie Husserls (Band 3, Heft 4). Chapters 1 and 2 came out in 1953 (Band 5, Heft 2 and Band 6, Heft 1/2). The final chapter in particular has been thoroughly revised since its first appearance.

Frankfurt

Easter 1956