miller - adorno critic husserl

PHENOMENOLOGY’S NEGATIVE DIALECTIC:ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF HUSSERL’S EPISTEMOLOGICALFOUNDATIONALISM

JARED A. MILLER

Philosophers have long been preoccupied with questions concerning the natureand fundamental status of their discipline.1 This is not all that surprising givenphilosophy’s traditional claim to hold a privileged position vis-à-vis other fields ofinquiry. But the search for answers to these questions, at least in the form of aquest for unconditional foundations from which to speak truth, has come underattack in the past century. The popularity of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud amongscholars in the early 20th century certainly contributed to the sense that philoso-phy’s recurring “crises” and debates over proper foundations revealed the bank-ruptcy of its self-prescribed task. Figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida,and the later Wittgenstein (to name only a select few) reiterated and rearticulatedconcerns over the tenability and productivity of this task and offered methods forliberating thought from this model of philosophizing. Thanks in large part to thework of Richard Rorty and Richard Bernstein, the late 1970s and early 1980switnessed a flurry of interest in the question of foundationalism.2 While overlap-ping with the more global discussion about the distinction between modern andpostmodern, this debate centered on the conception of philosophy as an enterpriseintent on securing an Archimedean point or foundation upon which its authorityover other disciplines and cultural spheres might be grounded.

Conceived as the distinctly modern (or even Cartesian) project aimed at defeat-ing skepticism by locating absolute, infallible, and/or indubitable truths accessible

1 This piece has undergone a long process of revision, and I am greatly indebted to the helpfulcomments of Michael Sullivan, Brian O’Connor, David Carr, Walter Hopp, and an anonymous readerfrom The Philosophical Forum.

2 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977); RichardBernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: Uof Pennsylvania P, 1983).

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to the cognitive subject, epistemology was singled out as the chief embodiment ofthe foundationalist attitude. The relationship between foundationalism and epis-temology, however, often changes depending upon the conception of these terms.If foundationalism is identified with the general tendency to find a fixed, absolutebasis from which to derive our notions of knowledge, truth, being, morality, andso on, then epistemology might be only one among many manifestations of thistrajectory of philosophical thought. On the other hand, when foundationalismrefers to a specific claim about the nature of epistemic warrant or justification inwhich all knowledge depends upon immediately justified beliefs or intuitivelygiven cognitions, then it appears as just one epistemological position againstwhich others, such as coherentism, constructivism, contextualism, etc., might becompared. The two extremes are not, however, mutually incompatible; there is noreason why we cannot conceive of foundationalism as a broad intellectual trendthat also has specific exemplifications in epistemological accounts that groundknowledge in immediate cognitions, self-evident truths, and so on. This under-standing would prevent the conflation of foundationalism with epistemology perse, while nevertheless permitting us to relate epistemological accounts to otherphilosophical commitments associated with foundationalism, such as correspon-dence theories of truth, metaphysical realism, or cognitive representationalism.Given its conceptual flexibility, I will follow this approach and conceive ofepistemological foundationalism as a subspecies of philosophical foundationalismbroadly construed.

Over the past 20 years, the issues surrounding the claims of foundationalism andepistemology have penetrated the scholarship of both major and minor figureswithin the history of philosophy.3 The sentiment motivating those scholars who takeup these problems seems to be a fear that the resort to caricatures, broad conceptualstrokes, and overly simplified paradigms has obscured unique contributions to thedebate. Hasty denunciation of philosophers and philosophical movements mustthus be replaced with detailed scholarship aimed at unearthing intermediate posi-tions, neglected alternatives, and innovative glosses on the issues at stake.

Edmund Husserl has emerged as a highly disputed figure in the foundationalismdebate that wages across the historiography of philosophy. A number of scholarshave attempted to defend Husserl against the charge of foundationalism by

3 Some of the recent scholarship on Hegel is a good example of this. See Kenley R. Dove, “Hegel’sDeduction of the Concept of Science,” Hegel and the Sciences (Boston Studies in the Philosophy ofScience 64), ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: D. Reidel PublishingCompany, 1984) 271–81; Kenley R. Dove, “Phenomenolgy and Systematic Philosophy,” Methodand Speculation in Hegel’s Phenomenology, ed. Merold Westphal (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humani-ties Press, 1982) 27–40; William Maker, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel(Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); and Richard Dien Winfield, Overcoming Foundations: Studies inSystematic Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).

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emphasizing the anti-representationalist, non-foundationalist, and even postmod-ern tendencies of his thought.4 The reasons behind this increased attention, par-ticularly by those trained in analytic philosophy, are certainly many. Husserl’sperceived status as one of, if not the most prominent, “founders” of the continentaltradition is likely to be a significant motivation. Another lies in the fact that hisphenomenological project began with a serious effort to undermine those posi-tions which he described as “skeptical relativism” and developed into a programto retrieve philosophy as a “rigorous science” from the debilitating effects ofobjectivism and naturalism. Moreover, the specific concepts of phenomenologicalreduction, evidence (Evidenz), and eidetic intuition all appear to represent aspectsof an epistemological account based on immediately intuited cognitive givens anddesigned to counter relativist conceptions of truth and knowledge. Indeed, even acursory glance at the themes, rhetoric, and aims of Husserl’s work suggests aconsistent, if not uniform, concern with overcoming both intellectual and culturalcrisis by delineating the proper domain, method, and goals of the philosophicalenterprise. The result of these converging factors has been to promote Husserl asa philosopher for whom the project of foundationalism and the viability andsustainability of epistemology are highly relevant and deeply intertwined prob-lems. In fact, the combination of his overriding faith in the redemptive power ofauthentic philosophical reflection and his repeated efforts to articulate and meth-odize this reflection makes Husserl a paradigmatic example of the intersectionbetween foundationalism in the broad sense and epistemological foundationalismmore specifically.

But before overt attacks on foundationalism came into fashion and long beforeHusserl emerged as a primary target, a German philosopher, musicologist, andsocial critic had already accused Husserlian phenomenology of capitulating to“that Cartesian illusion which validates the absolute foundation of philosophy.”5

Theodor Adorno spent much of his career studying and criticizing Husserl’sphenomenological epistemology, particularly its early formulations in LogicalInvestigations and Ideas. Culminating in his 1956 work, Zur Metakritik der

4 John J. Drummond, Husserlian Intentionality and Non-Foundational Realism: Neoma and Objects(Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1990); John J. Drummond, “Phenomenology and theFoundationalism Debate,” Reason Papers 16 (Fall 1991): 45–71; Gail Soffer, Husserl and theQuestion of Relativism (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); Henry Pietersma, “TheProblem of Knowledge and Phenomenology,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50(September 1989): 27–47; and Walter Hopp, “Husserl, Phenomenology, and Foundationalism,”Inquiry 51, no. 2 (2008): 194–216.

5 Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, Studies in Husserl and the Phenomeno-logical Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) 4; Theodor Adorno,Zur Metacritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien über Husserl und die phänomenologischen Anti-nomien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 13.

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Erkenntnistheorie, Adorno’s critique of Husserlian phenomenology represents anearly prescient characterization of Husserl as a “philosopher of foundations.”6 Inthis often neglected work, Adorno sets out to produce a detailed, “micrological”study of Husserl’s arguments for absolute truth and immediate knowledge thatwill simultaneously demonstrate the untenability of any attempt to secureepistemic foundations. Adorno’s goal is to level a critique of Husserl and therebyof epistemological foundationalism as a whole by indicating how contradictionsand antinomies immanent to Husserl’s thought are the result of his self-undermining effort to isolate cognition from its social context. Husserl would liketo treat knowledge and truth independently of practical, social, and historicalconditions under which real epistemic subjects come to have the knowledge thatthey have. However, this very isolation of the epistemological project from con-sideration of its social and historical context is the consequence of the idealsimplicit within that very context: namely, late bourgeois society’s hermetic sepa-ration of mental and manual labor. The subsequent difficulties that ensnare Hus-serl’s theory stem from the divisions that plague his social environment and fromhis theory’s self-deception regarding its relation to those divisions themselves.

This kind of “internal meta-criticism” has a certain prima facie advantageover those anti-foundationalist critiques which denounce the dogmatic “Cartesiananxiety” only to appeal to the equally dogmatic belief that the contextual limita-tions of reflection render all criteria of intellectual discrimination untenable, andwhich conclude with an embrace of theoretical egalitarianism and radical norma-tive pluralism. Adorno’s project, in contrast, appears to critique the foundation-alist dogma while obviating the total elimination of critical standards byemploying an immanent analysis that operates within Husserl’s own normativeframework but yields results that transcend the particularity of his thought. Suchan initiative offers the prospects for an anti-foundationalism that is both philo-sophical and critical.

Despite these intentions and potentialities, Adorno’s work remains a painfullyopaque, convoluted, and nearly impenetrable polemic that vacillates rapidlybetween close textual criticisms and sweeping claims about contemporary socialconditions, cultural crises, and their manifestations in modern philosophicalthought. Political, historical, and disciplinary issues aside, Adorno’s language andargumentative style would provide more than enough of an obstacle to widerreception of this work.

6 In 1924 Adorno took his doctoral dissertation with Han Cornelius. His work was entitled TheTranscendence of the Material and Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Adorno continued todevelop his critique of Husserl in exile, first at Oxford’s Merton College (1934–36) under thesupervision of Gilbert Ryle, then in the United States in the form of essays that were published bothin the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung and the Journal of Philosophy, and finally in Germany duringthe 1950s.

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In the face of these interpretative difficulties, it is my aim to extract fromAdorno’s writings on Husserl a coherent and pointed series of arguments aimed atexposing and undermining Husserl’s foundationalist project. I will then examinethe merit of these charges both in relation to Husserl’s texts and in terms of theirability to make good on their own promises. If it can be shown that Adorno’scritique finds support in a detailed and generous reading of Husserl’s position,then there will be good reason to explore his larger claims about the inadequacyof foundationalism in general. The stakes of the encounter between Husserl andAdorno are thus quite high. If Adorno’s critique succeeds and a paradigmaticexemplar of foundationalism is defeated by an immanent analysis immune to thepitfalls of more extreme anti-foundationalist positions, then the abandonment ofthe foundationalist project in favor of a different kind of critical program will findinitial justification. Likewise, if Husserl’s thought survives Adorno’s argumentsunscathed, then foundationalism would emerge even stronger, having defeatedone of its most sophisticated challengers. With these possibilities in mind, Iconceive of this article as a preliminary investigation that might serve as theimpetus and entry-point for further exploration into the nature of anti-foundationalist, meta-epistemological criticisms, and their consequences for thefuture of philosophy.

In his book, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibilities ofCritical Rationality, Brian O’Connor reconstructs Adorno’s epistemological posi-tion around the goal of formulating a rationally articulable account of experience.For Adorno, experience is “the process in which ideally, that is, in its fullestpossibility, one (a subject) is affected and somehow changed by confrontationwith some aspect of objective reality (an object).”7 In this sense, experience has astructure of reciprocity and transformation; as Adorno often says, the subject andobject mediate one another in the process of experience and knowledge acquisi-tion.8 This notion of mediation is deployed by Adorno in various contexts oftencarrying multiple intensions; sometimes he emphasizes the aspect of activity,sometimes that of reciprocity, and other times the more traditional and logicalsense of relational dependence. Adorno also awarded this concept a central role inthe critique of foundationalism when he insisted that “[m]ediation is not a positiveassertion about being, but instead a directive [Anweisung] for cognition not tocontent itself with such positivity.”9

7 Brian O’Connor, Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) 3.

8 For a lengthy discussion of Adorno’s concept of mediation, see Brian O’Connor, “Hegel, Adorno andthe Concept of Mediation,” Bulletin of the Hegel Society Great Britain 39/40 (1999): 84–96.

9 Adorno (1983): 24; Adorno (1970): 32. Translation altered.


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In all its connotations, mediation is used in contrast to the one-sided andreified accounts of experience offered by his opponents. Drawing upon theinsights of Georg Lukacs, Adorno believes that contemporary philosophy (of theearly 20th century) reproduces the reified and rationalized world of late capi-talism in which individuals confront their social relations as objectified “things”bound by eternal laws of nature and standing in opposition to human agency.Philosophies submit to reification and to what he calls “identity thinking” whenthey simplify the reciprocity of experience, either by assuming that the objectcan be mastered in its totality by the subject (idealism), or by attempting toremove the subject from the process of knowledge altogether (positivism).10

According to O’Conner, Adorno prepares quasi-Kantian “transcendental cri-tiques” aimed at demonstrating that by assuming models of knowledge thatignore the reciprocal structure of experience, reason is led to equally tenable yetmutually exclusive commitments. Like Kant, Adorno believes that the result ofsuch ignorance is antinomy. However, in contrast to Kant who envisioned suchantinomies as the external juxtaposition of two equally rational conclusions—asin the tradition of ancient skepticism and the method of equipollence—Adornolocates antinomies as internal elements of certain philosophical models. He thusperceives himself as the performer of “immanent critiques” which illuminate theinternal inconsistencies that afflict philosophical programs that presuppose one-sided accounts of experience.

In this vein, Adorno’s treatment of Husserl consists of various attempts to showthat the failure of his arguments for absolute truth and immediate knowledge tomake good on their own promises yields two mutually exclusive solutions, both ofwhich demand irreparable sacrifices to Husserl’s phenomenology. As I see it,Adorno’s critique consists in three phases distinguishable by their targets. The firstphase aims at challenging Husserl’s theory of logical absolutism as outlined in theProlegomena to Pure Logic. The second focuses on the conception of perceptual“fulfillment” presented in the Logical Investigations, and the third takes up therelated notion of categorial intuition. I will demonstrate that the success of the firstphase depends upon the success of the latter two and that while Adorno’s criticismof perceptual fulfillment and its antinomy holds water under a more systematicand detailed examination of Husserl’s position, his arguments against categorialintuition ultimately fail to reveal the antinomies he believes to be present withinHusserl’s position.

10 Interestingly, Adorno avoids idealism by positing a “dialectical priority of the object.” He contendsthat there is an irreducible moment of particularity that evades conceptual subsumption and whichis constitutive of meaning itself. However, because he conceives it as a moment within experience,this objective priority is not identical with Kant’s thing-in-itself. See O’Connor (2004): 45–70.

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LOGICAL ABSOLUTISM

The first phase of Adorno’s critique focuses on the difficulties involved inHusserl’s logical absolutism. This doctrine was developed in the Prolegomena toPure Logic that precedes the Logical Investigations. In this introduction, Husserlattacked the psychologistic understanding of logic while trying to avoid thestandard reference of its opponents to the discipline’s supposed practical norma-tivity. Husserl’s “third way” involved three major claims: (1) If logical laws areinductive generalizations drawn from empirical observation, then their validity ismerely probabilistic, which it is not; (2) if logical laws imply factual conditions,then their truth would be contingent upon those facts, which it is not; and (3) thereduction of logic to psychology leads invariably to relativism, which is neces-sarily self-defeating. From this, Husserl developed a view of logical principles asideal laws whose being and validity was independent of any real psychological orphysical existent. Whether this position of logical absolutism committed Husserlto a kind of Platonic realism that thoroughly divorced logic from psychologicalstates is possible, but not obvious.

Against this view Adorno raises a series of objections. He claims that the choicebetween logical laws as ideal unities or psychological generalizations is predi-cated on the assumption that the only potential real bears of logical truth areisolated individuals or “monads.”11 While attempting to circumvent the pitfalls ofpsychologism, Adorno appears to suggest that Husserl has ignored a kind ofhistoricism or sociologism that might yield extra-psychical validity to logical lawswithout removing them entirely from the realm of the real.12 Unfortunately,Adorno only intimates in this direction and never fleshes out his conception oflogical validity so as to demonstrate how it would avoid Husserl’s critique ofpsychologism and relativism. Instead, he chides Husserl for hypostasizing thedistinction between what he calls “genesis”—the origin of concepts in a processof social-historical development—and “validity.” Where the total isolation of truthfrom genetic inquiry is supposed to characterize absolutism, the subordination oftruth to genesis is the general course of all relativism. Adorno, as we shall see, isintent on demonstrating that these alternatives are mutually dependent and equallydeficient. According to him, the “alienation” of logical truths from the syntheticprocesses of thought occurs because under Husserl’s gaze, logical forms areconsidered “objects themselves.” Accusing Husserl of realism with regard touniversals, Adorno charges that by treating logical laws and meanings as self-sufficient ideal objects, Husserl has obscured the fact that without reference toactual propositions, these laws are merely empty forms. By talking about a logical

11 Adorno (1983): 58–59; Adorno (1970): 65–66.12 Adorno (1983): 59–60; Adorno (1970): 66–67.


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“object,” Husserl has smuggled content into abstract forms, content that couldonly be achieved by applying these forms in actual judgment.13 Adorno thusbelieves that Husserl’s logical absolutism is forged upon the illegitimate confla-tion of conceptual a priority, which he conceives along Kantian lines as beinginseparable from and hence mediated by experience in general, with immediategivenness, a kind of non-conceptual grasp of “objects themselves” that neverthe-less relies on concepts for articulation and determination.14 The failed attempt toboth recognize and overcome this dichotomy between mediation and immediacy,form and matter, determinacy and givenness, is for Adorno the general shape ofthose antinomies that plague Husserl’s project, and hence the philosophicalexpression of antagonistic society.

Although these objections are provocative, Adorno’s exposition presupposes somany terminological and conceptual distinctions not shared by Husserl that anassessment of them is quite difficult. Instead of trying to locate the source of thesepresuppositions in Adorno’s intellectual appropriations, I will attempt to recon-struct and evaluate those arguments that are more clearly “immanent” to Husserl’sepistemological account.

That being said, the only coherent argument which Adorno offers his readers forthe inadequacy he attributes to Husserl’s logical absolutism, and in fact the onlyone that fits his model of internal antinomies, runs as follows. He argues that oncelogical validity has been made “absolute and independent of all genesis and thusultimately of all entities,” there remain only two ways of verifying this truth andboth fail to achieve their goals.15 He describes the first option as one in which

[c]onsciousness confronts logic and its “ideal laws.” If consciousness wishes to substantiate theclaim of logic as founded and not crudely assume it, then logical laws must be reasonable(einsichtig) to thought. In that case, however, thinking must recognize them as its own laws, itsproper essence. Thinking, then, is the embodiment (Inbegriff ) of logical acts. Pure logic and purethought would not be detachable from one another.16

What Adorno presents here is a quasi-Kantian transcendental argument for justi-fying a belief in the ideal validity of logical laws. In attempting to determine the

13 Adorno (1983): 66–68; Adorno (1970): 73–75.14 The contrast between conceptual a priority and immediate givenness bears unmistakable traces of

Hegel’s argument in the section of Phenomenology of Spirit on “Sense-Certainty” (§90–110). Therehe examines the consistency of claims to know objects non-inferentially through the direct acquain-tance of sensation. Upon reflection, these claims reveal themselves to be self-defeating insofar asany attempt to articulate, describe, or individuate the object of knowledge invariably makes use ofeither universals or contextually circumscribed indexicals (“this,” “here,” “now”) which necessarilyrequire other items of knowledge, that is, they are epistemically mediated.

15 Adorno (1983): 73; Adorno (1970): 80.16 Ibid. Translation altered.

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validity of these laws, thought finds that it can only do so by employing those verysame laws as its normative criteria of judgment, that is, as its “proper essence.”Thus, logical laws are considered to be the a priori forms of thought, the universaland necessary conditions for the possibility of rational judgment in general. Thetruth of logic is justified in a “transcendental” or regressive manner by consideringthe formal conditions that make possible our ordinary experience of reason-givingand judgment-making. The inadequacy of this interpretation is that it confirms thevalidity of logic only by making it dependent on the real processes of thought forits content. Although he suggests that this method is unsatisfactory, Adorno neveroffers an explanation for this claim.17 But taking a cue from Husserl’s owncriticism of Kant, we can say that this type of hypothetical, or as I have describedit, regressive argument implicitly assumes a certain “subjective constitution” towhose existence logic’s validity would remain dependent and relative.18 This wayof verifying logic’s validity thus secures truth at the expense of its ideal andabsolute status.

The second prong of this antinomy consists in what Adorno considers to beHusserl’s own view of how logical truths are verified. If logical principles are notpresupposed by consciousness, then they are given “phenomenally” to it in whatHusserl called the “experience of truth.” Such a claim strictly separates logicalvalidity from the laws of thought. Unfortunately, as Adorno argues, by simplybeing “given” to consciousness, the laws of logic would be “valid only in theframework of [logic’s] ‘appearing’. They would remain dogmatic, unproven, andcontingent.”19 Once the subject or consciousness has been denied a constitutiverole in its validity, the logical a priori can no longer be critically interrogated, only“registered and accepted as a higher ‘phenomenon’.”20 In this way, Adorno argues,Husserl has transformed the world of logical propositions into a world of “facts”which, though removed from spatiotemporal conditions, retain even more ofthe impenetrable “stubbornness” of their “real” counterparts. By refusing toqualify the validity of logical laws, Husserl, according to Adorno, removes allcriteria by which to verify the content of those laws and thus has no way ofchallenging arbitrary and conflicting truth-claims. Where the first position in theantinomy succeeded in verifying logic’s a priori validity but did so only byappealing to “subjective” conditions, the second maintains logic’s ideality and“objectivity” but fails to confirm its validity.

17 Adorno (1983): 74; Adorno (1970): 80–81.18 Of course, it is important to remember that for Kant, the principles of Pure General Logic (as

opposed to those of Transcendental Logic) cannot be violated even by an intellect endowed withintellectual intuition.

19 Adorno (1983): 74; Adorno (1970): 81.20 Ibid.


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At the heart of Husserl’s logical absolutism lies an adherence to what Adornocalls a notion of “truth as residue”: “For the sake of mastery, subjectivism mustmaster and negate itself [. . .]. They [the philosophers of foundation] employ theirsubjectivity in order to subtract the subject from truth and conceive objectivity asresidue [. . .] truth should be what remains, the dregs, the stalest leftovers.”21 Theclaim is that Husserl advocates both a method for determining truth which seeksto purge away the dross of subjective and contingent elements in cognition as wellas a notion of truth itself which identifies this remainder as the essence of theobjectively true. According to Adorno, the removal of the subject’s contribution totruth and cognition leads to the abdication of discursive justification. Rather thanextracting an unsullied truth, Husserl’s schema arrives at an object that is reducedto “sheer subjectivity,” a personal object composed of all the contingent anddogmatic prejudices of the knower.22 In this way, logical absolutism, which forAdorno assumes the mere givenness of logical truth, renounces the need forcritical reflection and thus has no way of separating objective principles from thearbitrary preferences of the subject.

This notion of “truth as residue” is the basis for Adorno’s belief that “allrelativism lives off the consistency of absolutism.”23 He argues that “if everyindividual and restricted bit of knowledge is burdened with the necessity of beingstraightforwardly valid independently of every further qualification, then allknowledge is effortlessly delivered over to its own relativity.”24 Adorno’s pointseems to be that the absolutist’s commitment to immediate knowledge eliminatesthe ability to justify truth-claims on the basis of other justified beliefs and cogni-tions and that without this capacity there remains no way to discriminate betweenknowledge and opinion.

What is interesting about this charge is that Adorno appears to be making aclaim about Husserl’s conception of logical truth, but his argument draws con-clusions on the basis of the inadequacy of immediate knowledge. Now I believethat throughout the course of his critique of logical absolutism Adorno has madea series of assertions that tend to obscure the important difference between truthand knowledge. The position of logical absolutism, strictly speaking, is one aboutthe non-relativistic nature of logical truth, for example, that ~(p · ~p) is trueindependently of any and all real, empirical, and minimally, temporal entities. Inthis sense, the central tenant of logical absolutism is then the claim that logicaltruths are absolute insofar as they are necessary, invariant, and ideal. To talk of“absolute” knowledge, on the other hand, would seem to describe a situation in

21 Adorno (1983): 15; Adorno (1970): 23. Translation altered.22 Adorno (1983): 72; Adorno (1970): 78–79.23 Adorno (1983): 87; Adorno (1970): 94.24 Ibid.

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which we are justified in believing that p on the basis of something other than itsrelation to other justified beliefs. In other words, “absolute” knowledge is imme-diately, directly, and self-sufficiently justified true belief. The exact nature of the“relation” absent in immediate knowledge may be left undefined for the sake ofgenerality and because, as I have suggested, Adorno’s use of the terms “media-tion” and “mediate knowledge” intimates often diverse connotations. However, aswe shall come to see, this general definition and the concept motivating it leaveunanalyzed another important distinction: that between existential and justifica-tory conditions of knowledge, that is, the conditions necessary for holding a beliefand the cognitive relations that make that belief justified. This difference maps onto Adorno’s genesis-validity distinction and will become crucial in his critique ofHusserl’s categorial intuition.

One last comment on this point is needed. Appealing to a distinction betweentruth and knowledge does not entail taking a stand on the fundamental relationshipbetween the referents of these two terms. Both realist and anti-realist positions ontruth must take account of this distinction, even if it is only for the purposes ofarguing, in the case of the latter, that truth is ultimately inseparable from knowl-edge schemes. The same goes for the distinction between the conditions ofbelief-formation and those of belief-justification indicated previously. An episte-mological externalist will want to claim that the latter must include at least someof the former, but he will still need to explain why, despite this distinction, thereis substantial overlap between the two categories. For my purposes, I have foundthat drawing attention to these distinctions facilitates the identification of hiddenpresuppositions and potential misrepresentations in Adorno’s critique of Husserl.

In accordance with this approach, I submit that Adorno fails to explicitlyacknowledge the distinction between immediate knowledge and absolute truth inhis notion of “truth as residue,” since, as I have said, this describes both a methodof verification or justification that is unmediated by consciousness and a notion oflogical truth as absolute and necessary. Moreover, Adorno’s description of theantinomy plaguing logical absolutism appears to argue the incoherency of a notionof truth on the basis of a failed explanation of justification. The absolute andideal character of logical truth is supposedly untenable because of our inability toprovide successful accounts of how our beliefs in these truths are verified orjustified.

However, I would suggest that this strategy actually follows one adopted byHusserl himself in his defense of logical absolutism. As I noted earlier, one ofHusserl’s arguments in the Prolegomena is that if logical laws are inductivegeneralizations drawn from empirical observation, then their validity is merelyprobabilistic. This move describes an inference about the nature of certain truthson the basis of the kind of justification we have for believing them, in this case,that basis is induction. Furthermore, as Gail Soffer has shown, Husserl’s


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arguments in the Prolegomena rely implicitly on an account of Evidenz andepistemic intuition that has yet to be outlined in that text.25 In other words, muchof Husserl’s confidence in the untenability of psychologism rests on the belief thatour knowledge of logical truth is given in “categorial intuition” as evidence(Evidenz), that is, an unmediated and direct form of justification. In this way,Adorno has remained “immanent” to Husserl’s position by attacking the absolut-ism of logical laws on the basis of the impossibility of immediate knowledge.Of course, up to this point his only explanation for just why this kind of know-ledge is indefensible relies on the hither-to undefended assumption that the onlyway to justify propositions is to do so inferentially, discursively, or otherwise“mediately.”

For this reason, we must turn, as Adorno himself does, to Husserl’s descriptionof immediate knowledge as Evidenz and fulfillment in an effort to see if thisaccount can make good on its promises. If Adorno can successfully undermineHusserl’s confidence in immediate knowledge, then his objections against logicalabsolutism will have a much higher chance of success.

PERCEPTUAL FULFILLMENT

Husserl promised as early as the Prolegomena to provide a theory of knowledgeaccording to which the verification of propositions depended upon their ability tofind “fulfillment through evidence” restricted to that which is “intuitively estab-lished.”26 This “evidence” or justification involves an apprehension of the object“itself” as it is immediately given and corresponds to the “luminous certainty thatwhat we have accepted exists or that what we have rejected does not exist.” In theSixth Investigation, Husserl lays out a theory of fulfillment meant to elaborate themeaning of givenness and the process whereby “evidence” is acquired. He seeshimself performing a phenomenological analysis of the traditional epistemologi-cal relation of thought to “corresponding intuition,” or what Husserl calls the“unity of knowledge.”

Before proceeding to this discussion, we must briefly review some essentialHusserlian terminology. Husserl uses the term “act” to refer to all intentionalexperiences, that is, experiences that are directed at something, or are aboutsomething. This notion of intentionality inherited primitively from Brentano,became for Husserl a key concept in the establishment of the phenomenologicalenterprise. No longer could one conceive, in the empiricist vein, that ideas were“copies” of impressions, which were then further related to objects. Thinking

25 Soffer (1991): 66–67.26 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume 1 and 2, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Rout-

ledge, 2001) Pro. §7.

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about an object implies nothing about the existence of that object, nor is the realobject of intention somehow “contained” in the mental act of thinking it. Againstrepresentationalism in all its forms, Husserl held intentionality to be an intrinsicproperty of acts and not a relationship between concepts and reality. At the sametime, he distinguished between an act’s objective reference, what it is about, andits meaning. Since a variety of assertions may be uttered in different speech acts,by different speakers, in a range of different contexts, all nevertheless sharing thesame meaning and doing so independently of any intuitive objects, Husserl con-cluded that meanings must be abstractable properties, eternal universals, or “idealunities” capable of instantiating themselves in particular mental states. Meaningmakes up the ideal—as opposed to real or temporally determined—content of anact, in virtue of which it refers to an object. Different meanings may be correlatedto the same objective reference, as in the case of the victor of Jena and thevanquished at Waterloo. In this sense, our everyday mental acts—that is, those actsthat are not part of the phenomenological enquiry which takes up meaningsthemselves as objects of reflection—have their objective reference in virtue of anintermediary, the sense or meaning, which in itself need not necessarily corre-spond to any real object of intuition.

In the Fifth Investigation, Husserl deepened the anatomy of acts by introducingthe distinction between quality and matter. The former denotes the differencebetween judgments, wishes, questions, and so on: that is, different ways of beingintentional which “may be combined with every objective reference.”27 Matter, onthe other hand, is “that element in an act which first gives it reference to an object,and reference so wholly definite that it not merely fixes the object meant in ageneral way, but also the precise way in which it is meant.”28 Thus, in addition tosustaining an act’s objective reference, matter also includes the act’s distinctive“interpretative sense” which gives the determinant manner of reference, that is,its meaning. Quality and matter, which together constitute an act’s intentionalessence, become vital concepts in Husserl’s theory of fulfillment.

In the First Investigation, Husserl established the distinction between meaning-intentions—that is, acts whose meaning is not conjoined with an intuition of itssubject-matter—and meaning-fulfillments, or acts that “fulfill” meaning-intentionthrough an intuitive actualization of the act’s objective reference. In the SixthInvestigation, Husserl dissects meaning-fulfillment into three essential compo-nents: (1) a conceptual or signitive act which bears the meaning of a verbalexpression; (2) an intuitive act which presents the thing “itself” as that which isthought; and (3) an identity between the objective references of both acts. Husserllater attributes this “unity of identity” to a third “act of fulfillment” which brings

27 Ibid: V. §20. Italicized in original text.28 Ibid.


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about a “synthesis of identification,” a conscious recognition that the object meantin the signitive act is the same object presented as given in the intuitive act.29

Already there is ambiguity in Husserl’s discussion when he contends that theidentity of signitive and intuitive acts belongs not just to their objective reference,but to their entire matter.30 As noted, matter contains both an act’s objectivereference and its meaning. In the First Investigation, Husserl had assured hisreaders that opposed to every intended meaning in a signifying act, there was a“fulfilling sense” which allowed an intuitive act to present the object as “given”precisely as it was intended. If the “unity of identity” thus refers to the correspon-dence of both the objective reference as well as the sense of signitive and intuitiveacts, then it would seem that intuitive acts must also be bearers of meaning. If thisis the case, then Husserl must further explain how the content of these two actsdiffers so that intuition provides epistemic justification for meaning-intentions.

This problem of distinguishing intention from intuition becomes magnified inthe case of perception which, for Husserl, is the paradigmatic example of fulfill-ment: Perception gives “the thing itself” precisely as it is intended.31 The imme-diate givenness which characterizes perception, must, however, find a place forsensation, which though immediate, is necessarily non-intentional. Thus entersHusserl’s concept of “fullness” or “intuitive content.” In the Sixth Investigation,he argues that every purely intuitive act contains, in addition to its matter andquality, an element of fullness which denotes the sense-content of perceptualintuition and which serves to “fill” the “empty” signification.32 The raw, uninten-tional “stuff” of sensation is interpreted in the moment of “fullness” as the object“itself” to yield the gradations of evidence (Evidenz) corroborating assertiveintentions—the highest evidence being reserved for perception. This “interpreta-tion” is only possible, however, insofar as there is an intentional element capableof determining the “intuitive content” as the objective reference of the signitiveact. But if sensuous content is to be devoid of semantic content, then on what basiscan the former be “interpreted”? It seems that in order to avoid making the act ofrecognition or “interpretation” either arbitrary or inexplicable, Husserl was forcedto inject intentionality into the element of fullness and thus could only allow it tofulfill signification insofar as it possessed a “matter” of its own.33

With this exposition of Husserl’s concept of fulfillment in mind, I would like toexamine Adorno’s critique. Although he never brings his comments to the level ofdetail offered here, it is my contention that his argument against Husserl’s theory

29 Ibid: VI. §7, §8.30 Ibid: VI. §25.31 Ibid: VI. §37.32 Ibid: VI. §25.33 Ibid: VI. §37.

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of perceptual fulfillment is grounded on specific conceptual problems inherent inHusserl’s account of perceptual knowledge. Adorno claims that Husserl’s notionof fulfillment contains a blatant absurdity:

[P]erception, as consciousness of something, is included among intentional acts, but therebyrequires a new moment, i.e. that of fulfillment, which on Husserl’s theory, however, can be achievedby nothing other than perception itself [. . .]. [P]erception as “positing intention” should literally befulfilled, verified and made evident through perception, which equivocally modulates into itssecond, hyletic meaning, while Husserl anxiously avoids the concept of sensation.34

Adorno charges that Husserl’s description of perception is equivocal, being inten-tional on one hand and fulfilling on the other. Husserl does indeed offer suchseemingly contradictory depictions, and yet, as we have seen, in order to beconsidered fulfillment at all, perception would need to be founded on both asignitive and an intuitive act.

Interestingly, Adorno’s claim comes on the heels of a discussion of Kant thatappears suddenly in the middle of the chapter on perception and fulfillment. In asection entitled “Paradoxia of Pure Intuition,” Adorno offers a unique interpreta-tion of the Transcendental Aesthetic. He claims that Kant’s classification of spaceand time as “pure intuitions” of sensibility is motivated by a desire to evade thereciprocity of subject and object by “de-sensifying sense perception.” The attemptleads to an irresolvable contradiction:

Intuition as immediate sense-certainty, as givenness in terms of the subject, names a type ofexperience, which precisely as such can in no way be “pure” or independent of experience. Pureintuition is a square circle, experience without experience [. . .]. Pure intuition as immediate and notconceptual would indeed itself be sense perception, i.e. “experience.” Pure sensibility, releasedfrom any relation to content, would no longer be intuition, but rather “thought.” A form ofsensibility which merits the predicate “immediate” without, however, also being “given” isabsurd.35

According to Adorno, Kant embroiled himself in this absurdity because he failedto recognize the conditions of experience: that the “given” can only be givenaccording to the universal forms such as space and time, that is, as mediated, whilethose very forms are meaningless without their relation to the content of sensation.This brilliant example of Adorno’s transcendental critique bears directly on hisargument against Husserl’s theory of perceptual fulfillment. Just as Kant’s pureintuition sought to reduce immediacy and determination to a common denomina-tor, so too does Husserl’s theory of perceptual fulfillment attempt to glean imme-diate “givenness” from non-intentional sensation and to attach this givenness to

34 Adorno (1983): 149; Adorno (1970): 154. Translation altered.35 Adorno (1983): 146; Adorno (1970): 151. Translation altered.


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the “objecthood” characterizing perception as an intentional act. Both formationsleave behind a remainder: the irreducible indeterminacy of sensation on one handand the necessarily mediated and conceptual nature of perception on the other. Byallowing sense-perception to be both intention and its fulfillment, by assigning tothe “intuitive content” of the perceptual act its own “matter” or intentional com-ponent, and by allowing this component to “fill” the original signification,Husserl, at the very least, obscures the role of sensuous intuition in the act ofperceptual fulfillment. Adorno confirms and extends this point:

The theory of fulfillment proves itself to be completely viciously circular in that fulfillment isexpected of the “object” which perception gives or presents as present. Since, however, the presentobject of perception is, according to Husserl’s theory, not just υλη′ but rather something itselfalready “categorized,” i.e. meant through intention, the fulfillment of perception as intention wouldbe accomplished by the sense of this intention and not by sensation.36

I believe this claim can be defended by collecting the points of the exposition above.Let us review these points carefully. Husserl began his First Investigation bydividing all acts into signifying intentions and meaning-fulfillments. In the SixthInvestigation, the latter was itself analyzed into its own signitive and intuitivecomponents as well as a “unity of identity” between the “matters” of each. From hisdissection of acts, we saw that the matter of an intuitive act necessarily includes bothan objective reference and a “fulfilling sense” corresponding to the meaning of thesignifying act. Husserl went on to posit perception as an act of fulfillment in whichthe intended object “itself” was immediately given. In order to prevent its fulfill-ment function from being reduced to its “fulfilling sense” alone and in order to makeroom for the sensuous-givenness of the object, a third element was added toperception: a moment of “fullness” or an intuitive content.Yet, Husserl was forcedto concede that this intuitive content did itself contain a “matter” or intention whichenabled such content to be “interpreted.” This addition was necessitated by whatAdorno calls Husserl’s commitment to the “primacy of intentionality.”37 Without anintentional correlate to the content of our sensuous intuition, we would never beable to say that what we intuit as given is precisely the object meant in our signifyingact. The content of intuition must provide, as completely as possible, the determi-nations of the object being intuited. However, since this intentional correlate to thecontent of the intuitive act can only be understood, according to Husserl’s owndescription, as an abstractable property that is independent of the existence of itsobjective reference, then it would seem that the intuitive component of perceptionwould invariably need its own fulfillment.

36 Adorno (1983): 150; Adorno (1970): 155. Translation altered.37 Adorno (1983): 151; Adorno (1970): 156.

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We can see here that a regress is inevitable. If each “full” intuition must contain,on pain of indeterminacy, an intentional element that allows sensuous-content tobe interpreted as the meant object of signification, then at each stage of synthesis“interpretative sense” would match up with “fulfilling sense” without ever imply-ing a sensuous filling and hence without ever achieving fulfillment. Such a regressmight also be viewed as a vicious circle, one in which perception qua intentiondoes find its fulfillment in perception qua intuition merely in the “fulfilling sense”of the latter’s intuitive component; perception would thus satisfy its own expec-tation while never making contact with the “given.” In both views, the inabilityto give an adequate account of how form (intentionality) fits a formless (non-intentional) content (sensation) forces Husserl to narrow the scope and role ofsensuous content in perception by positing more and more formal componentswithin it. The result is debilitating: Either perception can never be fulfilled or itsfulfillment in no way involves sensation.

One attempt to salvage Husserl’s position might proceed by invoking commentsmade earlier in the Sixth Investigation where he states that “perception is an actwhich determines, but does not embody meaning.”38 This position would seem tofree perception from the dangers of infinite regress by detaching it from signifi-cation. It would also seem to support other references to perception as an act that“requires no further fulfillment.”39 Unfortunately, this stance, taken in its strictsense, would also force Husserl to purge all traces of conceptuality from thedomain of perception and thus render it indistinguishable from non-intentionalsensation. Again, the tension between immediacy and determination rears its head.

Adorno exploits this tension to expose what he sees as an antinomy withinHusserl’s concept of perception. In order to sustain the immediate “givenness” ofthe object while presenting the object “itself” as intended by the act, perceptionmust yield to either naïve realism or traditional idealism:

Naïve realism would salvage the immediate-character and pre-categoriality of perception, but itwould also rupture the immanence to consciousness on whose analysis epistemology’s claim tocertainty is grounded. The insistence on the categorial role in perception would certainly keepepistemology immanent and “critical.” But it would thereby sacrifice immediacy and thus the claimto ground transcendent being originally and absolutely in pure immanence.40

In other words, adopting a position of naïve realism would certainly allow per-ception to have the object “itself” as immediately given, but it would force areversal of the phenomenological reduction and thus commit Husserl to thedependence of cognitive acts on the existence of their objects. Conversely,

38 Husserl (2001): VI. §5.39 Ibid: VI. §14b.40 Adorno (1983): 155; Adorno (1970): 159. Translation altered.


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traditional idealism would retain the “immanence” of the phenomenologicalinquiry as well as permit the critical examination of knowledge. Yet, it wouldreintroduce the problems of representationalism and would make the objects ofknowledge dependent upon the cognitive constitution of the subject.

Adorno’s claim is certainly compelling given the difficulties which I haveoutlined in Husserl’s concept of perceptual fulfillment. It would seem that so longas Husserl provides no clear point of contact between interpretative sense andintuitive filling, between thought and intuition, his account is indeed caught ina tension between two internally consistent, yet diametrically opposed positions.Moreover, his critique strikes at the very heart of Husserl’s conception of percep-tion by demonstrating its inability to achieve the ideal of “adequacy.” In Husserl’sschema, this ideal serves as the basis for criticisms of partial fulfillments whichrequire further investigation and articulation to achieve completion. But insofar asAdorno has undermined the coherence of the very concept of meaning-fulfillment,this critical inquiry is deprived of its guiding ideal.

Unfortunately, Adorno does not even appear to recognize the presence of thistype of critical reflection in Husserl’s account. In one passage, he argues that ifHusserl’s description of perception as fulfillment that “requires no further fulfill-ment” is taken seriously, then he must also hold that the initial viewing of aphysical object constitutes immediate (i.e., complete) knowledge of the “objectitself” in a way that abdicates any further review:

If one perceived a building in German cities after the Second World War from a strict frontalperspective, then one quite often had to go around to the side in order to know whether one reallysaw a building or simply the intact wall of a demolished structure. Husserl did not take account ofsuch a possibility.41

This objection confuses Husserlian terms: Simple givenness, even what he calls inIdeas “bodily givenness,” is not identical with adequate givenness. According toHusserl, all outer perception is necessarily perspectival; physical objects are given“from the front” or “from the side.” Although these percepts may be synthesizedinto a complex “all-sided” percept, the object cannot be given from every side atonce in a single, “objectively simple presentation.”42 Nevertheless, this intrinsiclimitation of outer perception does not dissolve the possibility of justifying per-ceptual beliefs. Rather, every perceptual adumbration points beyond itself to otherpossible ones. In order to distinguish real from illusory perception, the “horizons”or implicit intentions that accompany the perception of a physical object wouldneed to be explored and the justification of the original belief in the nature of theobject might be improved through the achievement of ever higher gradations of

41 Adorno (1983): 153; Adorno (1970): 158. Translation altered.42 Husserl (2001): VI. §29.

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evidence (Evidenz), even within the limits of its inadequacy. In fact, preciselybecause of their perspectival nature, acts of perception are more susceptible tocritical scrutiny as well as to enticements of further exploration. To use Adorno’sexample, Husserl would not claim that the simple perception of “the front of abuilding” perfectly fulfils or justifies the belief that one is perceiving “a building.”To arrive at greater perfection, the perceiver would need to fulfill those intentionsthat are co-given with the initial perception. If these “horizontal” intentions aredisappointed, then there is good reason to criticize and reconsider the originalbelief. Thus, the movement from the implicit co-intentions to explicit perceptualfulfillment opens a path for epistemic interrogation and progress that appears atodds with Adorno’s belief that immediate perceptual knowledge is beyond criticalreview. However, such critical reflection still depends on the possibility of havingan object “given” just as it is meant and it is precisely this possibility whichAdorno has called into question.

CATEGORIAL INTUITION

The difficulties involved in Husserl’s theory of fulfillment, problems thatAdorno identified as antinomies, would seem to disable any further attempt tosalvage his logical absolutism. If Husserl fails to provide a satisfactory account ofimmediate knowledge, then his belief in the absolute truth of logical principleswhich depends upon the possibility of having this type of knowledge wouldappear to be untenable. It is important, however, to note that the kind of immediateknowledge that Husserl thinks we have of logical truths is not the same as thatwhich we have of physical objects in perception. While Husserl certainly believesthat we have direct, unmediated access to the truth of logical laws, judgmentalforms, syncategorematic connectives, and other “ideal objects,” unlike perception,such acts need not involve the ambiguous task of “interpreting” heterogeneous,sensuous “stuff.” Since Adorno’s criticism of immediate perceptual knowledgerelied primarily on elucidating the irremediable difficulty of linking the non-intentional, indeterminate “intuitive content” of sensation with intentional,meaning-determinant acts of intellection, the possibility of intuitive access tonon-sensuous contents of experience remains unimpugned and in need of inde-pendent treatment if Adorno’s argument against logical absolutism is to succeed.

In a 1940 article published in the Journal of Philosophy, Adorno lays out hiscritique of Husserl’s theory of categorial intuition as the “necessary consequenceof logical absolutism with respect to the thinking subject.”43 In what is arguably

43 Theodore Adorno, “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism,” Journal of Philosophy 37 ( January1940): 12. I turn to this article because it contains an extended treatment of Adorno’s critique ofcategorial intuition which is then essentially summarized in Adorno (1970).


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the most lucid and straightforward exposition of Adorno’s philosophical positionon the matter, he outlines his case against categorial intuition and Husserl’s projectas a whole. Adorno avers that Husserl inserted the concept of categorial intuitionduring the Sixth Investigation in order to provide a “bridge” between real and idealworlds, a method “by which we could ‘think’ ideal realities (Ideale Tatbestände)that are not produced by us and still get their absolute validity into rationalevidence.”44 Categorial intuition is, in Adorno’s terms, the deus ex machina oflogical absolutism, the concept that arrives to resolve the tension between the“rationalist Husserl” who wishes to “vindicate the vérités de raison” and the“positivist Husserl” who acknowledges immediate givenness as “the only legalsource of knowledge.”45

In the Sixth Investigation, he introduces categorial intuition after consideringthose categorial and relational elements of judgments—words such as “the,” “a,”“some,” “is,” etc.—which do not seem to have intuitive correlates available insense-perception. As he explains, the predicate of “being” expressed in the word“is” cannot find fulfillment in sensation since, “I can see colour, but not being-coloured.”46 Husserl’s discussion of sense-perception has already established that inorder to be verified, meaning-intentions must come into a recognitive unity withintuitions that give the object immediately as it is meant. Without intuitive corre-lates, there would seem to be no way of fulfilling intentions of universal orcategorial objects. Therefore, Husserl concludes that in order for such knowledge tobe possible, “there must be an act which renders identical the services to thecategorial elements of meaning that merely sensuous perception renders to thematerial elements.”47 This act is categorial intuition, and its object is the idealcorrelate of judgment, the state-of-affairs (Sachverhalt). Husserl contends that theobjective reference of categorial acts lies not in the world of real objects, but in therealm of ideal states-of-affairs, of which we “become aware” in the fulfillment ofjudgment: “as the sensible object stands to sense-perception so the state of affairsstands to the ‘becoming aware’ in which it is given.”48 In this analogy to sense-perception, Husserl hopes to have described a categorial mode of “perception”according to which logical truths can become objects of immediate knowledge. It isthis idea of an intuitive grasp of non-sensuous contents of experience that iselaborated in Husserl’s other ideas of “ideational abstraction,” “eidetic intuition”and “essential insight.”

Adorno levels his critique on the ambiguity of this “becoming aware” and of theentire concept of categorial intuition. He argues the following:

44 Adorno (1940): 12.45 Ibid: 13.46 Husserl (2001): VI. §42.47 Ibid: VI. §45.48 Ibid: VI. §44.

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The judgment, viewed subjectively, is an act, an experience, and as such it is something immedi-ately given. To judge or to become aware of a judged Sachverhalt is the same, or more precisely,the second expression is a metaphorical circumscription of the first one. There is no second act ofbecoming aware of what one has judged in addition to the actual judging itself, unless of course onereflects on the judgment. Such a reflection, however, would necessarily transcend the “immediacy”of the actual judgment which for itself would become the object of such reflection [. . .]. But tobecome aware of a Sachverhalt means for Husserl also to reassure oneself of the truth of thejudgment. The equivocation [. . .] is strictly this, (1) to become aware of a Sachverhalt, to achievethe synthesis of judgment, and (2) to bring the truth of this judgment to absolute evidence. None ofthe meanings of the expression, however, can possibly be interpreted as categorial intuition.49

Adorno claims that categorial intuition is a hybrid concept forged out of thecontamination of the real act of judging—an immediate experience of “becomingaware”—and the non-immediate, reflective verification of judgment which “putsthe Sachverhalt into relation with other Sachverhalt” and thereby arrives at a newcategorization.50 For Adorno, the concept of “becoming aware” allows Husserl todetach the non-reflective immediacy of “actual judging itself” and to use it inexplaining the justificatory function of categorial acts. Just as his concept ofsense-perception described a kind of non-inferential justification that possessedboth sensuous immediacy and conceptual determinacy, so too does Husserl’sterm “categorial intuition” betray the illegitimate synthesis of the immediategivenness that characterizes actual judging with the generality and necessity that“reflection”—and hence, “mediation”—alone can provide. Husserl’s conceptualsleight of hand, his attempt to bridge by fiat distinctions to whose rigidity hisposition is beholden, has once again landed him in antinomy.

Adorno’s interpretation of Husserl’s notoriously problematic concept and hissubsequent criticism is indeed innovative, but it is not without its own ambiguities.In light of his attack on Husserl, Adorno may himself be guilty of equivocation.His use of the term “reflection” appears to imply two distinct meanings. Initially,it refers to an act of consciousness wherein other acts, such as judgments, areselected and made into objects of “inward perception.” This Lockean conceptionis then coupled with another according to which reflection is synonymous with adiscursive mode of justification that appeals to related items of knowledge. In thefirst sense, reflection takes as its object the act of judgment, while in the second itinterrogates the judged state-of-affairs itself and its relation to other judged states-of-affairs which might serve as grounds for the judgment’s veracity. Moreover,Husserl himself employs the term only in the first sense, arguing that “the conceptof state-of-affairs cannot arise out of reflection on judgments, since this could onlyyield us concepts of judgments or of real constituents of judgments.”51

49 Adorno (1940): 16.50 Ibid.51 Husserl (2001): VI. §44.


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The fact that Husserl would not accept either meaning of reflection as a descrip-tion of how beliefs in categorial objects are justified does not absolve Adorno ofthe guilt of equivocation. The ambiguity in his use of that term is linked to thelarger problem of trying Husserl on the charge of confusing real acts of judgmentwith their ideal contents and objective correlates. Husserl himself was perhaps thefirst to clarify and reflect upon the significance of this distinction—primarily in theProlegomena to Pure Logic—and it is therefore all the more difficult to show thathe succumbs to confusion on this point.

Nevertheless, Adorno has raised an important issue. The immediacy with whichthe act of judgment is given in experience is quite different from the way in whichwe determine the truth of the judged state-of-affairs. The former refers to anempirical belief which is immediate only in the sense that its existence does notdepend on other cognitions, while the latter would describe the immediate, non-inferential, and non-discursive justification of a belief. A judgment is “immedi-ately given” in the first sense just in case our making it requires no reference tomemories, perceptions, or any other cognitive experiences. This type of imme-diacy is vastly different from the justification or verification of a categorialjudgment which proceeds without connecting that judgment to other justifiedbeliefs. This useful distinction, which I introduced above, explains situations inwhich the existence of a judgment or belief may presuppose other cognitions orbeliefs without depending upon these for its justification. In fact, Husserl claimsthat categorial judgments possess precisely this mediate-immediate structure—categorial objects can be presented in a fulfilled manner only by means of acomplex cognitive process even though the validation of these judgments isachieved non-inferentially and non-discursively.

Perhaps the best example of this class of acts are those in which we move fromsensible, material objects to the corresponding species or universal by way of aprocess which Husserl calls ideational abstraction. The categorial act whichenables our apprehension of universals is founded on other acts such as theperception of certain specific “moments” in a sensible object as well as theconception of these moments as standing in certain relations of identity. Since,according to Husserl, one act “founds” another when it is necessary for theholding or existence of the latter, “founding” refers to an existential relationshipamong acts. In this way, the conscious act through which the judgment that a isa part of A is verified may begin with the straightforward perception of A, withoutattention being drawn to its parts. Only then, in “acts of articulation” do we “putits parts ‘into relief,’ in relational acts we bring the relieved parts into relation [. . .]and only through these new modes of conception do the connected and relatedmembers gain the character of ‘parts’.”52 Now we must consider two acts—the first

52 Ibid: VI. §48.

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directed at A, the other at its part a—which are not merely “performed together,or after one another, in the manner of disjoined experiences; rather they are boundtogether in a single act in whose synthesis A is first given as containing a withinitself. Just so, a can, with a reversal of the direction of relational perception,achieve self-givenness as pertaining to A.”53 This perceptual “reversal of direction”indicates that there are “two possibilities, marked off in a priori fashion, in whichthe ‘same relation’ can achieve actual givenness.”54 This “same relation,” thecategorial relation between part and whole, is the “ideal law” which unites the twoperceptual possibilities as its instances. In this way, the categorial state-of-affairsis intuited on the basis of articulating acts that “set into relief” the “moment” ofrelation between a and A in the straightforward perception of A.

The example of ideational abstraction depicts a justificatory process that isnon-inferential, yet carried out through a complex procedure involving interre-lated cognitive acts. Intending a universal relation, such as that between part andwhole, is dependent upon the content of preliminary acts directed at concreteindividuals and abstract particulars. In Husserl’s terms, the higher-order intentionsof universal objects are founded on lower-order acts of perception whose contentit operates on to arrive at a new intentional object. This process requires that wedraw attention from concrete individuals to their abstract “moments” and thendirect our cognitive interest to the universal instantiated in these “moments.” It ison the basis of these prior “acts of articulation” and the selective attention theyprovide that we are in a position to “see” the universal in the particular. What thismeans is that, phenomenologically speaking, the possibility of holding a beliefabout universals or carrying out a categorial act is “mediated” by the materialsecured by lower-order acts and thus cannot be the “immediate” experience thatAdorno says it is. Nevertheless, the justificatory nature of categorial fulfillments isprecisely that of an intuitive or immediate grasp of ideal objects. As the fulfillmentof a judgment, the intuition of the part–whole relation does not depend upon theknowledge of other abstract relations. In contrast, the possibility of actuallycarrying out such an abstractive act may certainly depend upon the prior sense-perception of a particular whole and its part, as well as a number of otherobservations.

The problem with Adorno’s critique is not that he appeals to an inappropriatedistinction between existential and justificatory conditions, but rather that there issimply no evidence that Husserl’s categorial intuition constitutes an illegitimateattempt to “bridge” this difference. In fact, Adorno cannot be correct when heclaims that Husserl attributes to the justificatory function of acts an immediacythat belongs solely to “actual judging itself,” since Husserl explicitly characterizes

53 Ibid.54 Ibid.


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the latter as mediated by numerous “founding” acts. Thus, if Husserl were everactually guilty of “contaminating” real and ideal moments in the concept ofcategorial intuition, he would more than likely have made categorial fulfillment aderivative, inferential, and mediated operation and not, as he does, an achievementof intuition.

Despite the failure of his direct assault on categorial intuition, Adorno’s morespecific discussions of ideational abstraction and eidetic intuition offer an oppor-tunity to salvage his critique. To recall, Adorno’s argument rests on proving thatHusserl’s categorial intuition is constructed on the basis of an invalid inferencefrom the conditions necessary for holding a belief or carrying out an act with thosenecessary for justifying that belief or act. In discussing the ideational abstractionof “Red” from the red “moment” of a particular red object, he says that:

The accentuated “red moment” isolates the moment “color” from the present perception. If thiswere isolated as an autonomous unity, it would thereby fall into relations with other colors.Otherwise the color moment could not be isolated as autonomous at all, for in present perceptionit is simply blended into other things. It attains autonomy only by being brought together with acompletely distinct dimension of experience, namely past acquaintance [Kenntnis] with color assuch. Insofar as it is representative of “color,” the “red moment” is familiar to consciousness beyondsheer present experience. Its concept is presupposed, no matter how primitive and little actualizedit may be; it does not come out of the hic et nunc.55

In this passage, Adorno is asserting that the act of focusing on a red “moment” or“trope” as an abstract particular within the sense-perception of an individualobject presupposes knowledge of “Red” as a universal capable of instantiation.This claim has some initial plausibility. Isolating the redness of an apple in the actof perception would seem to presuppose that we already know that Red is auniversal property that instantiates itself in the color properties or tropes ofconcrete individuals such as apples; yet this knowledge is supposed to exist onlyin virtue of the complex act of “isolation” itself. In order to “break up” the “hic etnunc” of perception into individuals and tropes, we must make use of categorialconcepts and other “ideal unities” which are already justified and presented withinthe “intentional essence” of those “founding” acts of isolation. However, accord-ing to Husserl’s account these concepts and universals are themselves verifiedonly through an intuitive recognition whose possibility is dependent upon acts ofperception. Avoiding this circularity would involve adopting either a naive realistor an empirical-conceptualist view of abstraction, at least in regard to universalslike “Red.” The first would force Husserl again to shatter the phenomenologicalwhile the second would turn “Red” into an empirical concept formulated andjustified through induction from particulars. The latter’s adoption would require

55 Adorno (1983): 102; Adorno (1970): 108–09. Translation altered.

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the total abandonment of Husserl’s description of ideational abstraction as imme-diate or intuitive knowledge.

Tempting as this interpretation is, it fails to deliver the antinomy-rendering blowthat Adorno anticipates. One reason for this failure is that Adorno has himselfconfused the conditions of belief-holding with those of justification. Isolating thered trope of a perception does not require prior knowledge of “Red” or “Color” assuch, since this act could just as easily be performed on the basis of a mere beliefabout the universal character of “Red.” In other words, I need not be justified inbelieving that “Red” is a universal property instantiated in the red “moment” of anapple to isolate that “moment” in my experience. Adorno’s claim that the identi-fication of color moments is only possible on the basis of a “past acquaintance”with “color as such” or with past experiences of colored objects to which theymight be compared, is quite defensible when taken as an argument about theformation of beliefs regarding abstract particulars. But to move from a conditionof belief to a condition of justification requires an explicit recognition of thisboundary and an explanation of its permeability. Adorno supplies neither.

David Bell has outlined an objection to categorial intuition quite similar to theone raised by Adorno and has offered a convincing rebuttal in Husserl’s defense.He formulates the problem as follows:

On the one hand [. . .] Husserl is committed to the claim that an awareness of the ideal objects called“universals,” “species,” and “meanings” is only possible as a result of the application of a processof synthesis to items that are given in “straightforward” acts. On the other hand, however, he alsoappears to claim that those very items are themselves meanings, or universals, or “intentionalmaterials” of objectifying acts. Consequently, Husserl seems to be faced by the following dilemma:either “straightforward” awareness of meaning is possible, in which case the whole apparatus offounded, synthetic, higher-level acts is simply otiose; or “straightforward” awareness of meaning isnot possible, in which case there appears to be no appropriate material to which synthesis can beapplied in the first place.56

Like Bell, Adorno sees a fundamental incoherence in the claims that preparatoryacts for the intuitive awareness of universals appear to make use of and presupposeprior acquaintance with these entities as their “intentional matter.” But in contrastto Bell, he is unable or unwilling to find a possible resolution to this dilemma.

Expressions like “the matter,” “the meaning,” “the sense,” and “the intentional matter” of an act aresystematically ambiguous. They can either be used to refer to an individual, real, abstract momentof some particular concrete experience, or they can be used to refer to a universal, ideal species thata number of such concrete experiences have in common. Given that an awareness of the former isindependent of, and prior to, any awareness of the latter, the one is in principle capable of acting asthe foundation of the other.57

56 David Bell, Husserl (New York: Routledge, 1990) 124.57 Ibid.


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Adorno failed to see that isolating acts whose matter is a red trope or “moment”are experiences whose justification is independent of our awareness of the idealuniversal “Red.” Much of his blindness is attributable to the fact that his critiquetransgresses the very distinction between the conditions for belief-formation andthose of belief-justification to which he himself drew attention. Since the factualconditions that make the execution or “genesis” of cognitive acts possible aredistinguishable from the epistemic conditions that make beliefs justified or“valid,” Adorno has implicitly conflated the very relation between “genesis” and“validity” of whose hypostasization he convicted Husserl. This is not to say thatthe point which seems to motivate Adorno’s critique—namely, that the processesof belief-formation and belief-justification are not isolated activities, but insteadindicate the two-sided, doxastic, and normative character of all judgments—iswithout warrant. Rather, Adorno’s chief problem is that he has failed to show howantinomies follow from Husserl’s attempt to bridge a distinction upon whoserigidity his entire program depends. As I hope to have shown previously, Husserl’sconcept of categorial intuition can be coherently analyzed in terms of the differ-ence between the conditions of belief-formation and those of belief-justificationand thus shows no indication of constituting the unwarranted “bridge” that Adornothinks it does.

CONCLUSION

Despite the shortcomings of his treatment of categorial intuition, Adorno hasnevertheless given us criticisms of Husserl’s early phenomenological project thathighlight the difficulties involved in an account of immediate knowledge. As Ihave argued, Adorno’s critique of perceptual fulfillment holds its ground under aclose reading of Husserl’s argument. The general problem that emerges from thatcritique lies in Husserl’s inability to negotiate between immediacy and mediation,or more specifically, between givenness and determinacy. Whether or not this is adilemma faced by all descriptions of immediate knowledge, as Adorno thinks, isstill an open question and probably not one that can be settled on the basis of justone example. But the success of this particular immanent critique suggests thatAdorno may have provided a novel and effective approach to the problems offoundationalism in epistemology, problems that need not be dealt with either byepistemologists still in pursuit of foundations or by anti-foundationalists dismiss-ive of the epistemological enterprise in general. The kind of paradoxical “internalmeta-criticism” that he performed on Husserl’s early phenomenology had mixedresults, and while it appears that, in the final analysis, the core of Husserl’s logicalabsolutism is left intact, his epistemological foundationalism has not emergedunscathed. Although the stakes of this encounter remain high, the outcome doesnot indicate a decisive victor. Instead, the limited achievements of Adorno’s

JARED A. MILLER

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meta-critique point the way toward reconstruction of arguments, refinement oftechniques, and expansion of subject-matter so that new figures in the history ofphilosophy and its intersection with the foundationalism debate may come undersimilar scrutiny.

Emory University


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miller - adorno critic husserl

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