Adorno Contra Transcendental Idealism: A Critique of Husserl’s Notion of Objectivity
Authors: Miranda Raphaella Elaine 
Published: October 2022

The work intends to reconstruct Theodor Adorno’s critique of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental idealism. The intended goal of Husserl’s phenomenology was to continue the Cartesian project of attaining certitude, and in the process, dismantle the alleged arbitrary division between subject and object. Despite sharing the latter’s goal of effecting a radical turn against traditional epistemology, Adorno, however, criticizes Husserl’s idealist position. The latter’s position asserts that objectivity is laden not only within the object, but is also reliant within the internal structures of consciousness, and its relation with the object. By virtue of the a priori, and transcendent nature of the Husserlian eidos, Adorno asserts that this idealism merely posits an abstract “philosophical First” that reveals nothing concrete about the object itself. Consequently, instead of taking a revolutionary approach, as Husserl would have it, it instead becomes an affirmation of the totalitarian nature of the classical notion of subjectivity. The paper will demonstrate how the abstract and dominating nature of Husserl’s philosophy fashions objectivity as its necessary instrument. Objectivity for Husserl only occurs once the transcendental subject exhausts the horizons of meaning of an object thereby implying the necessity of the subject’s participation in the creation of meaning for an object. Following this, I will demonstrate Adorno’s critique of objectivity in the backdrop of his confrontation of the crisis of philosophy, vis-à-vis his own proposed materialist dialectic method.

References

Primary Sources

Books

Adorno, Theodor. Against Epistemology: A Metacritique. Translated by Willis Domingo Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013.

__________. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford with an Introduction by Lydia Goehr. New York: Colombia University Press, 2005.

Husserl, Edmund. Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology. Translated by Dorion Cairns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1977.

__________. Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology. Volume I. Translated by W.R. Boyce Gibson. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1952.

__________. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology: From the Lectures, Winter Semester, 1910-1911. Translated by Ingo Farin and James Hart. Dordrecht: Springer, 2006.

__________. The Idea of Phenomenology. Translated and with an introduction by Lee Hardy. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1999.

Essays

Adorno, Theodor. “A Metacritique of Epistemology.” Telos 38 (Winter 1978-79): 77- 103.

__________. “Husserl and the Problem of Idealism.” The Journal of Philosophy 37, no. 1 (1940): 5-18.

__________. “Subject and Object” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords. Translated by Henry W. Pickford and an Introduction by Lydia Goehr. New York: Colombia University Press, 2005.

__________ “The Actuality of Philosophy.” Telos 1997, no. 31 (1997): 120-133.

__________ “The Idea of Natural History,” Telos, no. 60 (1984), 111-124.

Secondary Sources

Books

Bryers, Damian. Intentionality and Transcendence: Closure and Openness in Husserl’s Phenomenology. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2002.

Cambridge University Press. The Cambridge Companion to Husserl. Edited by Berry Smith and David Woodruff Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Drummord, John. Historical Dictionary of Husserl’s Philosophy. Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007.

Gordon, Peter E. Adorno and Existence. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016.

Hermberg, Kevin. Husserl’s Phenomenology: Knowledge, Objectivity and Others. London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006.

Jarvis, Simon. Adorno: A Critical Introduction. New York: Routledge, 1998.

Zahavi, Dan. Husserl’s Phenomenology. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003.

Articles

Aoyagi, Masafumi. “Phenomenological Antinomy and Holistic Idea: Adorno’s Husserl- Studies and Influences from Cornelius.” Investigaciones Fenomenologicas 4, no. 2 (2013): 23-38.

Dallmayr, Fred. “Phenomenology and Critical Theory: Adorno*.” Cultural Hermeneutics 3 (1976): 367-405.

Follesdal, Dagfinn. “Noema and Meaning in Husserl.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50, Supplement (1990): 263-271.

Gibson, W.R. Boyce. “The Problem of Real and Ideal in the Phenomenology of Husserl.” Mind 34, no. 135 (1925): 311-333.3

McIntyre, Ronald and Smith, David Woodruff. “Husserl’s Identification of Meaning and Noema.” The Monist 59, no. 1, The Philosophy of Husserl (1975): 115-132.

Molts, Andreas. “Adorno and the Myth of Subjectivity.” Contempts 3 (2002): 109-121.

Soffer, W. “Husserl’s Neo-Cartesianism.” Research in Phenomenology 11 (1981): 141- 158.