2009 The Philosophical Forum, Inc.

PHENOMENOLOGYS NEGATIVE DIALECTIC: ADORNOS CRITIQUE OF HUSSERLS EPISTEMOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONALISM

JARED A. MILLER

Philosophers have long been preoccupied with questions concerning the nature and fundamental status of their discipline.1 This is not all that surprising given philosophys traditional claim to hold a privileged position vis--vis other elds of inquiry. But the search for answers to these questions, at least in the form of a quest for unconditional foundations from which to speak truth, has come under attack in the past century. The popularity of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud among scholars in the early 20th century certainly contributed to the sense that philosophys recurring crises and debates over proper foundations revealed the bankruptcy of its self-prescribed task. Figures such as Heidegger, Gadamer, Derrida, and the later Wittgenstein (to name only a select few) reiterated and rearticulated concerns over the tenability and productivity of this task and offered methods for liberating thought from this model of philosophizing. Thanks in large part to the work of Richard Rorty and Richard Bernstein, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a urry of interest in the question of foundationalism.2 While overlapping with the more global discussion about the distinction between modern and postmodern, this debate centered on the conception of philosophy as an enterprise intent on securing an Archimedean point or foundation upon which its authority over other disciplines and cultural spheres might be grounded. Conceived as the distinctly modern (or even Cartesian) project aimed at defeating skepticism by locating absolute, infallible, and/or indubitable truths accessible

This piece has undergone a long process of revision, and I am greatly indebted to the helpful comments of Michael Sullivan, Brian OConnor, David Carr, Walter Hopp, and an anonymous reader from The Philosophical Forum. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1977); Richard Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics, and Praxis (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1983).

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to the cognitive subject, epistemology was singled out as the chief embodiment of the foundationalist attitude. The relationship between foundationalism and epistemology, however, often changes depending upon the conception of these terms. If foundationalism is identied with the general tendency to nd a xed, absolute basis from which to derive our notions of knowledge, truth, being, morality, and so on, then epistemology might be only one among many manifestations of this trajectory of philosophical thought. On the other hand, when foundationalism refers to a specic claim about the nature of epistemic warrant or justication in which all knowledge depends upon immediately justied beliefs or intuitively given cognitions, then it appears as just one epistemological position against which others, such as coherentism, constructivism, contextualism, etc., might be compared. The two extremes are not, however, mutually incompatible; there is no reason why we cannot conceive of foundationalism as a broad intellectual trend that also has specic exemplications in epistemological accounts that ground knowledge in immediate cognitions, self-evident truths, and so on. This understanding would prevent the conation of foundationalism with epistemology per se, while nevertheless permitting us to relate epistemological accounts to other philosophical commitments associated with foundationalism, such as correspondence theories of truth, metaphysical realism, or cognitive representationalism. Given its conceptual exibility, I will follow this approach and conceive of epistemological foundationalism as a subspecies of philosophical foundationalism broadly construed. Over the past 20 years, the issues surrounding the claims of foundationalism and epistemology have penetrated the scholarship of both major and minor gures within the history of philosophy.3 The sentiment motivating those scholars who take up these problems seems to be a fear that the resort to caricatures, broad conceptual strokes, and overly simplied paradigms has obscured unique contributions to the debate. Hasty denunciation of philosophers and philosophical movements must thus be replaced with detailed scholarship aimed at unearthing intermediate positions, neglected alternatives, and innovative glosses on the issues at stake. Edmund Husserl has emerged as a highly disputed gure in the foundationalism debate that wages across the historiography of philosophy. A number of scholars have 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, Hegels Deduction of the Concept of Science, Hegel and the Sciences (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 64), ed. Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1984) 27181; Kenley R. Dove, Phenomenolgy and Systematic Philosophy, Method and Speculation in Hegels Phenomenology, ed. Merold Westphal (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982) 2740; William Maker, Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994); and Richard Dien Wineld, Overcoming Foundations: Studies in Systematic Philosophy (New York: Columbia UP, 1989).

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emphasizing the anti-representationalist, non-foundationalist, and even postmodern tendencies of his thought.4 The reasons behind this increased attention, particularly by those trained in analytic philosophy, are certainly many. Husserls perceived status as one of, if not the most prominent, founders of the continental tradition is likely to be a signicant motivation. Another lies in the fact that his phenomenological project began with a serious effort to undermine those positions which he described as skeptical relativism and developed into a program to retrieve philosophy as a rigorous science from the debilitating effects of objectivism and naturalism. Moreover, the specic concepts of phenomenological reduction, evidence (Evidenz), and eidetic intuition all appear to represent aspects of an epistemological account based on immediately intuited cognitive givens and designed to counter relativist conceptions of truth and knowledge. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the themes, rhetoric, and aims of Husserls work suggests a consistent, if not uniform, concern with overcoming both intellectual and cultural crisis by delineating the proper domain, method, and goals of the philosophical enterprise. The result of these converging factors has been to promote Husserl as a philosopher for whom the project of foundationalism and the viability and sustainability of epistemology are highly relevant and deeply intertwined problems. In fact, the combination of his overriding faith in the redemptive power of authentic philosophical reection and his repeated efforts to articulate and methodize this reection makes Husserl a paradigmatic example of the intersection between foundationalism in the broad sense and epistemological foundationalism more specically. But before overt attacks on foundationalism came into fashion and long before Husserl emerged as a primary target, a German philosopher, musicologist, and social 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 Husserls phenomenological epistemology, particularly its early formulations in Logical Investigations 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 the Foundationalism Debate, Reason Papers 16 (Fall 1991): 4571; Gail Soffer, Husserl and the Question of Relativism (Boston, MA: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991); Henry Pietersma, The Problem of Knowledge and Phenomenology, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 50 (September 1989): 2747; and Walter Hopp, Husserl, Phenomenology, and Foundationalism, Inquiry 51, no. 2 (2008): 194216. Theodor Adorno, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, trans. Willis Domingo (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983) 4; Theodor Adorno, Zur Metacritik der Erkenntnistheorie: Studien ber Husserl und die phnomenologischen Antinomien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970) 13.

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Erkenntnistheorie, Adornos critique of Husserlian phenomenology represents an early prescient characterization of Husserl as a philosopher of foundations.6 In this often neglected work, Adorno sets out to produce a detailed, micrological study of Husserls arguments for absolute truth and immediate knowledge that will simultaneously demonstrate the untenability of any attempt to secure epistemic foundations. Adornos goal is to level a critique of Husserl and thereby of epistemological foundationalism as a whole by indicating how contradictions and antinomies immanent to Husserls thought are the result of his selfundermining effort to isolate cognition from its social context. Husserl would like to treat knowledge and truth independently of practical, social, and historical conditions under which real epistemic subjects come to have the knowledge that they have. However, this very isolation of the epistemological project from consideration of its social and historical context is the consequence of the ideals implicit within that very context: namely, late bourgeois societys hermetic separation of mental and manual labor. The subsequent difculties that ensnare Husserls theory stem from the divisions that plague his social environment and from his theorys self-deception regarding its relation to those divisions themselves. This kind of internal meta-criticism has a certain prima facie advantage over those anti-foundationalist critiques which denounce the dogmatic Cartesian anxiety only to appeal to the equally dogmatic belief that the contextual limitations of reection render all criteria of intellectual discrimination untenable, and which conclude with an embrace of theoretical egalitarianism and radical normative pluralism. Adornos project, in contrast, appears to critique the foundationalist dogma while obviating the total elimination of critical standards by employing an immanent analysis that operates within Husserls own normative framework but yields results that transcend the particularity of his thought. Such an initiative offers the prospects for an anti-foundationalism that is both philosophical and critical. Despite these intentions and potentialities, Adornos work remains a painfully opaque, convoluted, and nearly impenetrable polemic that vacillates rapidly between close textual criticisms and sweeping claims about contemporary social conditions, cultural crises, and their manifestations in modern philosophical thought. Political, historical, and disciplinary issues aside, Adornos language and argumentative style would provide more than enough of an obstacle to wider reception of this work.
6

In 1924 Adorno took his doctoral dissertation with Han Cornelius. His work was entitled The Transcendence of the Material and Noematic in Husserls Phenomenology. Adorno continued to develop his critique of Husserl in exile, rst at Oxfords Merton College (193436) under the supervision of Gilbert Ryle, then in the United States in the form of essays that were published both in the Zeitschrift fr Sozialforschung and the Journal of Philosophy, and nally in Germany during the 1950s.

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In the face of these interpretative difculties, it is my aim to extract from Adornos writings on Husserl a coherent and pointed series of arguments aimed at exposing and undermining Husserls foundationalist project. I will then examine the merit of these charges both in relation to Husserls texts and in terms of their ability to make good on their own promises. If it can be shown that Adornos critique nds support in a detailed and generous reading of Husserls position, then there will be good reason to explore his larger claims about the inadequacy of foundationalism in general. The stakes of the encounter between Husserl and Adorno are thus quite high. If Adornos critique succeeds and a paradigmatic exemplar of foundationalism is defeated by an immanent analysis immune to the pitfalls of more extreme anti-foundationalist positions, then the abandonment of the foundationalist project in favor of a different kind of critical program will nd initial justication. Likewise, if Husserls thought survives Adornos arguments unscathed, then foundationalism would emerge even stronger, having defeated one of its most sophisticated challengers. With these possibilities in mind, I conceive of this article as a preliminary investigation that might serve as the impetus and entry-point for further exploration into the nature of antifoundationalist, meta-epistemological criticisms, and their consequences for the future of philosophy. In his book, Adornos Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibilities of Critical Rationality, Brian OConnor reconstructs Adornos epistemological position around the goal of formulating a rationally articulable account of experience. For Adorno, experience is the process in which ideally, that is, in its fullest possibility, one (a subject) is affected and somehow changed by confrontation with some aspect of objective reality (an object).7 In this sense, experience has a structure of reciprocity and transformation; as Adorno often says, the subject and object mediate one another in the process of experience and knowledge acquisition.8 This notion of mediation is deployed by Adorno in various contexts often carrying multiple intensions; sometimes he emphasizes the aspect of activity, sometimes that of reciprocity, and other times the more traditional and logical sense of relational dependence. Adorno also awarded this concept a central role in the critique of foundationalism when he insisted that [m]ediation is not a positive assertion about being, but instead a directive [Anweisung] for cognition not to content itself with such positivity.9

Brian OConnor, Adornos Negative Dialectic: Philosophy and the Possibility of Critical Rationality (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004) 3. For a lengthy discussion of Adornos concept of mediation, see Brian OConnor, Hegel, Adorno and the Concept of Mediation, Bulletin of the Hegel Society Great Britain 39/40 (1999): 8496. 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 and reied accounts of experience offered by his opponents. Drawing upon the insights of Georg Lukacs, Adorno believes that contemporary philosophy (of the early 20th century) reproduces the reied and rationalized world of late capitalism in which individuals confront their social relations as objectied things bound by eternal laws of nature and standing in opposition to human agency. Philosophies submit to reication and to what he calls identity thinking when they simplify the reciprocity of experience, either by assuming that the object can be mastered in its totality by the subject (idealism), or by attempting to remove the subject from the process of knowledge altogether (positivism).10 According to OConner, Adorno prepares quasi-Kantian transcendental critiques aimed at demonstrating that by assuming models of knowledge that ignore the reciprocal structure of experience, reason is led to equally tenable yet mutually exclusive commitments. Like Kant, Adorno believes that the result of such ignorance is antinomy. However, in contrast to Kant who envisioned such antinomies as the external juxtaposition of two equally rational conclusionsas in the tradition of ancient skepticism and the method of equipollenceAdorno locates antinomies as internal elements of certain philosophical models. He thus perceives himself as the performer of immanent critiques which illuminate the internal inconsistencies that afict philosophical programs that presuppose onesided accounts of experience. In this vein, Adornos treatment of Husserl consists of various attempts to show that the failure of his arguments for absolute truth and immediate knowledge to make good on their own promises yields two mutually exclusive solutions, both of which demand irreparable sacrices to Husserls phenomenology. As I see it, Adornos critique consists in three phases distinguishable by their targets. The rst phase aims at challenging Husserls theory of logical absolutism as outlined in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic. The second focuses on the conception of perceptual fulllment presented in the Logical Investigations, and the third takes up the related notion of categorial intuition. I will demonstrate that the success of the rst phase depends upon the success of the latter two and that while Adornos criticism of perceptual fulllment and its antinomy holds water under a more systematic and detailed examination of Husserls position, his arguments against categorial intuition ultimately fail to reveal the antinomies he believes to be present within Husserls position.

10

Interestingly, Adorno avoids idealism by positing a dialectical priority of the object. He contends that there is an irreducible moment of particularity that evades conceptual subsumption and which is constitutive of meaning itself. However, because he conceives it as a moment within experience, this objective priority is not identical with Kants thing-in-itself. See OConnor (2004): 4570.

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LOGICAL ABSOLUTISM The rst phase of Adornos critique focuses on the difculties involved in Husserls logical absolutism. This doctrine was developed in the Prolegomena to Pure Logic that precedes the Logical Investigations. In this introduction, Husserl attacked the psychologistic understanding of logic while trying to avoid the standard reference of its opponents to the disciplines supposed practical normativity. Husserls third way involved three major claims: (1) If logical laws are inductive generalizations drawn from empirical observation, then their validity is merely 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) the reduction of logic to psychology leads invariably to relativism, which is necessarily self-defeating. From this, Husserl developed a view of logical principles as ideal laws whose being and validity was independent of any real psychological or physical existent. Whether this position of logical absolutism committed Husserl to a kind of Platonic realism that thoroughly divorced logic from psychological states is possible, but not obvious. Against this view Adorno raises a series of objections. He claims that the choice between logical laws as ideal unities or psychological generalizations is predicated on the assumption that the only potential real bears of logical truth are isolated individuals or monads.11 While attempting to circumvent the pitfalls of psychologism, Adorno appears to suggest that Husserl has ignored a kind of historicism or sociologism that might yield extra-psychical validity to logical laws without removing them entirely from the realm of the real.12 Unfortunately, Adorno only intimates in this direction and never eshes out his conception of logical validity so as to demonstrate how it would avoid Husserls critique of psychologism and relativism. Instead, he chides Husserl for hypostasizing the distinction between what he calls genesisthe origin of concepts in a process of social-historical developmentand validity. Where the total isolation of truth from genetic inquiry is supposed to characterize absolutism, the subordination of truth to genesis is the general course of all relativism. Adorno, as we shall see, is intent on demonstrating that these alternatives are mutually dependent and equally decient. According to him, the alienation of logical truths from the synthetic processes of thought occurs because under Husserls gaze, logical forms are considered objects themselves. Accusing Husserl of realism with regard to universals, Adorno charges that by treating logical laws and meanings as selfsufcient ideal objects, Husserl has obscured the fact that without reference to actual propositions, these laws are merely empty forms. By talking about a logical
11 12

Adorno (1983): 5859; Adorno (1970): 6566. Adorno (1983): 5960; Adorno (1970): 6667.

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object, Husserl has smuggled content into abstract forms, content that could only be achieved by applying these forms in actual judgment.13 Adorno thus believes that Husserls logical absolutism is forged upon the illegitimate conation of conceptual a priority, which he conceives along Kantian lines as being inseparable from and hence mediated by experience in general, with immediate givenness, a kind of non-conceptual grasp of objects themselves that nevertheless relies on concepts for articulation and determination.14 The failed attempt to both recognize and overcome this dichotomy between mediation and immediacy, form and matter, determinacy and givenness, is for Adorno the general shape of those antinomies that plague Husserls project, and hence the philosophical expression of antagonistic society. Although these objections are provocative, Adornos exposition presupposes so many terminological and conceptual distinctions not shared by Husserl that an assessment of them is quite difcult. Instead of trying to locate the source of these presuppositions in Adornos intellectual appropriations, I will attempt to reconstruct and evaluate those arguments that are more clearly immanent to Husserls epistemological account. That being said, the only coherent argument which Adorno offers his readers for the inadequacy he attributes to Husserls logical absolutism, and in fact the only one that ts his model of internal antinomies, runs as follows. He argues that once logical validity has been made absolute and independent of all genesis and thus ultimately of all entities, there remain only two ways of verifying this truth and both fail to achieve their goals.15 He describes the rst option as one in which
[c]onsciousness confronts logic and its ideal laws. If consciousness wishes to substantiate the claim 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, its proper essence. Thinking, then, is the embodiment (Inbegriff ) of logical acts. Pure logic and pure thought would not be detachable from one another.16

What Adorno presents here is a quasi-Kantian transcendental argument for justifying a belief in the ideal validity of logical laws. In attempting to determine the
13 14

15 16

Adorno (1983): 6668; Adorno (1970): 7375. The contrast between conceptual a priority and immediate givenness bears unmistakable traces of Hegels argument in the section of Phenomenology of Spirit on Sense-Certainty (90110). There he examines the consistency of claims to know objects non-inferentially through the direct acquaintance of sensation. Upon reection, these claims reveal themselves to be self-defeating insofar as any attempt to articulate, describe, or individuate the object of knowledge invariably makes use of either universals or contextually circumscribed indexicals (this, here, now) which necessarily require other items of knowledge, that is, they are epistemically mediated. Adorno (1983): 73; Adorno (1970): 80. Ibid. Translation altered.

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validity of these laws, thought nds that it can only do so by employing those very same 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 universal and necessary conditions for the possibility of rational judgment in general. The truth of logic is justied in a transcendental or regressive manner by considering the formal conditions that make possible our ordinary experience of reason-giving and judgment-making. The inadequacy of this interpretation is that it conrms the validity of logic only by making it dependent on the real processes of thought for its content. Although he suggests that this method is unsatisfactory, Adorno never offers an explanation for this claim.17 But taking a cue from Husserls own criticism of Kant, we can say that this type of hypothetical, or as I have described it, regressive argument implicitly assumes a certain subjective constitution to whose existence logics validity would remain dependent and relative.18 This way of verifying logics validity thus secures truth at the expense of its ideal and absolute status. The second prong of this antinomy consists in what Adorno considers to be Husserls own view of how logical truths are veried. If logical principles are not presupposed by consciousness, then they are given phenomenally to it in what Husserl called the experience of truth. Such a claim strictly separates logical validity from the laws of thought. Unfortunately, as Adorno argues, by simply being given to consciousness, the laws of logic would be valid only in the framework of [logics] appearing. They would remain dogmatic, unproven, and contingent.19 Once the subject or consciousness has been denied a constitutive role 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 of the impenetrable stubbornness of their real counterparts. By refusing to qualify the validity of logical laws, Husserl, according to Adorno, removes all criteria by which to verify the content of those laws and thus has no way of challenging arbitrary and conicting truth-claims. Where the rst position in the antinomy succeeded in verifying logics a priori validity but did so only by appealing to subjective conditions, the second maintains logics ideality and objectivity but fails to conrm its validity.

17 18

19 20

Adorno (1983): 74; Adorno (1970): 8081. 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 with intellectual intuition. Adorno (1983): 74; Adorno (1970): 81. Ibid.

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At the heart of Husserls logical absolutism lies an adherence to what Adorno calls a notion of truth as residue: For the sake of mastery, subjectivism must master and negate itself [. . .]. They [the philosophers of foundation] employ their subjectivity in order to subtract the subject from truth and conceive objectivity as residue [. . .] truth should be what remains, the dregs, the stalest leftovers.21 The claim is that Husserl advocates both a method for determining truth which seeks to purge away the dross of subjective and contingent elements in cognition as well as a notion of truth itself which identies this remainder as the essence of the objectively true. According to Adorno, the removal of the subjects contribution to truth and cognition leads to the abdication of discursive justication. Rather than extracting an unsullied truth, Husserls schema arrives at an object that is reduced to sheer subjectivity, a personal object composed of all the contingent and dogmatic prejudices of the knower.22 In this way, logical absolutism, which for Adorno assumes the mere givenness of logical truth, renounces the need for critical reection and thus has no way of separating objective principles from the arbitrary preferences of the subject. This notion of truth as residue is the basis for Adornos belief that all relativism lives off the consistency of absolutism.23 He argues that if every individual and restricted bit of knowledge is burdened with the necessity of being straightforwardly valid independently of every further qualication, then all knowledge is effortlessly delivered over to its own relativity.24 Adornos point seems to be that the absolutists commitment to immediate knowledge eliminates the ability to justify truth-claims on the basis of other justied beliefs and cognitions and that without this capacity there remains no way to discriminate between knowledge and opinion. What is interesting about this charge is that Adorno appears to be making a claim about Husserls conception of logical truth, but his argument draws conclusions on the basis of the inadequacy of immediate knowledge. Now I believe that throughout the course of his critique of logical absolutism Adorno has made a series of assertions that tend to obscure the important difference between truth and knowledge. The position of logical absolutism, strictly speaking, is one about the non-relativistic nature of logical truth, for example, that ~(p ~p) is true independently of any and all real, empirical, and minimally, temporal entities. In this sense, the central tenant of logical absolutism is then the claim that logical truths 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 22 23 24

Adorno (1983): 15; Adorno (1970): 23. Translation altered. Adorno (1983): 72; Adorno (1970): 7879. Adorno (1983): 87; Adorno (1970): 94. Ibid.

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which we are justied in believing that p on the basis of something other than its relation to other justied beliefs. In other words, absolute knowledge is immediately, directly, and self-sufciently justied true belief. The exact nature of the relation absent in immediate knowledge may be left undened for the sake of generality and because, as I have suggested, Adornos use of the terms mediation and mediate knowledge intimates often diverse connotations. However, as we shall come to see, this general denition and the concept motivating it leave unanalyzed another important distinction: that between existential and justicatory conditions of knowledge, that is, the conditions necessary for holding a belief and the cognitive relations that make that belief justied. This difference maps on to Adornos genesis-validity distinction and will become crucial in his critique of Husserls categorial intuition. One last comment on this point is needed. Appealing to a distinction between truth and knowledge does not entail taking a stand on the fundamental relationship between the referents of these two terms. Both realist and anti-realist positions on truth must take account of this distinction, even if it is only for the purposes of arguing, in the case of the latter, that truth is ultimately inseparable from knowledge schemes. The same goes for the distinction between the conditions of belief-formation and those of belief-justication indicated previously. An epistemological externalist will want to claim that the latter must include at least some of the former, but he will still need to explain why, despite this distinction, there is substantial overlap between the two categories. For my purposes, I have found that drawing attention to these distinctions facilitates the identication of hidden presuppositions and potential misrepresentations in Adornos critique of Husserl. In accordance with this approach, I submit that Adorno fails to explicitly acknowledge the distinction between immediate knowledge and absolute truth in his notion of truth as residue, since, as I have said, this describes both a method of verication or justication that is unmediated by consciousness and a notion of logical truth as absolute and necessary. Moreover, Adornos description of the antinomy plaguing logical absolutism appears to argue the incoherency of a notion of truth on the basis of a failed explanation of justication. The absolute and ideal character of logical truth is supposedly untenable because of our inability to provide successful accounts of how our beliefs in these truths are veried or justied. However, I would suggest that this strategy actually follows one adopted by Husserl himself in his defense of logical absolutism. As I noted earlier, one of Husserls arguments in the Prolegomena is that if logical laws are inductive generalizations drawn from empirical observation, then their validity is merely probabilistic. This move describes an inference about the nature of certain truths on the basis of the kind of justication we have for believing them, in this case, that basis is induction. Furthermore, as Gail Soffer has shown, Husserls 109

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arguments in the Prolegomena rely implicitly on an account of Evidenz and epistemic intuition that has yet to be outlined in that text.25 In other words, much of Husserls condence in the untenability of psychologism rests on the belief that our knowledge of logical truth is given in categorial intuition as evidence (Evidenz), that is, an unmediated and direct form of justication. In this way, Adorno has remained immanent to Husserls position by attacking the absolutism 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 knowledge is indefensible relies on the hither-to undefended assumption that the only way to justify propositions is to do so inferentially, discursively, or otherwise mediately. For this reason, we must turn, as Adorno himself does, to Husserls description of immediate knowledge as Evidenz and fulllment in an effort to see if this account can make good on its promises. If Adorno can successfully undermine Husserls condence in immediate knowledge, then his objections against logical absolutism will have a much higher chance of success. PERCEPTUAL FULFILLMENT Husserl promised as early as the Prolegomena to provide a theory of knowledge according to which the verication of propositions depended upon their ability to nd fulllment through evidence restricted to that which is intuitively established.26 This evidence or justication involves an apprehension of the object itself as it is immediately given and corresponds to the luminous certainty that what we have accepted exists or that what we have rejected does not exist. In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl lays out a theory of fulllment meant to elaborate the meaning of givenness and the process whereby evidence is acquired. He sees himself performing a phenomenological analysis of the traditional epistemological relation of thought to corresponding intuition, or what Husserl calls the unity of knowledge. Before proceeding to this discussion, we must briey review some essential Husserlian terminology. Husserl uses the term act to refer to all intentional experiences, that is, experiences that are directed at something, or are about something. This notion of intentionality inherited primitively from Brentano, became for Husserl a key concept in the establishment of the phenomenological enterprise. No longer could one conceive, in the empiricist vein, that ideas were copies of impressions, which were then further related to objects. Thinking
25 26

Soffer (1991): 6667. Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations: Volume 1 and 2, trans. J. N. Findlay (New York: Routledge, 2001) Pro. 7.

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about an object implies nothing about the existence of that object, nor is the real object of intention somehow contained in the mental act of thinking it. Against representationalism in all its forms, Husserl held intentionality to be an intrinsic property of acts and not a relationship between concepts and reality. At the same time, he distinguished between an acts objective reference, what it is about, and its 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 the same meaning and doing so independently of any intuitive objects, Husserl concluded that meanings must be abstractable properties, eternal universals, or ideal unities capable of instantiating themselves in particular mental states. Meaning makes up the idealas opposed to real or temporally determinedcontent of an act, in virtue of which it refers to an object. Different meanings may be correlated to the same objective reference, as in the case of the victor of Jena and the vanquished at Waterloo. In this sense, our everyday mental actsthat is, those acts that are not part of the phenomenological enquiry which takes up meanings themselves as objects of reectionhave their objective reference in virtue of an intermediary, the sense or meaning, which in itself need not necessarily correspond to any real object of intuition. In the Fifth Investigation, Husserl deepened the anatomy of acts by introducing the distinction between quality and matter. The former denotes the difference between judgments, wishes, questions, and so on: that is, different ways of being intentional which may be combined with every objective reference.27 Matter, on the other hand, is that element in an act which rst gives it reference to an object, and reference so wholly denite that it not merely xes the object meant in a general way, but also the precise way in which it is meant.28 Thus, in addition to sustaining an acts objective reference, matter also includes the acts distinctive interpretative sense which gives the determinant manner of reference, that is, its meaning. Quality and matter, which together constitute an acts intentional essence, become vital concepts in Husserls theory of fulllment. In the First Investigation, Husserl established the distinction between meaningintentionsthat is, acts whose meaning is not conjoined with an intuition of its subject-matterand meaning-fulllments, or acts that fulll meaning-intention through an intuitive actualization of the acts objective reference. In the Sixth Investigation, Husserl dissects meaning-fulllment into three essential components: (1) a conceptual or signitive act which bears the meaning of a verbal expression; (2) an intuitive act which presents the thing itself as that which is thought; and (3) an identity between the objective references of both acts. Husserl later attributes this unity of identity to a third act of fulllment which brings
27 28

Ibid: V. 20. Italicized in original text. Ibid.

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about a synthesis of identication, a conscious recognition that the object meant in the signitive act is the same object presented as given in the intuitive act.29 Already there is ambiguity in Husserls discussion when he contends that the identity of signitive and intuitive acts belongs not just to their objective reference, but to their entire matter.30 As noted, matter contains both an acts objective reference and its meaning. In the First Investigation, Husserl had assured his readers that opposed to every intended meaning in a signifying act, there was a fullling 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 correspondence of both the objective reference as well as the sense of signitive and intuitive acts, then it would seem that intuitive acts must also be bearers of meaning. If this is the case, then Husserl must further explain how the content of these two acts differs so that intuition provides epistemic justication for meaning-intentions. This problem of distinguishing intention from intuition becomes magnied in the case of perception which, for Husserl, is the paradigmatic example of fulllment: Perception gives the thing itself precisely as it is intended.31 The immediate givenness which characterizes perception, must, however, nd a place for sensation, which though immediate, is necessarily non-intentional. Thus enters Husserls concept of fullness or intuitive content. In the Sixth Investigation, he argues that every purely intuitive act contains, in addition to its matter and quality, an element of fullness which denotes the sense-content of perceptual intuition and which serves to ll the empty signication.32 The raw, unintentional stuff of sensation is interpreted in the moment of fullness as the object itself to yield the gradations of evidence (Evidenz) corroborating assertive intentionsthe highest evidence being reserved for perception. This interpretation is only possible, however, insofar as there is an intentional element capable of determining the intuitive content as the objective reference of the signitive act. But if sensuous content is to be devoid of semantic content, then on what basis can the former be interpreted? It seems that in order to avoid making the act of recognition or interpretation either arbitrary or inexplicable, Husserl was forced to inject intentionality into the element of fullness and thus could only allow it to fulll signication insofar as it possessed a matter of its own.33 With this exposition of Husserls concept of fulllment in mind, I would like to examine Adornos critique. Although he never brings his comments to the level of detail offered here, it is my contention that his argument against Husserls theory
29 30 31 32 33

Ibid: VI. 7, 8. Ibid: VI. 25. Ibid: VI. 37. Ibid: VI. 25. Ibid: VI. 37.

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of perceptual fulllment is grounded on specic conceptual problems inherent in Husserls account of perceptual knowledge. Adorno claims that Husserls notion of fulllment contains a blatant absurdity:
[P]erception, as consciousness of something, is included among intentional acts, but thereby requires a new moment, i.e. that of fulllment, which on Husserls theory, however, can be achieved by nothing other than perception itself [. . .]. [P]erception as positing intention should literally be fullled, veried and made evident through perception, which equivocally modulates into its second, hyletic meaning, while Husserl anxiously avoids the concept of sensation.34

Adorno charges that Husserls description of perception is equivocal, being intentional on one hand and fullling on the other. Husserl does indeed offer such seemingly contradictory depictions, and yet, as we have seen, in order to be considered fulllment at all, perception would need to be founded on both a signitive and an intuitive act. Interestingly, Adornos claim comes on the heels of a discussion of Kant that appears suddenly in the middle of the chapter on perception and fulllment. In a section entitled Paradoxia of Pure Intuition, Adorno offers a unique interpretation of the Transcendental Aesthetic. He claims that Kants classication of space and time as pure intuitions of sensibility is motivated by a desire to evade the reciprocity of subject and object by de-sensifying sense perception. The attempt leads to an irresolvable contradiction:
Intuition as immediate sense-certainty, as givenness in terms of the subject, names a type of experience, which precisely as such can in no way be pure or independent of experience. Pure intuition is a square circle, experience without experience [. . .]. Pure intuition as immediate and not conceptual would indeed itself be sense perception, i.e. experience. Pure sensibility, released from any relation to content, would no longer be intuition, but rather thought. A form of sensibility which merits the predicate immediate without, however, also being given is absurd.35

According to Adorno, Kant embroiled himself in this absurdity because he failed to recognize the conditions of experience: that the given can only be given according to the universal forms such as space and time, that is, as mediated, while those very forms are meaningless without their relation to the content of sensation. This brilliant example of Adornos transcendental critique bears directly on his argument against Husserls theory of perceptual fulllment. Just as Kants pure intuition sought to reduce immediacy and determination to a common denominator, so too does Husserls theory of perceptual fulllment attempt to glean immediate givenness from non-intentional sensation and to attach this givenness to
34 35

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

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the objecthood characterizing perception as an intentional act. Both formations leave behind a remainder: the irreducible indeterminacy of sensation on one hand and the necessarily mediated and conceptual nature of perception on the other. By allowing sense-perception to be both intention and its fulllment, by assigning to the intuitive content of the perceptual act its own matter or intentional component, and by allowing this component to ll the original signication, Husserl, at the very least, obscures the role of sensuous intuition in the act of perceptual fulllment. Adorno conrms and extends this point:
The theory of fulllment proves itself to be completely viciously circular in that fulllment is expected of the object which perception gives or presents as present. Since, however, the present object of perception is, according to Husserls theory, not just but rather something itself already categorized, i.e. meant through intention, the fulllment of perception as intention would be 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 by dividing all acts into signifying intentions and meaning-fulllments. In the Sixth Investigation, the latter was itself analyzed into its own signitive and intuitive components as well as a unity of identity between the matters of each. From his dissection of acts, we saw that the matter of an intuitive act necessarily includes both an objective reference and a fullling sense corresponding to the meaning of the signifying act. Husserl went on to posit perception as an act of fulllment in which the intended object itself was immediately given. In order to prevent its fulllment function from being reduced to its fullling sense alone and in order to make room for the sensuous-givenness of the object, a third element was added to perception: a moment of fullness or an intuitive content. Yet, Husserl was forced to concede that this intuitive content did itself contain a matter or intention which enabled such content to be interpreted. This addition was necessitated by what Adorno calls Husserls commitment to the primacy of intentionality.37 Without an intentional correlate to the content of our sensuous intuition, we would never be able to say that what we intuit as given is precisely the object meant in our signifying act. The content of intuition must provide, as completely as possible, the determinations of the object being intuited. However, since this intentional correlate to the content of the intuitive act can only be understood, according to Husserls own description, as an abstractable property that is independent of the existence of its objective reference, then it would seem that the intuitive component of perception would invariably need its own fulllment.
36 37

Adorno (1983): 150; Adorno (1970): 155. Translation altered. 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 to be interpreted as the meant object of signication, then at each stage of synthesis interpretative sense would match up with fullling sense without ever implying a sensuous lling and hence without ever achieving fulllment. Such a regress might also be viewed as a vicious circle, one in which perception qua intention does nd its fulllment in perception qua intuition merely in the fullling sense of the latters intuitive component; perception would thus satisfy its own expectation while never making contact with the given. In both views, the inability to give an adequate account of how form (intentionality) ts a formless (nonintentional) content (sensation) forces Husserl to narrow the scope and role of sensuous content in perception by positing more and more formal components within it. The result is debilitating: Either perception can never be fullled or its fulllment in no way involves sensation. One attempt to salvage Husserls position might proceed by invoking comments made earlier in the Sixth Investigation where he states that perception is an act which determines, but does not embody meaning.38 This position would seem to free perception from the dangers of innite regress by detaching it from signication. It would also seem to support other references to perception as an act that requires no further fulllment.39 Unfortunately, this stance, taken in its strict sense, would also force Husserl to purge all traces of conceptuality from the domain of perception and thus render it indistinguishable from non-intentional sensation. Again, the tension between immediacy and determination rears its head. Adorno exploits this tension to expose what he sees as an antinomy within Husserls concept of perception. In order to sustain the immediate givenness of the object while presenting the object itself as intended by the act, perception must yield to either nave realism or traditional idealism:
Nave realism would salvage the immediate-character and pre-categoriality of perception, but it would also rupture the immanence to consciousness on whose analysis epistemologys claim to certainty is grounded. The insistence on the categorial role in perception would certainly keep epistemology immanent and critical. But it would thereby sacrice immediacy and thus the claim to ground transcendent being originally and absolutely in pure immanence.40

In other words, adopting a position of nave realism would certainly allow perception to have the object itself as immediately given, but it would force a reversal of the phenomenological reduction and thus commit Husserl to the dependence of cognitive acts on the existence of their objects. Conversely,
38 39 40

Husserl (2001): VI. 5. Ibid: VI. 14b. Adorno (1983): 155; Adorno (1970): 159. Translation altered.

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traditional idealism would retain the immanence of the phenomenological inquiry as well as permit the critical examination of knowledge. Yet, it would reintroduce the problems of representationalism and would make the objects of knowledge dependent upon the cognitive constitution of the subject. Adornos claim is certainly compelling given the difculties which I have outlined in Husserls concept of perceptual fulllment. It would seem that so long as Husserl provides no clear point of contact between interpretative sense and intuitive lling, between thought and intuition, his account is indeed caught in a tension between two internally consistent, yet diametrically opposed positions. Moreover, his critique strikes at the very heart of Husserls conception of perception by demonstrating its inability to achieve the ideal of adequacy. In Husserls schema, this ideal serves as the basis for criticisms of partial fulllments which require further investigation and articulation to achieve completion. But insofar as Adorno has undermined the coherence of the very concept of meaning-fulllment, this critical inquiry is deprived of its guiding ideal. Unfortunately, Adorno does not even appear to recognize the presence of this type of critical reection in Husserls account. In one passage, he argues that if Husserls description of perception as fulllment that requires no further fulllment is taken seriously, then he must also hold that the initial viewing of a physical object constitutes immediate (i.e., complete) knowledge of the object itself in a way that abdicates any further review:
If one perceived a building in German cities after the Second World War from a strict frontal perspective, then one quite often had to go around to the side in order to know whether one really saw a building or simply the intact wall of a demolished structure. Husserl did not take account of such a possibility.41

This objection confuses Husserlian terms: Simple givenness, even what he calls in Ideas bodily givenness, is not identical with adequate givenness. According to Husserl, all outer perception is necessarily perspectival; physical objects are given from the front or from the side. Although these percepts may be synthesized into a complex all-sided percept, the object cannot be given from every side at once in a single, objectively simple presentation.42 Nevertheless, this intrinsic limitation of outer perception does not dissolve the possibility of justifying perceptual beliefs. Rather, every perceptual adumbration points beyond itself to other possible ones. In order to distinguish real from illusory perception, the horizons or implicit intentions that accompany the perception of a physical object would need to be explored and the justication of the original belief in the nature of the object might be improved through the achievement of ever higher gradations of
41 42

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

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evidence (Evidenz), even within the limits of its inadequacy. In fact, precisely because of their perspectival nature, acts of perception are more susceptible to critical scrutiny as well as to enticements of further exploration. To use Adornos example, Husserl would not claim that the simple perception of the front of a building perfectly fulls or justies the belief that one is perceiving a building. To arrive at greater perfection, the perceiver would need to fulll those intentions that are co-given with the initial perception. If these horizontal intentions are disappointed, then there is good reason to criticize and reconsider the original belief. Thus, the movement from the implicit co-intentions to explicit perceptual fulllment opens a path for epistemic interrogation and progress that appears at odds with Adornos belief that immediate perceptual knowledge is beyond critical review. However, such critical reection still depends on the possibility of having an object given just as it is meant and it is precisely this possibility which Adorno has called into question. CATEGORIAL INTUITION The difculties involved in Husserls theory of fulllment, problems that Adorno identied as antinomies, would seem to disable any further attempt to salvage his logical absolutism. If Husserl fails to provide a satisfactory account of immediate knowledge, then his belief in the absolute truth of logical principles which depends upon the possibility of having this type of knowledge would appear to be untenable. It is important, however, to note that the kind of immediate knowledge that Husserl thinks we have of logical truths is not the same as that which we have of physical objects in perception. While Husserl certainly believes that we have direct, unmediated access to the truth of logical laws, judgmental forms, syncategorematic connectives, and other ideal objects, unlike perception, such acts need not involve the ambiguous task of interpreting heterogeneous, sensuous stuff. Since Adornos criticism of immediate perceptual knowledge relied primarily on elucidating the irremediable difculty of linking the nonintentional, indeterminate intuitive content of sensation with intentional, meaning-determinant acts of intellection, the possibility of intuitive access to non-sensuous contents of experience remains unimpugned and in need of independent treatment if Adornos argument against logical absolutism is to succeed. In a 1940 article published in the Journal of Philosophy, Adorno lays out his critique of Husserls theory of categorial intuition as the necessary consequence of 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 ( January 1940): 12. I turn to this article because it contains an extended treatment of Adornos critique of categorial intuition which is then essentially summarized in Adorno (1970).

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the most lucid and straightforward exposition of Adornos philosophical position on the matter, he outlines his case against categorial intuition and Husserls project as a whole. Adorno avers that Husserl inserted the concept of categorial intuition during the Sixth Investigation in order to provide a bridge between real and ideal worlds, a method by which we could think ideal realities (Ideale Tatbestnde) that are not produced by us and still get their absolute validity into rational evidence.44 Categorial intuition is, in Adornos terms, the deus ex machina of logical absolutism, the concept that arrives to resolve the tension between the rationalist Husserl who wishes to vindicate the vrits de raison and the positivist Husserl who acknowledges immediate givenness as the only legal source of knowledge.45 In the Sixth Investigation, he introduces categorial intuition after considering those categorial and relational elements of judgmentswords such as the, a, some, is, etc.which do not seem to have intuitive correlates available in sense-perception. As he explains, the predicate of being expressed in the word is cannot nd fulllment in sensation since, I can see colour, but not beingcoloured.46 Husserls discussion of sense-perception has already established that in order to be veried, meaning-intentions must come into a recognitive unity with intuitions that give the object immediately as it is meant. Without intuitive correlates, there would seem to be no way of fullling intentions of universal or categorial objects. Therefore, Husserl concludes that in order for such knowledge to be possible, there must be an act which renders identical the services to the categorial elements of meaning that merely sensuous perception renders to the material elements.47 This act is categorial intuition, and its object is the ideal correlate of judgment, the state-of-affairs (Sachverhalt). Husserl contends that the objective reference of categorial acts lies not in the world of real objects, but in the realm of ideal states-of-affairs, of which we become aware in the fulllment of judgment: as the sensible object stands to sense-perception so the state of affairs stands to the becoming aware in which it is given.48 In this analogy to senseperception, Husserl hopes to have described a categorial mode of perception according to which logical truths can become objects of immediate knowledge. It is this idea of an intuitive grasp of non-sensuous contents of experience that is elaborated in Husserls other ideas of ideational abstraction, eidetic intuition and essential insight. Adorno levels his critique on the ambiguity of this becoming aware and of the entire concept of categorial intuition. He argues the following:
44 45 46 47 48

Adorno (1940): 12. Ibid: 13. Husserl (2001): VI. 42. Ibid: VI. 45. Ibid: VI. 44.

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The judgment, viewed subjectively, is an act, an experience, and as such it is something immediately 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 rst one. There is no second act of becoming aware of what one has judged in addition to the actual judging itself, unless of course one reects on the judgment. Such a reection, however, would necessarily transcend the immediacy of the actual judgment which for itself would become the object of such reection [. . .]. But to become aware of a Sachverhalt means for Husserl also to reassure oneself of the truth of the judgment. The equivocation [. . .] is strictly this, (1) to become aware of a Sachverhalt, to achieve the synthesis of judgment, and (2) to bring the truth of this judgment to absolute evidence. None of the 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 the contamination of the real act of judgingan immediate experience of becoming awareand the non-immediate, reective verication of judgment which puts the Sachverhalt into relation with other Sachverhalt and thereby arrives at a new categorization.50 For Adorno, the concept of becoming aware allows Husserl to detach the non-reective immediacy of actual judging itself and to use it in explaining the justicatory function of categorial acts. Just as his concept of sense-perception described a kind of non-inferential justication that possessed both sensuous immediacy and conceptual determinacy, so too does Husserls term categorial intuition betray the illegitimate synthesis of the immediate givenness that characterizes actual judging with the generality and necessity that reectionand hence, mediationalone can provide. Husserls conceptual sleight of hand, his attempt to bridge by at distinctions to whose rigidity his position is beholden, has once again landed him in antinomy. Adornos interpretation of Husserls notoriously problematic concept and his subsequent 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 reection appears to imply two distinct meanings. Initially, it refers to an act of consciousness wherein other acts, such as judgments, are selected and made into objects of inward perception. This Lockean conception is then coupled with another according to which reection is synonymous with a discursive mode of justication that appeals to related items of knowledge. In the rst sense, reection takes as its object the act of judgment, while in the second it interrogates the judged state-of-affairs itself and its relation to other judged statesof-affairs which might serve as grounds for the judgments veracity. Moreover, Husserl himself employs the term only in the rst sense, arguing that the concept of state-of-affairs cannot arise out of reection on judgments, since this could only yield us concepts of judgments or of real constituents of judgments.51
49 50 51

Adorno (1940): 16. Ibid. Husserl (2001): VI. 44.

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The fact that Husserl would not accept either meaning of reection as a description of how beliefs in categorial objects are justied does not absolve Adorno of the guilt of equivocation. The ambiguity in his use of that term is linked to the larger problem of trying Husserl on the charge of confusing real acts of judgment with their ideal contents and objective correlates. Husserl himself was perhaps the rst to clarify and reect upon the signicance of this distinctionprimarily in the Prolegomena to Pure Logicand it is therefore all the more difcult to show that he succumbs to confusion on this point. Nevertheless, Adorno has raised an important issue. The immediacy with which the act of judgment is given in experience is quite different from the way in which we determine the truth of the judged state-of-affairs. The former refers to an empirical belief which is immediate only in the sense that its existence does not depend on other cognitions, while the latter would describe the immediate, noninferential, and non-discursive justication of a belief. A judgment is immediately given in the rst sense just in case our making it requires no reference to memories, perceptions, or any other cognitive experiences. This type of immediacy is vastly different from the justication or verication of a categorial judgment which proceeds without connecting that judgment to other justied beliefs. This useful distinction, which I introduced above, explains situations in which the existence of a judgment or belief may presuppose other cognitions or beliefs without depending upon these for its justication. In fact, Husserl claims that categorial judgments possess precisely this mediate-immediate structure categorial objects can be presented in a fullled manner only by means of a complex cognitive process even though the validation of these judgments is achieved non-inferentially and non-discursively. Perhaps the best example of this class of acts are those in which we move from sensible, material objects to the corresponding species or universal by way of a process which Husserl calls ideational abstraction. The categorial act which enables our apprehension of universals is founded on other acts such as the perception of certain specic moments in a sensible object as well as the conception of these moments as standing in certain relations of identity. Since, according to Husserl, one act founds another when it is necessary for the holding or existence of the latter, founding refers to an existential relationship among acts. In this way, the conscious act through which the judgment that a is a part of A is veried may begin with the straightforward perception of A, without attention being drawn to its parts. Only then, in acts of articulation do we put its 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 related members gain the character of parts.52 Now we must consider two actsthe rst
52

Ibid: VI. 48.

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directed at A, the other at its part awhich are not merely performed together, or after one another, in the manner of disjoined experiences; rather they are bound together in a single act in whose synthesis A is rst given as containing a within itself. 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 which the same relation can achieve actual givenness.54 This same relation, the categorial relation between part and whole, is the ideal law which unites the two perceptual possibilities as its instances. In this way, the categorial state-of-affairs is intuited on the basis of articulating acts that set into relief the moment of relation between a and A in the straightforward perception of A. The example of ideational abstraction depicts a justicatory process that is non-inferential, yet carried out through a complex procedure involving interrelated cognitive acts. Intending a universal relation, such as that between part and whole, is dependent upon the content of preliminary acts directed at concrete individuals and abstract particulars. In Husserls terms, the higher-order intentions of universal objects are founded on lower-order acts of perception whose content it operates on to arrive at a new intentional object. This process requires that we draw attention from concrete individuals to their abstract moments and then direct our cognitive interest to the universal instantiated in these moments. It is on the basis of these prior acts of articulation and the selective attention they provide that we are in a position to see the universal in the particular. What this means is that, phenomenologically speaking, the possibility of holding a belief about universals or carrying out a categorial act is mediated by the material secured by lower-order acts and thus cannot be the immediate experience that Adorno says it is. Nevertheless, the justicatory nature of categorial fulllments is precisely that of an intuitive or immediate grasp of ideal objects. As the fulllment of a judgment, the intuition of the partwhole relation does not depend upon the knowledge of other abstract relations. In contrast, the possibility of actually carrying out such an abstractive act may certainly depend upon the prior senseperception of a particular whole and its part, as well as a number of other observations. The problem with Adornos critique is not that he appeals to an inappropriate distinction between existential and justicatory conditions, but rather that there is simply no evidence that Husserls categorial intuition constitutes an illegitimate attempt to bridge this difference. In fact, Adorno cannot be correct when he claims that Husserl attributes to the justicatory function of acts an immediacy that belongs solely to actual judging itself, since Husserl explicitly characterizes
53 54

Ibid. Ibid.

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the latter as mediated by numerous founding acts. Thus, if Husserl were ever actually guilty of contaminating real and ideal moments in the concept of categorial intuition, he would more than likely have made categorial fulllment a derivative, inferential, and mediated operation and not, as he does, an achievement of intuition. Despite the failure of his direct assault on categorial intuition, Adornos more specic discussions of ideational abstraction and eidetic intuition offer an opportunity to salvage his critique. To recall, Adornos argument rests on proving that Husserls categorial intuition is constructed on the basis of an invalid inference from the conditions necessary for holding a belief or carrying out an act with those necessary for justifying that belief or act. In discussing the ideational abstraction of 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 this were 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 perception it is simply blended into other things. It attains autonomy only by being brought together with a completely distinct dimension of experience, namely past acquaintance [Kenntnis] with color as such. Insofar as it is representative of color, the red moment is familiar to consciousness beyond sheer present experience. Its concept is presupposed, no matter how primitive and little actualized it 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 individual object presupposes knowledge of Red as a universal capable of instantiation. This claim has some initial plausibility. Isolating the redness of an apple in the act of perception would seem to presuppose that we already know that Red is a universal property that instantiates itself in the color properties or tropes of concrete individuals such as apples; yet this knowledge is supposed to exist only in virtue of the complex act of isolation itself. In order to break up the hic et nunc of perception into individuals and tropes, we must make use of categorial concepts and other ideal unities which are already justied and presented within the intentional essence of those founding acts of isolation. However, according to Husserls account these concepts and universals are themselves veried only through an intuitive recognition whose possibility is dependent upon acts of perception. Avoiding this circularity would involve adopting either a naive realist or an empirical-conceptualist view of abstraction, at least in regard to universals like Red. The rst would force Husserl again to shatter the phenomenological while the second would turn Red into an empirical concept formulated and justied through induction from particulars. The latters adoption would require
55

Adorno (1983): 102; Adorno (1970): 10809. Translation altered.

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the total abandonment of Husserls description of ideational abstraction as immediate or intuitive knowledge. Tempting as this interpretation is, it fails to deliver the antinomy-rendering blow that Adorno anticipates. One reason for this failure is that Adorno has himself confused the conditions of belief-holding with those of justication. Isolating the red trope of a perception does not require prior knowledge of Red or Color as such, since this act could just as easily be performed on the basis of a mere belief about the universal character of Red. In other words, I need not be justied in believing that Red is a universal property instantiated in the red moment of an apple to isolate that moment in my experience. Adornos claim that the identication 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 they might be compared, is quite defensible when taken as an argument about the formation of beliefs regarding abstract particulars. But to move from a condition of belief to a condition of justication requires an explicit recognition of this boundary and an explanation of its permeability. Adorno supplies neither. David Bell has outlined an objection to categorial intuition quite similar to the one raised by Adorno and has offered a convincing rebuttal in Husserls 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 process of synthesis to items that are given in straightforward acts. On the other hand, however, he also appears to claim that those very items are themselves meanings, or universals, or intentional materials 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 of founded, synthetic, higher-level acts is simply otiose; or straightforward awareness of meaning is not possible, in which case there appears to be no appropriate material to which synthesis can be applied in the rst place.56

Like Bell, Adorno sees a fundamental incoherence in the claims that preparatory acts for the intuitive awareness of universals appear to make use of and presuppose prior acquaintance with these entities as their intentional matter. But in contrast to Bell, he is unable or unwilling to nd a possible resolution to this dilemma.
Expressions like the matter, the meaning, the sense, and the intentional matter of an act are systematically ambiguous. They can either be used to refer to an individual, real, abstract moment of some particular concrete experience, or they can be used to refer to a universal, ideal species that a number of such concrete experiences have in common. Given that an awareness of the former is independent of, and prior to, any awareness of the latter, the one is in principle capable of acting as the foundation of the other.57
56 57

David Bell, Husserl (New York: Routledge, 1990) 124. Ibid.

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Adorno failed to see that isolating acts whose matter is a red trope or moment are experiences whose justication is independent of our awareness of the ideal universal Red. Much of his blindness is attributable to the fact that his critique transgresses the very distinction between the conditions for belief-formation and those of belief-justication to which he himself drew attention. Since the factual conditions that make the execution or genesis of cognitive acts possible are distinguishable from the epistemic conditions that make beliefs justied or valid, Adorno has implicitly conated the very relation between genesis and validity of whose hypostasization he convicted Husserl. This is not to say that the point which seems to motivate Adornos critiquenamely, that the processes of belief-formation and belief-justication are not isolated activities, but instead indicate the two-sided, doxastic, and normative character of all judgmentsis without warrant. Rather, Adornos chief problem is that he has failed to show how antinomies follow from Husserls attempt to bridge a distinction upon whose rigidity his entire program depends. As I hope to have shown previously, Husserls concept of categorial intuition can be coherently analyzed in terms of the difference between the conditions of belief-formation and those of belief-justication and thus shows no indication of constituting the unwarranted bridge that Adorno thinks it does. CONCLUSION Despite the shortcomings of his treatment of categorial intuition, Adorno has nevertheless given us criticisms of Husserls early phenomenological project that highlight the difculties involved in an account of immediate knowledge. As I have argued, Adornos critique of perceptual fulllment holds its ground under a close reading of Husserls argument. The general problem that emerges from that critique lies in Husserls inability to negotiate between immediacy and mediation, or more specically, between givenness and determinacy. Whether or not this is a dilemma faced by all descriptions of immediate knowledge, as Adorno thinks, is still an open question and probably not one that can be settled on the basis of just one example. But the success of this particular immanent critique suggests that Adorno may have provided a novel and effective approach to the problems of foundationalism in epistemology, problems that need not be dealt with either by epistemologists still in pursuit of foundations or by anti-foundationalists dismissive of the epistemological enterprise in general. The kind of paradoxical internal meta-criticism that he performed on Husserls early phenomenology had mixed results, and while it appears that, in the nal analysis, the core of Husserls logical absolutism is left intact, his epistemological foundationalism has not emerged unscathed. Although the stakes of this encounter remain high, the outcome does not indicate a decisive victor. Instead, the limited achievements of Adornos 124

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meta-critique point the way toward reconstruction of arguments, renement of techniques, and expansion of subject-matter so that new gures in the history of philosophy and its intersection with the foundationalism debate may come under similar scrutiny. Emory University

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