Adorno Contra Transcendental Idealism: A Critique of Husserl’s Notion of Objectivity

Abstract

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.