From Philosophy Lecturer to Advanced Student 205dialectics. His starting-point was Husserl’s claim that phenomenology
belonged in the tradition of a ‘first philosophy’, by which was meant
a philosophy founded on the premise of a hierarchical ‘schema of a first
thing which supports everything and from which everything else was
derived’.^77 He accused Husserl of attempting to explain the entire
universe by positing an originatory principle that was based purely on
thought.^78 At the same time, he objected to the legacy of an idealism
that placed the subject at the centre of attention. Even if Husserl’s
idea of an intentional consciousness established a new foundation for
the subject–object relation, ‘the subject–object remained a subject in
disguise.’^79 Adorno went so far as to criticize the entire philosophical
tradition since Descartes for having always posited an unalterable
ultimate ground. In the process ‘the return of subject and object within
subjectivity and the duality of the one is detailed in two types of epistemo-
logy, each of which lives on the unrealizability of the other. Roughly
speaking, these types are those of rationalism and empiricism.’^80
Husserl’s critique is basically a half measure. ‘The concept of imman-
ence sets limits to an immanent critique.’^81 In contrast, dialectics not
only negates the unity of thing and consciousness, but proves that ‘the
real life process of society... is the core of the contents of logic itself.’^82
Approaching Husserl from a materialist standpoint, this statement is
the culmination of Adorno’s chief objections to his epistemology. Dia-
lectics is the only possible alternative to phenomenology. Only dialectical
thinking is able to lay bare the mediated nature of the phenomenal
world and hence to define the ways in which preformed social factors
determine contingent individual experience. This conception of dialectics
should not be thought of as ‘a positive assertion about being’, but rather
as ‘a directive to cognition not to comfort itself with such positivity. It
is really the demand to arbitrate dialectic concretely.’^83 Dialectics does
not reject epistemology in general, but protests against a monistic view
of knowledge that is derived from the principle of identity and that
claims to be free from contradiction and therefore true. Knowledge
totalized in this way, Adorno claims, is a ‘fetishism of knowledge’.^84
In his critique of Husserl, Adorno constantly referred to the history
of philosophy in order to show that phenomenology stands in a tradi-
tion and that it clings to ultimate explanations. As far as Husserl’s
theory of the constitution of consciousness was concerned, he accepted
the proposition that the limits of consciousness are revealed a priori.
But where phenomenology comes to speak of ‘the matter itself’, its
concepts degenerate into ‘a fiction’ behind which ‘the route to facticity
is obstructed’.^85 This is also expressed in the language of phenomeno-
logy, with its ‘metaphorical, art nouveau, ornamental’ quality. ‘The aura
of the concrete accrues to the concepts’ even though they are no more
than ‘the labels of pure consciousness’.^86 To illustrate the illusory nature
of the ‘intuition of essences’ (Wesensschau), Adorno used the image of
the ‘old-style photographer... who is mysteriously hidden beneath a