This dissertation explores Theodor Adorno’s career-long critique of Martin Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology toward understanding how the latter may be inherently supportive of a negative dialectical approach to social critique and change. Adorno’s negative dialectics is motivated by the assumption that ethical rationality is primordially rooted in non-identity thinking, and it proposes that three basic conditions must be met for non-identity thinking to be truly engaged: the subject must acknowledge that the object takes socio-epistemic priority in constructions of meaning; she must attend to the object’s particular qualities that resist circumscription by the totalizing concepts of modern autonomous reason; and she must resolve to relate to the object through a “mimetic” form of rationality, which is passively attuned to the playful and unfinished elements of experience as much as it is inclined to critically interpret the particular socio-material conditions that shape consciousness and its environments. Without meeting these conditions, rationality tacitly sanctions subjects to reify experience as it takes an idealist form. While emphasizing that the problem of reification is endemic to public life at large, Adorno foregrounds its correlation with the persistence of philosophical idealism within the academy, leading him to target the phenomenological and existential traditions in general, and Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology in particular, as inherently antagonistic to what he deems is philosophy’s central mission of normalizing non-identity thinking in both theory and praxis. Fundamental Ontology, he alleges, celebrates identity thinking, thus betraying its own endeavor to overturn traditional philosophical principles. Adorno locates the repercussions of this purported failure not only within theoretical understandings of how rationality and meaning are constituted, but within mundane forms of intersubjective relations that determine the ethics, discourse, and well-being of social collectives. He charges Fundamental Ontology with promoting an ethos in which subjects contribute to their own deprivations of the social conditions that, toward garnering robust understanding of how objectivity restrictively mediates subjectivity, would encourage recognition of new possibilities for subjectively mediating social conditions by amplifying individual and collective agency for de-normalizing identity thinking. This is largely because Adorno deems Heidegger’s concept of “authenticity” - an existential modality designated by recursive engagement in practices of disillusionment and self-actualization - to contradict itself by reaffirming atomization, alienation, and reification as social norms. Given that the majority of Adorno’s objections to Fundamental Ontology are briefed by his broader belief that it eschews non-identity thinking, the central task of this dissertation is to search for exceptions, that is, to ask after the plausibility of interpreting essential components of the Ontology so that non-identity not only “appears,” but assumes a critical position. This foremost involves examining the meaning of Being as a lived hermeneutic, the role of existential analysis for rediscovering what I call “authentic non-identity thinking” and its vitality to immanent social critique, and the possibility that a template for ethical relations inheres in or can be extrapolated from the Ontology. While the focus of the dissertation remains with Adorno and Heidegger, this is also to advance a more extensive understanding of the complex relationship between the First Generation Critical Theory and Existential Phenomenological traditions, including how they may be mutually supportive as they aim to negate ideology in both the academy and broader public life.
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