Adorno read Husserl’s paradoxes as evidence for materialist dialectics

Evidence

In Adorno’s opinion, Husserl had not succeeded in breaking out of idealism, out of the philosophy of consciousness which saw consciousness as being capable of grasping the totality of the world. Husserl had, however, to a certain extent opened idealism to attack by taking it to self-destructive extremes. Lukács had demonstrated the antinomies of bourgeois thought in his essay on `Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat’, and used them to arrive at the embodiment of the proletariat’s self-knowledge in Marxist theory; similarly, Adorno wanted to present the phenomenological antinomies that plainly appeared in the plethora of paradoxical constructs and conceptual links in Husserl, and use them to arrive at materialist dialectics, as he understood it, as the solution to them. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2268

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s Critical Theory track — Lukács’s reification essay as the model Adorno copied against Husserl; resonates with the broader Marxist critique of bourgeois thought. — connects to: Adorno renounced Husserl’s object theory via Cornelius’s pure immanent philosophy — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 276