All philosophical immediacy is mediated, so no philosophy of origins survives

Evidence

As a concept, what is primary and immediate is always mediated, and therefore not primary. No immediacy, and no factuality, in which philosophical thought hopes to escape mediation through itself, will be granted to intellectual reflection except through thought. This was both registered and transfigured by the pre-Socratic metaphysics of existence in the Parmenides fragment stating that thought and being are the same. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Encapsulates Adorno’s central critique of prima philosophia — the mediation thesis that grounds his negative dialectics.
• DEEPTHINKING: This is the generative core of Adorno’s entire anti-foundationalism — dense, self-referential, and the sort of passage one re-reads.