Husserl’s phenomenology reified abstractions by forgetting consciousness’s productive role

Evidence

This intermediate realm of awareness-of-things, with its `immanent transcendence’, was criticized by Adorno as being a combination of two abstractions: an abstraction from everything factual, in the concept of originally given phenomena, and an abstraction from the activity of thinking, corporeal individuals, in the concept of consciousness. Husserl had dissociated these abstractions from the things they were abstracted from. What resulted was the reification of abstraction. Consciousness was taking something as given because it had forgotten the part it played in creating it itself. The space in which consciousness and objects apparently coincided was that of reduced consciousness itself. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2271

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘reification of abstraction’ argument parallels earlier chapters on commodity fetishism and on reification in Lukács and Adorno. — connects to: Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 383; Dasein’s thrown concreteness displaced pure consciousness as philosophy’s starting point — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 403; Husserl’s late turn toward embodiment may have borrowed from Heidegger and Uexküll — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 426 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Escaping monologic reason requires replacing philosophy of consciousness with communicative rationality #complicates (0.85) — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism, 383
• Husserl’s late turn toward embodiment may have borrowed from Heidegger and Uexküll #responds-to (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 426
• Dasein’s thrown concreteness displaced pure consciousness as philosophy’s starting point #qualifies (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 403
• Consciousness is being, not merely self-knowledge, so knowledge’s primacy must be abandoned #expands (0.72) — Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 128