Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969)

Words' own meanings weigh heavily on them. But these words do not use themselves up in their meanings; they themselves are caught up in their context. This fact is underestimated in the high praise given to science by every pure analysis of meaning, starting with Husserl's, especially by that of Heidegger, which considers itself far above science. Only that person satisfies the demand of language who masters the relation of language to individual words in their configurations. Just as the fixing of the pure element of meaning threatens to pass over to the arbitrary, so the belief in the primacy of the configurative threatens to pass into the badly functional, the merely communicative - into scorn for the objective aspect of words. In language that is worth something both of these elements are transmitted.

In the jargon, finally, there remains from inwardness only the most external aspect, that thinking oneself superior which marks people who elect themselves: the claim of people who consider themselves blessed simply by virtue of being what they are. Without any effort, this claim turns into an elitist claim, or into a readiness to attach itself to elites which then quickly gives the axe to inwardness. A symptom of the transformation of inwardness is the belief of innumerable people that they belong to an extraorinary family. The jargon of authenticity, which sells self-identity as something higher, projects the exchange formula onto that which imagines that it is not exchangeable; for as a biological individual each man resembles himself. That is what is left over after the removal of the soul and immortality from the immortal soul.

This cannot be avoided and has to be taken into consciousness. In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally performed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it. But fundamental ontology gladly spares itself that, by pretending it has a starting point somewhere outside. In that way such ontology succumbs to cultural mediations all the more; they recur as social aspects of the ontology's own purity. Philosophy involves itself all the more deeply in society as it more eagerly - reflecting upon itself - pushes off from society and its objective spirit.

Thus industriousness is the substantivisation of those characteristics that apply to all industrious people, and which they have in common. By contrast, however, 'authenticity' names no authentic thing as a specific characteristic but remains formal, relative to a content which is by-passed in the word, if not indeed rejected by it - even when the word is used adjectivally. The word says nothing about what a thing is, but questions the extent to which the thing realises what is posited by its concept. The thing stands in implicit opposition to what it merely seems to be. In any case the word would receive its meaning from the quality which it is a predicate of. But the suffix '-keit', '-ness' tempts one to believe that the word must already contain that content in itself. The mere category of relationship is fished out and in its turn exhibited as something concrete.