[FRA:] Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (1)

[Ralph Dumain]

Adorno, Theodor W. Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", translated by 
Rodney Livingstone. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. (1959)

Lecture 1: 12 May 1959

However tangentially people may be acquainted with Kant, they know 
more about what they've been told than what's actually there. Kant's 
Copernican is not subjectivist, it's about the objectivity of 
subjectivity. Kant's original issues are not today's. Neo-Kantianism 
was once the going thing; now it is scarcely a memory.  Adorno 
mentions the Marburg School preoccupied with mathematics, etc., and 
the Southwestern School concentrating on aesthetics. The issues seem 
to be dead. Supposedly Kant's categorical ideas have been shattered 
by relativity theory, quantum mechanics, etc. Positivists like 
Reichenbach have allegedly shown Kant to be obsolete. (5) But now 
that Kant's authority has receded, as has the authority of all 
classic texts, Kant can be viewed afresh. This will not be a 
conventional course explicating Kant as the existing secondary 
literature does; rather, it will be attempt to bring Kant back to 
life by explaining the core issues that motivate his work.

Adorno warns his students not to be hypnotized by the seeming central 
concept of the day, "Being", to which he explicitly opposes Kant. (3) 
I'm supposing this is a dig against Heidegger.

Kant, by showing that the traditional great metaphysical questions 
were unprovable, not rationally decidable, contributed to their 
removal from consideration. Kant's critique doesn't answer the 
metaphysical questions in the negative; it critiques the questions 
themselves. One result of this is the greater resort of theologians, 
such as Kierkegaard and Barth to pure faith, as pure reason won't get 
them anywhere.

Adorno claims that Kant's COPR is the first work that expresses 
bourgeois resignation, abjuring the ultimate questions and pursuing 
the finite in all directions. "This is a very different kind of 
outlook from the radical atheism of the philosophes of the 
Enlightenment . . . who really did give negative answers and in whose 
thought reason was sufficiently confident to make statements about 
the Absolute." (6) Kant restricts such claims.

Note: there are implications of this contrastive juxtaposition that 
need to be thought out further. Adorno does not claim that the 
perspective of the philosophes is superior; rather, he diagnoses the 
fate of the bourgeois world view in Kant, not too flatteringly.

COPR represents "a theodicy of bourgeois life which is conscious of 
its own practical activity while despairing of the fulfillment of its 
own utopia." (6-7)

This is, I think, an odd conclusion to draw based solely on what is 
presented thus far.  There is one further element insufficiently 
discussed: the nature of proof and the need for absolute foundations. 
Once we dispense with the need for absolute proof, we can draw 
conclusions about the way the world is structured based on positive 
knowledge and methods of knowledge acquisition that actually produce 
progress.  The question of what can be proved strictly logically or 
not is historically an important one, but an exclusive preoccupation 
with proof, and hence its opposite, skepticism, bogs down so much of 
philosophy to this day and doesn't do justice to how knowledge progresses.

Adorno emphasizes the "dual aspect of self-reflexivity", which for 
Kant establishes the foundation of experience and prevents 
transgressing its boundaries into the Absolute. (7) But this raises a 
new question: how can reason criticize itself? Kant approached this 
in a straightforward way, while a problem was created for 
post-Kantians, who criticized Kant himself. Kant criticized Locke's 
"physiology of reason", while having no problem with reason's ability 
to take itself as an object of scrutiny. (7) Central to Kant is the 
confidence he places in mathematical natural science to take the 
place of a priori metaphysics. (8) He poses the question: how (not 
whether) synthetic a priori judgments are possible? This is key to 
Kant's whole philosophy?

Here Adorno interjects a general statement on the study of 
philosophy. If university courses are worth anything, it's because 
philosophical texts of the past are not comprehensible on their own. 
Adorno hastens to disavow a need to understand the historical context 
of the work; rather, "the problems under discussion are only 
comprehensible if you are familiar with certain force fields within 
which philosophies may be said to move." (8)

Then Adorno defines judgement, propositions, analytic, synthetic, a 
priori, a posteriori. Truth, absolutes, must be nailed down as 
timeless and forever secure, a tendency characteristic of bourgeois 
thought, also revealed by metaphors of commerce. (10)  Kant is 
quintessentially a bourgeois thinker.

Query: how does this compare to the atemporality of ancient Greek thought?