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

[Lev Lafayette]

Hi Ralph,

There are references but no footnotes to this commentary. Can they found elsewhere?

Kind regards,


Lev


--- On Thu, 8/21/08, Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org> wrote:

> From: Ralph Dumain <rdumain at autodidactproject.org>
> Subject: [FRA:] Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason" (1)
> To: Adorno-Hegel at yahoogroups.com
> Cc: theory-frankfurt-school at srcf.ucam.org
> Date: Thursday, August 21, 2008, 10:13 PM
> 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?
> 
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