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

[Ralph Dumain]

I don't understand your question. Do you mean are there footnotes in 
the English translation of Adorno's lectures?  The numbers I put in 
parentheses are page numbers to the cited translation.

I would like some clarification on a few points two points in lecture 
1 that I found elusive:

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

(2) Why is Kant's the first work that Adorno expresses bourgeois 
resignation? "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)

(3) Absolutes must be nailed down as timeless and forever secure, a 
tendency characteristic of bourgeois thought. Why is this so, and how 
does this need for timelessness compare to a comparable tendency of 
ancient Greek metaphysics?


At 11:49 PM 8/21/2008, Lev Lafayette wrote:
>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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