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

[James Rovira]

I think those are good questions, Ralph.  I have no idea how Adorno
can get from Kant's COPR to his claim #1 below, esp. after saying Kant
is not a subjectivist.

Kierkegaard's discussion of time in the Christian era vs. time in the
Greek era in Concept of Anxiety might help you with your question
about Kant, temporality, and the Greeks.  If you have a copy of this
text available you might look it up.  It's a little complicated and I
don't recall the details offhand.  His main point, if I recall, is
that because human existence is not entirely time-bound (spirit is
aware of eternity) we are able to live with a conscious awareness of
past, present, and future, rather than live in a continual present
like, say, animals might.  He rejects the notion of time as a simple
linear experience and discusses problems inherent in thinking about
time that way.

Jim R

On Fri, Aug 22, 2008 at 12:24 AM, Ralph Dumain
<rdumain at autodidactproject.org> wrote:
> 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?
>