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

[walter a davis]

I wonder if a reading of Meillassoux's After Finitude (on Kant and Hume
etc.)in some  would advance this discussion, getting us beyond all the old
and inadequate ways in which objectivity and subjectivity are deployed. Or
if a reading of the first chapter of my Inwardness and Existence might also
do that.  Or Heidegger's analytic of dasein.  The problem isn't that we
can't get beyond all this objectivity-subjectivity stuff, but that we ever
let those terms reify consciousness.
   


walter a. davis
Professor Emeritus, Ohio State University
www.walteradavis.com
 

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

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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