Kant's Critique of Pure Reason

Theodor W. Adorno, Rolf Tiedemann

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780745694368
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Epistemology in Philosophy

Kant is a pivotal thinker in Adorno's intellectual world. Yet although he wrote monographs on Hegel, Husserl and Kierkegaard, the closest he came to an extended discussion of Kant are two lecture courses, one concentrating on the Critique of Pure Reason and the other on the Critique of Practical Reason. This new volume by Adorno comprises his lectures on the former.
Adorno attempts to make Kant's thought comprehensible to students by focusing on what he regards as problematic aspects of Kant's philosophy. Adorno examines his dualism and what he calls the Kantian 'block': the contradictions arising from Kant's resistance to the idealism that his successors, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, saw as the inevitable outcome of his ideas. But these lectures also provide an accessible introduction to and rationale for Adorno's own philosophy as expounded in Negative Dialectics and his other major writings. Adorno's view of Kant forms an integral part of his own philosophy, since he argues that the way out of the Kantian contradictions is to show the necessity of the dialectical thinking that Kant himself spurned. This in turn enables Adorno to criticize Anglo-Saxon scientistic or positivist thought, as well as the philosophy of existentialism.
This book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought, and it will be essential reading for anyone interested in the foundations of Adorno's own work.

EDITOR’S NOTES

Lecture One

1 Comparisons between Copernicus’s heliocentric reform and all sorts of changes in the intellectual superstructure have always been very common, both before Kant and since. Kant himself regarded his ‘intellectual revolution’ as an ‘analogy’ to the Copernican revolution: ‘We must … make trial whether we may not have more success in the tasks of metaphysics, if we suppose that objects must conform to our knowledge … We should then be proceeding precisely along the lines of Copernicus’s primary hypothesis. Failing of satisfactory progress in explaining the movements of the heavenly bodies on the supposition that they all revolved around the spectator, he tried whether he might not have better success if he made the spectator to revolve and the stars to remain at rest.’ For Kant’s ‘new method of thought’ this means ‘that we can know a priori of things only what we ourselves put into them.’ (Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, pp. 22–3, B xvi, xviii). Walter Benjamin, with whose ideas Adorno closely identified himself, wrote of ‘a Copernican turn in historiography’ analogous to Kant’s epistemo-logical grounding of objectivity in the depths of the subject. According to this, true insight into past events was reserved for a process of remembering anchored in present actualities (see Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 5, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schwep-penhäuser, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main, 1982, pp. 490–1 and 1006). Adorno spoke of Beethoven’s Copernican revolution by means of which Beethoven derived the traditional forms of music once again from the subject (Beethoven. Philosophie der Musik. Fragmente und Texte, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, NaS, section I, vol. 1, p. 99). On Kant’s Copernican revolution see also Lecture Three, p. 32, and also n. 13.

2 Critique of Pure Reason, p. 12, A xvi-xvii.

3 Ibid.

4 The concept of salvaging, rescuing [Rettung] is crucial to Adorno’s interpretation of Kant. Kant only used the word casually, for example, in connection with the idea of freedom (cf. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, p. 80. Adorno quotes the passage in Negative Dialectics, GS, vol. 6, p. 250). For Adorno the nominalism that both accompanies and conditions the history of the increasing domination of nature terminates in the abolition of metaphysical entities and reaches a culminating point at which the entire process goes into reverse: the Kantian urge to rescue the intelligible sphere, to cite a formulation from Negative Dialectics (GS, vol. 6, p. 378), corresponded to the final limitation of knowledge to the world of ‘appearances’. In the same way the young Horkheimer talked in a lecture of 1927 of the way in which Kant ‘was compelled to discover new ways to salvage metaphysics and a faith capable of rational explanation’. Max Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9: Nachgelassene Schriften [Posthumous Writings] 19141931, p. 471. On the concept of salvaging in Kant, see also Lecture Three, p. 31.

5 [This phrase was famously used by Karl Marx to describe the oblivion into which Hegel had fallen in the middle of the nineteenth century, and has been regularly used in the Marxian tradition since then. (See Capital, vol. 1, Lawrence and Wishart, London, 1967, ‘Afterword to the second German edition’, p. 19.) Trans.]

6 [The Great Elector, i.e. Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg (1620–88), is remembered for his role in building up the power of Brandenburg Prussia, both by foreign conquest and by administrative modernization. As a result, Prussia became a kingdom a few years after his death. Trans.]

7 This was the lecture Erfahrungsgehalte der Hegelschen Philosophie [Experiential Contents of Hegelian Philosophy] that Adorno gave to the Conference of the German Hegel Society on 25 October 1958 in Frankfurt. See the expanded version in GS, vol. 5, pp. 295ff.

8 Reichenbach’s book appeared in Berkeley/Los Angeles in 1951.

9 ‘Immanuel Kant has acted the inexorable philosopher; he has stormed the heavens; he has put the entire garrison to the sword; the overlord of the world is wallowing – unproven – in his own blood; there is now no universal mercy; no paternal kindness; no reward in the next world for self-denial in this one; the immortality of the soul is in its final death-throes – how it gasps and groans – and old Lampe is standing by with his umbrella under his arm, a distressed onlooker, cold sweat and tears pouring down his face.’ Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Hans Kaufmann, Kindler, Munich, 1964, vol. 9, p. 250. [Lampe was Kant’s servant. Trans.]

10 See especially Bernhard Groethuysen, Die Entstehung der bürgerlichen Welt- und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich [The Origins of the Bourgeois View of Life and the World in France], 2 vols, Halle, 1927–30; cf. Adorno’s discussion of this book in GS, vol. 20.1, pp. 205ff.

11 ‘If you wish to enter the realm of the infinite, just explore the finite in every direction.’ J. W. von Goethe, ‘Gott, Gemüt und Welt’ in Gedenk-ausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, vol. 1: Sämtliche Gedichte, part 1, 2nd edn, Artemis Verlag, Zürich/Stuttgart 1961, p. 410.

12 The critique of this pure understanding … does not permit us to create a new field of objects beyond those which may be presented to it as appearances, and so to stray into intelligible worlds; nay, it does not allow of our entertaining even the concept of them.’ Critique of Pure Reason, p. 294, A 289/B 345.

13 Cf. the Preface to the First Edition, p. 8, A ixf.

14 [Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, p. 55, B 19. Trans.]

15 Adorno has addressed this question in the Introduction to Against Epistemology: ‘Kant reckons to be sure about the reconstruction of truth out of the immanence of consciousness. And the “How is it possible?” forms the determining figure of all his questions, since for him possibility itself poses no problems. Thus, like Hegel after him, he assumes the burden of carrying through that reconstruction on all fronts.’ Against Epistemology, p. 34.

16 Note the correction at the beginning of Lecture Two.

Lecture Two

1 Kant himself adduces these examples in the Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘If I say, for instance, “All bodies are extended”, this is an analytic judgement. For I do not require to go beyond the concept which I connect with “body” in order to find extension as bound up with it. To meet with this predicate, I have merely to analyse the concept, that is, to become conscious to myself of the manifold which I always think in that concept. The judgement is therefore analytic. But when I say, “All bodies are heavy”, the predicate is something quite different from anything that I think in the mere concept of body in general; and the addition of such a predicate therefore yields a synthetic judgement.’ Critique of Pure Reason, Introduction, pp. 48f, A 7/B 11.

2 On this point Adorno largely follows the arguments of Hans Cornelius (1863–1947), who had taught him philosophy and who had passed his doctoral thesis in 1924, although he had in fact rejected his first dissertation for the second doctorate, the Habilitation. ‘The distinction between analytic and synthetic judgements that is of such crucial importance for the entire work [i.e. the Critique of Pure Reason] suffers … from a lack of clarity. The proposition “All bodies are heavy” is only synthetic if the concept of the “body” is taken in the sense of a geometric body. If, in contrast, “body” is used in the way it normally occurs in a chemistry laboratory, then it would contain the meaning of “weight” in it and so the above-mentioned proposition becomes analytic. This example shows that the distinction between analytic and synthetic varies unless it is made clear which attributes are contained in it and which are not.’ Hans Cornelius, Kommentar zu Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Erlangen, 1926, p. 31.

3 ‘That logic has already, from the earliest times, proceeded upon this sure path is evidenced by the fact that since Aristotle it has not required to retrace a single step, unless, indeed, we care to count as improvements the removal of certain needless subtleties or the clearer exposition of its recognized teaching, features which concern the elegance rather than the certainty of the science.’ Critique of Pure Reason, Preface to the Second Edition, p. 17, B viii.

4 Probably in conversation. At any rate, this term has not been discovered in Adorno’s published writings.

5 Here Adorno sums up in two sentences an idea that stands in the centre of his own thinking from the book on Kierkegaard down to Negative Dialectics. This is the critique of idealism as a critique of the philosophy of origins. This critique was most fully developed, not long before the present lectures on Kant, in the Introduction to Against Epistemology, a book whose spirit pervades almost the entire course of lectures. ‘Idealism, which through reduction to the absolute unity of the “I think” was the very first to be amenable to a systematics developing on all fronts, has, by the measure of its own radicalism, revealed how questionable is the residue it had crystallized. Prima philosophia came to awareness of this in the doctrine of the antinomies in the Critique of Pure Reason. The search for the utterly first, the absolute cause, results in infinite regress. Infinity cannot be posited as given with a conclusion, even though this positing seems unavoidable to total spirit. The concept of the given, the last refuge of the irreducible in idealism, collides with the concept of spirit as something to which everything can be reduced, viz. with idealism itself. This antinomy explodes the system, whose only idea is the attained identity, which as anticipated identity, as finitude of the infinite, is not at one with itself.’ Against Epistemology, pp. 29f. And, on the ‘problem of history’: ‘The problem of the first itself is retrospective. Thinking which, like Plato’s, has its absolute in memory has no real expectations of anything further. The praise of the unchanging suggests that nothing should be otherwise than it has always been. A taboo is issued about the future’ (ibid., p. 32). Then, in the Negative Dialectics, Adorno defined his own philosophy as an ‘attitude’ that ‘refuses to act as the custodian of the primordial and the certain and yet, if only through the trenchant nature of its own narrative, is so far from making concessions to relativism, the brother of absolutism, that it comes close to doctrine … But by setting thought free from the primal and the fixed it does not validate itself as something free-floating. That very act of setting free ties it to something other than itself and destroys the illusion of autarchy.’ (GS, vol. 6, p. 44). The central themes of the lectures on the Critique of Pure Reason take up ideas from the Introduction to Against Epistemology that had been written two years previously. And in the same way, without simply repeating himself, Adorno continued to develop most of the ideas contained in the lectures in his subsequent writings, above all in Negative Dialectics.

6 Adorno has in mind here the Note to §16 of the Transcendental Deduction in which Kant states: ‘The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point to which we must ascribe [heften = attach. Trans.] all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy.’ Critique of Pure Reason, p. 154, B 134 [Editor’s emphasis].

7 ‘I know no enquiries which are more important for exploring the faculty which we entitle understanding, and for determining the rules and limits of its employment, than those which I have instituted … under the title Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding.’ Critique of Pure Reason, p. 11, A xvi.

8 Critique of Pure Reason, p. 161, B 145.

9 Ibid., B 145f.

10 Kant himself speaks of ‘intelligible contingency’ in the Observation on the Fourth Antinomy of Pure Reason, where he writes that ‘we cannot argue from an empirical contingency to an intelligible one.’ (Critique of Pure Reason, p. 420, A 459/B 587). In his commentary on this passage Cohen then speaks literally of ‘intelligible contingency’. See Hermann Cohen, Kommentar zu Immanuel Kants Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 2nd edn, Leipzig, 1917, p. 150.

11 Adorno writes about Kant’s respect for the ‘irreducibility’ of existent beings to their concepts in ‘Aspects of Hegel’s Philosophy’, the first of his Hegel Studies, written in 1956–7: ‘Just as, on the one hand, the categorial forms of the “I think” nee...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• CONTENTS
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT
• LECTURE ONE
• LECTURE TWO
• LECTURE THREE
• LECTURE FOUR
• LECTURE FIVE
• LECTURE SIX
• LECTURE SEVEN
• LECTURE EIGHT
• LECTURE NINE
• LECTURE TEN
• LECTURE ELEVEN
• LECTURE TWELVE
• LECTURE THIRTEEN
• LECTURE FOURTEEN
• LECTURE FIFTEEN
• LECTURE SIXTEEN
• LECTURE SEVENTEEN
• LECTURE EIGHTEEN
• LECTURE NINETEEN
• LECTURE TWENTY
• LECTURE TWENTY-ONE
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES
• EDITOR’S NOTES
• EDITOR’S AFTERWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INDEX