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January 15, 2011
Matt Waggoner in Giving up the Good: Adorno, Kiergkegaard, and The Critique of Political Culture in the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory (6.2, Spring 2005) (highlights the extensive amount of interest that Adorno shows in Kant’s philosophy. This interest had always puzzled me. Why Kant, given Adorno's preoccupation with Hegel?
Waggoner says:
Adorno was clearly not preoccupied with the liberal Kant of popular political philosophy, but instead with the Kant who was also obsessed with contradiction, antinomy and paradox, and who, in Adorno’s estimate, earned his greatness from the fact that he did not rush to resolve the contradictions he encountered. While it is reasonable to characterize this period as suggestive of a “Kantian turn” in Adorno’s thinking, his obvious interest in Kant during this period also demonstrates a turn to paradoxes and a reaction against the tendency of the dialectical tradition to base its ideas on the imminent reconciliation of contradictions in society. Adorno sought to take the experience of contradiction and impossibility much more seriously, and for this reason his pursuit of an ethic of aporia returned him to an entirely Kierkegaardian line of questioning: what lies beyond the logic of moral and ethical reason?
He argues that Adorno appears far less Hegel-Marxist than widely held in that negative dialectics mirrored Kierkegaard’s philosophy inasmuch as it sought to escape the confines of moral-formalistic (Kantian) and ethical-historicist (Hegelian) accounts of the relation of the Good, Truth, and Justice to the existing world.
Waggoner says:
Adorno worried that Hegel’s treatment of otherness betrayed elements of subjective idealism, and he respected Kant for preserving rather than reconciling contradiction in the way Hegel did. Even if Adorno noted affinities between Kant and de Sade (as have others, such as Jacques Lacan), he worried most about an “ethical life” closed to the prospect of, as Adorno put it, something new under the sun.
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