The Fleeting Promise of Art

Adorno's Aesthetic Theory Revisited

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780801469275
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A discussion of Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory is bound to look significantly different today than it would have looked when the book was first published in 1970, or when it first appeared in English translation in the 1980s. In The Fleeting Promise of Art, Peter Uwe Hohendahl reexamines Aesthetic Theory along with Adorno's other writings on aesthetics in light of the unexpected return of the aesthetic to today's cultural debates.

Is Adorno's aesthetic theory still relevant today? Hohendahl answers this question with an emphatic yes. As he shows, a careful reading of the work exposes different questions and arguments today than it did in the past. Over the years Adorno's concern over the fate of art in a late capitalist society has met with everything from suspicion to indifference. In part this could be explained by relative unfamiliarity with the German dialectical tradition in North America. Today's debate is better informed, more multifaceted, and further removed from the immediate aftermath of the Cold War and of the shadow of postmodernism.Adorno's insistence on the radical autonomy of the artwork has much to offer contemporary discussions of art and the aesthetic in search of new responses to the pervasive effects of a neoliberal art market and culture industry.

Focusing specifically on Adorno's engagement with literary works, Hohendahl shows how radically transformative Adorno's ideas have been and how thoroughly they have shaped current discussions in aesthetics. Among the topics he considers are the role of art in modernism and postmodernism, the truth claims of artworks, the function of the ugly in modern artworks, the precarious value of the literary tradition, and the surprising significance of realism for Adorno.

PART I

1

HUMAN FREEDOM AND
THE AUTONOMY OF ART

The Legacy of Kant

If Adorno had died in 1949 instead of 1969, he would be remembered today primarily as the coauthor, with Max Horkheimer, of Dialectic of Enlightenment. That is, he would be remembered as a fierce critic of the European Enlightenment including Immanuel Kant. What Adorno and Horkheimer had to say about Kant in this pathbreaking study was mostly negative and hostile. Kant makes an appearance in the second chapter, along with the Marquis de Sade, where the authors want to demonstrate that the sage of Königsberg is very much part of a trajectory that began in the seventeenth century and ultimately resulted in the triumph of fascism in Europe. The dialectic of the Enlightenment consists precisely of the intimate but obscured connection between rationalism and fascism. In the development of modern philosophy from Bacon to Carnap, Kant is part of the transformation of reason into positivist rationality, which is the other side of the same coin better known as the mythic irrationalism of fascism. In a more conventional historical reconstruction (for instance that of Ernst Cassirer) Kant would have been evoked as the rationalist opponent of this irrationalism, as the defender of humanism and progress. Instead, Adorno and Horkheimer saw Kant as part of the very reduction of reason that prepared the way for the ultimate historical catastrophe.

Some of the same ideas recur in Adorno’s later writings. There are occasional moments when Adorno emphasizes his distance from Kant, a certain impatience with Kant’s Bürgerlichkeit and lack of radical philosophical reflection, but for the most part Adorno’s assessment of Kant is much more positive in his postwar writings. This remarkable return to Kant is by no means limited to a specific field of philosophy. Rather, Adorno’s renewed engagement with Kant is equally concerned with his epistemology, his moral philosophy, and his aesthetic theory, which will be at the center of my analysis. It is important to grasp the broad spectrum of Adorno’s rereading of Kant as well as the interconnectedness of his attempts to revive the interest in Kant in various fields of philosophy.

My intention here is not to dwell on the reasons for Adorno’s surprising return to Kant. The new engagement was probably related, at least in part, to his teaching obligations at the University of Frankfurt. He was expected to offer lecture courses and seminars that would cover the German philosophical tradition. For instance, he offered one lecture course in 1959 on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and another one in 1963 entitled “Problems in Moral Philosophy,” which focused largely on Kant. To a lesser degree his lectures on metaphysics (1965) and on aesthetics (1958/59) dealt with Kant’s thought as eminently relevant for the present. If a critical reassessment of the German intellectual tradition was at the center of Adorno’s postwar pedagogy in Frankfurt, Kant clearly occupied a prominent place, rivaled only by Hegel, who also received Adorno’s renewed attentions. The full extent of his engagement with Kant became visible only more recently when his posthumous writings, including his lectures, were published.

Although Adorno’s rereadings by no means signaled a dogmatic return to a Kantian framework, even a cursory review of these writings betrays a significant change in Adorno’s thinking, one that occurred after his return to Germany in 1950. Now Kant appears as a central figure with power to restore confidence in the German tradition. At the very least, Adorno considered it vital to inform a new generation of students of the philosophical importance of Kant. But there’s more to it than that. It is clear that Adorno did not mean to return to the neo-Kantians of the early twentieth century. While they are sometimes mentioned (among them his own teacher Hans Cornelius), their positions are not validated. As we will see, it becomes important for Adorno to reframe the approach to Kant by marking his distance from the neo-Kantians. This effort is particularly strong in his lectures on Kant’s First Critique, where he has to navigate carefully between the latent positivism of a neo-Kantian reading and a radical metaphysical reading of Heidegger that is closer to (but not identical with) his own efforts. Precisely for this reason the distance from Heidegger has to be underlined.

Adorno’s lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in particular demonstrate his intent to explore aspects of Kantian thought that the neo-Kantians had neglected or pushed into the background as no longer relevant. Again and again, Adorno explains to his audience that he is not interested in a dogmatic introduction or a pure reconstruction of Kant’s epistemological position. His discussion of Kant’s epistemology is intended to recover the foundations of Kant’s thought, foundations that would be equally relevant for a sustained discussion of ethics and aesthetics. For Adorno, the essential Kant is articulated in the First Critique. When it comes to aesthetic theory, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is recognized as an important text, but ultimately not as important as Hegel’s aesthetics. In other words, for Adorno’s own aesthetic theory the insights of Kant’s First Critique turn out to be more valuable and demanding than Kant’s discussion of the artwork. In the final analysis, Adorno fundamentally disagrees with Kant’s approach to art, which means that he can make only selective use of Kant’s Third Critique.

For the reasons mentioned above, any discussion of Adorno’s postwar reading of Kant has to begin with the Critique of Pure Reason. In this chapter, however, I will restrict myself to a reconstruction of Adorno’s approach and a discussion of the central themes. It should be noted at the outset that Adorno is much less interested in Kant’s solutions than Kant’s questions and the internal contradictions that are the result of addressing these questions. Put differently, he means to examine Kant’s response to the problems he inherited from his predecessors (i.e. the German metaphysical tradition and the radical skepticism of Hume) as options that determined the later history of philosophy. By later history of philosophy Adorno means the idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel on the one hand, and the positivism of scientific philosophy on the other (which, by the way, means that he implicitly acknowledges twentieth-century logical positivists as legitimate heirs of Kant). The tension between these contradicting positions is, as Adorno insists, the enigma of Kant, the reason why we have to return to his texts. His rereading of the First Critique especially explores the metacritical level, because a reading at this level enables the reader to understand the structure of Kant’s thought rather than the mere truth and legitimacy of certain positions. For this reason Adorno proceeds selectively and is highly unorthodox in his own emphasis.

Adorno is aware that even among his students familiarity with Kant cannot be taken for granted after the Third Reich. Therefore, one important task of his lectures was to lay the ground for a critical reception of Kant’s epistemology, but he also understood that such grounding must avoid continuing the neo-Kantian interpretation of Kant. Adorno describes the task in the following manner: “So what I would like to do is to retranslate this philosophy from a codified, ossified system back into the kind of picture that results from a sustained X-ray examination,” and he continues by insisting that Kant should be understood as a force field (Kraftfeld) where the careful reader finds extraordinary forces of experience (Erfahrung) behind the abstract concepts.1 By emphasizing the concept of experience Adorno prepares a double move: he breaks up the conventional history of philosophy, which is constructed along the lines of concepts and ideas, and he creates a stronger link between philosophy and related cultural experiences and institutions—for instance, music or literature. Thus Adorno is not simply attempting to restore the lost authority of Kant’s First Critique; he means to explicate the problems Kant faced at the level of concrete historical experiences.

For Adorno the Critique of Pure Reason turns out to be the decisive turning point in modern history; namely, the point when certain fundamental metaphysical questions (e.g. the proof of God) are critically questioned in such a manner that they are subsequently removed from serious philosophical inquiry—even though they may remain central issues in other areas of inquiry such as modern theology (Karl Barth), where the sharp contrast between knowledge and faith (Glaube) points back to Kant’s epistemology. With Kant, Adorno insists, reason reaches the point where it systematically reflects on its own use and its limitations but not yet on its own preconditions. In this respect, Adorno suggests, Kant remains naive. Kant’s famous opening question, “How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?” presupposes that synthetic judgments are a priori possible, a ground that remains unquestioned. This unquestioned ground in Kant is precisely what Adorno wants to explore—although his goal is not to refute and dismiss Kant but to problematize philosophy.

While Adorno respects and praises Kant’s epistemology for its technical thoroughness, his lectures are ultimately not interested in technical thoroughness. Not unlike Heidegger, Adorno searches for and critically explains the metaphysical ideas that Kant means to assert by demonstrating the limits of reason. Yet this interest must not be misunderstood as a simple return to the metaphysical tradition. Adorno’s analysis of reason (in the wake of Dialectic of Enlightenment) focuses on the moment of logical identity, the most basic move of philosophy that has remained intact since Aristotle. As Adorno notes, it does not occur to Kant to question the rules of formal logic (KC 14). If critical philosophy is assigned the task of questioning the presuppositions of knowledge, then the concept of reason cannot be treated as a given and becomes ultimately uncertain as well. However, Adorno rejects this quest for the ultimate ground as an illusion (Fundierungswahn) and therefore appreciates Kant’s more modest program to establish the proper use and the limits of reason, although this appreciation remains somewhat ambivalent, since there are also those moments when he distances himself from Kant’s thought as undialectical. For Adorno, Kant’s rigorous philosophical honesty comes to the fore in the sustained tension between the elements that move toward the unity of reason and the acceptance of the “consciousness of the heterogeneous, the block, the limit” (KC 18). These two sides are working toward and against each other (sich aneinander abarbeiten).2

Adorno does not follow the Kantian text in his lectures, but organizes them around a number of themes that he considers defining. Among them we encounter (a) metaphysics, (b) the nature of the transcendental, (c) the subject/object relationship, (d) constituens and constitution, and (e) the limit of knowledge. In my remarks I will focus exclusively on Adorno’s reflections on metaphysics in Kant and the problem of constitution. It goes without saying that my treatment can only be schematic. Adorno does not show much interest in restating the obvious: that Kant pursues a thorough critique of the older metaphysical tradition in the wake of Hume’s skepticism. Instead, Adorno underscores the methodological and formal aspect in Kant’s efforts to define the limits of understanding (Verstand). In his fifth lecture Adorno explicates the peculiar nature of Kant’s critique. It does not simply prohibit metaphysical statements or take a position on the importance of the concept of God. As Adorno points out, “Direct propositions of this kind are prohibited here because the Critique of Pure Reason is concerned not with objects as such, not even the objects of metaphysics, but simply, as Kant puts it, with our faculty to obtain knowledge of such objects” (KC 47). Kant does not dogmatically deny the existence of God, as did the atheists for instance. He merely demonstrates the impossibility of such judgments. Adorno points to the peculiar notion that one can critique metaphysical positions as rationally unfounded and at the same time one can read this critique as enabling a different form of metaphysics. In the later part of the same lecture it becomes clear that Adorno looks at Kant from the vantage point of his successors and critics such as Fichte and Hegel, who, encouraged by the implications of Kantian thought, rescued the concept of speculation from Kant’s negative verdict.

As much as Adorno appreciates the Kantian type of formal critique, ultimately he is not satisfied with Kant’s method and its results. From Adorno’s perspective, Kant’s philosophy remains incomplete because its author refused (on formal, rational grounds) to transcend the sphere of experience. Against this position Adorno refers to Hegel in order to demonstrate the need for speculative thought. Hegel, as Adorno insists, does not deny the validity of Kant’s analysis (the contradictions of reason when it transcends experience) but he gives it a new and different “value” (KC 49). The contradiction of limited experimental and unlimited speculative knowledge is the powerful motor for the creation of knowledge: “such contradictions are actually the organ, the medium, in which what we think of as knowledge is constituted” (KC 49).

At this point the deeper motivation for Adorno’s inquest becomes visible. Kant’s First Critique as the paradigmatic modern model that defines the possibility of rational knowledge gives him the opportunity to explore the nature of philosophical thought, its deeper aspects that remain inaccessible in an orthodox interpretation that simply follows Kant’s argument. Kant’s argument is of interest to Adorno primarily as evidence for the problematic of modern thought. Differently put, Adorno does not present himself as a Kantian or want to persuade his audience to become Kantians. Rather, the study of the Critique of Pure Reason is the path to critical thought. The aim of his teaching is what he calls “its hidden content and its hidden puzzles” (KC 52). If one then raises the question what the hidden content of Kant’s philosophy could be, Adorno introduces the concept of autonomy of reason, the fact that it is only reason itself that can question control and justify itself (KC 54–55, KK 87).

Not surprisingly, therefore, Adorno returns to this problematic in those later lectures that deal with the tension between constituens and constitutum, the moment of constituting the object and the given object that we find as already constituted. When Kant discusses the process of understanding, he stresses, as Adorno insists, the subjective side, the consciousness of the subject (KC 140, KK 212); in other words, he underscores the moment of freedom and autonomy rather than the impact of the object on the consciousness. For Adorno, the proof for this thesis is Kant’s discussion of causality, especially his engagement with Hume.3 Using Kant’s definition of causality (CPR 125 = A 91, B 124), Adorno argues that this definition performs a circle and then maintains that “causality in Kant must be understood in terms of this synthesis and not in terms of something inherent in objects themselves” (KC 141). In other words, in Adorno’s reading causality is grounded in consciousness rather than the relationship between objects.

One might expect that Adorno would take this feature of Kant’s theory as proof of the autonomy of the subject, but this is not the case. Instead, Adorno laments the distance between subject and object, the fact that Kant’s concepts are imposed on the objects by the subject rather than unfolding within the objects. Thus universality in Kant is, according to Adorno, produced “simply by the constitution of the human subject that comprehends things in t...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I
• Part II
• Epilogue
• Notes