Adorno and Critique of Neo Kantianism
Adorno and Critique of Neo Kantianism
Adorno and Critique of Neo Kantianism
From phenomenology to
critical theory
The genesis of Adorno’s critical theory
from his reading of Husserl
Husserls Philosophie ist Anlaß, nicht Ziel. (Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnis-
theorie)
After his thesis Adorno did not again devote a study solely to Husserl-
ian phenomenology, that is, before his essays of 1937 (Zur Philosophie
4 Husserl as idealist
– which is also valid in the present text that expresses the relation
between philosophy and mathematics in the following way: ‘Numbers
are an arrangement for making the non-identical, dubbed “the Many”,
commensurable with the subject, the model of unity.’50 But what is the
use of reflections on mathematics in a study of Husserl, where the
latter’s philosophy of arithmetic is not even taken into account? It is
that the Husserlian idealism is driven by the same logic as mathemat-
ics; his prima philosophia, constructed on the principle of a subject that
would be purified of all ontological remains, aims at ‘the development
of a doctrine of being under the conditions of nominalism and the
reduction of concepts to the thinking subject’51 and it is precisely this
subject that ‘draws up an inventory of’ and ‘confiscates’ everything that
is not identical to itself in order to assimilate it into his own identity.
In this way is perpetuated the spirit of equivalence that reigns in the
bourgeoisie or middle-class society and of which one could identify two
dominant values: first, the bourgeoisie denigrates the event of the new;52
and second, Husserl’s phenomenology turns out to be a theory of
possession that goes along with its shift towards neutrality and priva-
tization.53 In this way, by merging the subject and object in order to
win the domain of immediate origins, the first philosophy buys the
origin at the price of knowledge, and this, to such an extent that it loses
its critical possibilities.54
This process of assimilation (and exclusion) of the subject is the
method. The method is the course taken starting from that which is
already established and pursuing that which follows in a regular way
from it – this is why every method presupposes a principle – and thus
the methodical reasoning meets nothing that disturbs it from outside.55
PSC
Notes
1 Both of the aforementioned works were collected in Philosophische Früh-
schriften, vol. 1 of Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften (henceforth abbreviated
as GS). Except where indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.
2 According to the essay by Carlo Pettazzi that is precisely entitled ‘La fase
trascendentale del pensiero di Adorno: Hans Cornelius’ [The Transcenden-
tal Phase of Adorno’s Thought: Hans Cornelius], Rivista critica di storia
della filosofia 23 (1977): 436–49.
PSC
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