The “deepest thing in Kant:” the experience of the block

Adorno also takes pains to emphasize the continued value of Kant’s philosophy for contemporary critical thought. According to Adorno, it is one of the hallmarks of Kant’s philosophy that it illuminated the antinomies which result from this form of subjectivist, foundational philosophical procedure. This very recognition continues to enamor

Adorno of Kant’s philosophical perspective. For Adorno, the distinction between Kantian and post-Kantian idealism lies in this crucial recognition by Kant, if only unconsciously within his writings, that a systematic philosophy, a prima philosophia, is ultimately an untenable goal. Kant’s saving grace is his continued reliance on the concept of the thing- in-itself. “[W]hile Kant does situate the unity of existing reality and also the concept of Being in the realm of consciousness, he simultaneously refuses to generate everything that exists from that realm of consciousness” (KK 33-4/18). Rather than a problem, Adorno sees this fundamental contradiction in Kant’s philosophy as an important benefit. The recognition that there is a “block” to consciousness, a limit beyond which we simply may not go, is essential to Adorno’s thought as well.

This block, which represents the fundamentally antinomical character of Kant’s philosophy, is the “anti-idealist” element of Kant, and an inspiration for Adorno’s own conception of materialism (ND 379/386). That the constituens, for instance, cannot be separated from the constitutum, is both recognized and denied by Kantian philosophy. In the Kantian conception, the block points to the particular kind of experience that Adorno wants to salvage. Although Kant valued the rationality of science, he understood

that it was not revealing “the ‘true’ essence of nature . . . [I]t is a metaphysical

experience implicit in the doctrine of the block in the Critique of Pure Reason that the

object of nature that we define with our categories is not actually nature itself. For our knowledge of nature is really so preformed by the demand that we dominate nature . . . that we end up understanding only those aspects of nature that we can control’ (KK 266/175-6; emphasis added). Here we can see the importance of the theme of alienation, and its essential link to a form of subjectivism. The importance does not lie ultimately in the cognitive sphere, but in alienation from nature as an experience. When we find that we are “alienated from what we are really looking for,” this constitutes an experience which “is hard to express in rational terms, because the sphere of rationality is the sphere that contradicts experience”. Adorno’s move beyond cognition to a variety of experience — a move which is “embedded” within Kant’s own work — becomes central for Adorno (KK 267/176).56

This Kantian block is clearly read by Adorno as the philosophical precursor to his own notion of the nonidentical: “it is a kind of metaphysical mourning, a kind of memory of what is best, of something that we must not forget, but that we are nevertheless compelled to forget” (KK 268/176). For Adorno, Kant represents an important stage in the dialectic of reason, because in his work the important metaphysical questions of philosophy — which have since been forgotten — remain to be discovered. Adorno goes so far as to say that the most central aspect of Kant’s philosophy is the idea of rupture

56 _{It is this experiential core which separates Kant sharply from the positivists, who recognize no}

such contradiction in our procedure of knowledge. Adorno notes that Kant’s philosophy was the last instance (before the analytical or “linguistic” turn, that is) of philosophy being in fundamental agreement with science. With Hegel, all of this went out the window. But in Kant, although he believed strongly in science, his thought retained antinomies which would not be tolerated by scientists or by positive thought in general.

(KK 270/178). One of the interesting aspects of this account, is that it is precisely the form of critique which cannot rely solely on a form of rationality, since a form of experience is at its heart. In this way, the dualisms which characterize Kantian philosophy are both real, and only apparent. The block on the achievement of an

absolute knowledge, the fundamental limits on our thought, are real, but for Adorno they are related not to the transcendental structure of experience, but rather to our modern structure of society. Kant was right to find this sphere outside of the capacity of reason, but he erred when he legitimated it by securing its position too well. The Kantian block represents the “truth” of bourgeois society. It thus contains the central contradiction of Kant’s idealism within itself.

Adorno’s work thus ultimately relies upon a conception of the form of a society based upon exchange. Although his work is riven with implied analogies between forms of thought and social forms, he refrains from specification. Kant’s philosophy becomes an index of a contradictory society. The transcendental subject

has its reality in the immortalizing domination, attained through the principle of equivalence. The abstraction process, transformed by philosophy and only attributed to the perceiving [erkennend] subject, occurs in the actual [tatsächlich] exchange society. The determination of the transcendental as that of the necessary, which accompanies [sich gesellen zu] functionality and universality, expresses the principle of the self- preservation of the species. It provides the legal basis for the abstraction, without which it cannot proceed [abgehen]; it is the medium of self-sustaining [selbsterhaltend] reason (ND 180/178-9).

In plain terms, Kant’s transcendental subject serves as a form of legitimation for exchange society, since it institutes its form of abstraction. The cognitive and the social in this analysis are linked in an indeterminate way, as are the cognitive and the

Kant’s texts themselves encapsulate an experience which reflects, in some sense, both corporeal and social forms.