Adorno, Foucault, and the Critique of the West by Deborah Cook

Author:Deborah Cook
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso

This eBook is licensed to Dunno Thanks, [email protected] on 03/25/2020

Chapter 5

Critique

‘Immaturity’, Kant declared in his famous essay on enlightenment, ‘is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another’. Rather than thinking for themselves, individuals are immature to the extent that they allow authorities and experts to do their thinking for them, to act as their guardians.1 Conversely, enlightenment presupposes maturity. In his gloss on Kant’s essay, Adorno explains that maturity is achieved when individuals are able ‘to resist established opinions and, one and the same, … to resist existing institutions, to resist everything that is merely posited, that justifies itself with its existence’. Critical theory itself presupposes maturity in the Kantian sense; it assumes that critics can speak for themselves because they have thought for themselves and are ‘not merely repeating someone else’.2

By the late 1970s, Foucault placed himself squarely within this Kantian lineage. As I noted in the opening chapter, he explicitly situated himself in the tradition of critical philosophy that runs from Kant and Hegel ‘to the Frankfurt School, passing through Nietzsche, Max Weber and so on’.3 Claiming that his ideas about critique differ little from Kant’s definition of enlightenment, Foucault also follows Kant and his successors when he opts for a ‘critical thought which takes the form of an ontology of the present, of present reality, an ontology of modernity, an ontology of ourselves’. According to Foucault, the critical tradition that was inaugurated by Kant is animated by an ‘attitude’, or by a ‘philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’.4 In addition, Foucault shares with the modern critical tradition the aim of finding an Ausgang that will release individuals from immaturity.5

Adorno’s and Foucault’s critical ontologies of the present will be studied in this chapter. The first section will explore the philosophical premises on which their ontologies are based; it will offer an account of Adorno’s and Foucault’s ideas about reality and our access to it. Kant was an important influence on their conceptions of critique, but the next section of this chapter will show that Kantian ideas inform their ontologies as well. In the following section, I shall examine in more detail one of the primary motivations for Adorno’s and Foucault’s extensive critiques of existing conditions in the West: their concern that fascism might recur. Finally, the chapter will end with a discussion of the normative foundations of their critical theories, including their Kantian ideas about autonomy.

ONTOLOGIES OF THE PRESENT

Chapter Three asked about the ‘stuff’ from which individuals are made. However, it is also important to ask a more general question: how do Adorno and Foucault characterize the ‘stuff’ that makes up the world in which we live? To begin to answer this question, I shall make a very broad, and possibly contentious, claim: Adorno and Foucault conceptualize reality as simultaneously material and historical. Arguing that the material world is thoroughly historical, and that it is always grasped through an equally historical conceptual prism, Adorno and Foucault also deny that something can come from nothing.

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