CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

The world of empirical experience, which seemed safe, certain, and utterly free of
superstition, is in fact a cover, put in place as a defensive reaction against the unknown
outside—in other worlds, the Kantian realm of phenomena is established as a safe haven
for a humanity that has become epistemically agoraphobic, so that the apparent safety
that this realm provides is at the same time a defense against fear and anxiety from the
real “outside.” The world of phenomena is not a home but rather just a cover for the
anxiety that results from feeling estranged from the world, from feeling that the world is
not a home at all. The world of phenomena now appears not safe and certain but rather
as a world of illusion. “Die Welt wird dann tatsächlich zu einer Art von Verbergen eines
Unbekannten, zu einer Art von bloßem Doppelgänger eben wirklich, zum Schein oder
zum Gespenst.” 308
The division of reality into phenomena and noumena in Kant is thus interpreted
first as a reflection of the structure of the reified world, an opposition that mirrors the
contradiction in the object, and then this contradiction is interpreted as an expression and
rationalization of the experience of metaphysical alienation and despair. The structure of
Kant’s philosophy, revelatory as it is of the structure of social reality, is according to
Adorno expressive of a specific form of suffering: the suffering of a humanity estranged
from nature, attempting to feel secure by creating a “safe world” around it and never
leaving it again, a world defined by scientific instrumentality and free of all superstition,
308 Adorno, Kants »Kritik der reinen Vernunft«, in Nachgelassene Schriften, Abteilung IV:
Vorlesungen, Band 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 169-170. English translation by Rodney
Livingston in Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112:
“The world does in fact become a way of concealing something unknown, a kind of Doppelgänger, a mere
spectre or illusion.”
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