Political Antinomy in Kant and Adorno

What happens when moral principle collides with political expediency? The Kantian answer is clear: we make use of the categorical imperative to exclude those political options that could never exemplify a universal moral system. We resist the temptation of such expediency by means of an implicit antinomy: morality and politics collide. We avoid this contradiction by recognizing the priority of morality over politics. Our political deliberation is limited to those possibilities that conform to the moral law. While Hegel criticizes such a Kantian moral priority as destructive of the political realm, Kant himself claims that such limited political deliberation can be conceived as demonstrating the progress of humanity. And this assumption, that rational inquiry leads to progress, is precisely what Adorno criticizes. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), which he wrote with Max Horkheimer, the enlightenment refers not to the historical epoch surrounding the 18th century, but to the process of rationalization that culminated in this era. Where it originates, Adorno claims, is in the sort of presupposition that Kant assumes is unavoidable, the presupposition of rational order that itself leads to the “totalitarian” rationalizing of all nature. Adorno rejects not only Kant’s assumption of progress in political judgment but also the conception of rationality implicit in the categorical imperative, both sides of Kant’s political antinomy. And yet, Adorno does not merely equate reason with a destructive power (as Nietzsche or perhaps Sade could be said to do); rather he holds out hope for some kind of reason that would itself reflect on its voracious tendencies, and so offer a non-totalizing rationality. Adorno came to call it a “negative dialectics” (hence the title of the latter book) that, bereft of a Hegelian telos, must embrace its implicit contradictions. Adorno describes this “antinomy” as that of the static and dynamic elements of thought. However dynamic, and externally focused a system is, it is closed, there is an outside, and it is thus static. An always incomplete reason, Adorno argues, contradicts itself, and so, as he explains, what is possible is the “resistance to the perpetual danger of relapse,” and so a negative project, reason denying its own totalizing goals. For Kant the moral law protects us from the descent into tyranny that Adorno describes. And yet the question for Adorno, and perhaps for us too, is whether the moral law can truly protect us from the totalizing excess of the enlightenment idea of progress? Does the pursuit of cosmopolitan goals in a Kantian politics, pursued within the terrain of the moral law, allow us to evade the static rational order that Adorno describes as leading to tyranny?