Jay Bernstein

This essay originated as a reply to Richard Rorty's ”Habermas, Derrida, and the Functions of Philosophy“. In it, I contest Rorty's deployment of the categories of private selfcreation and the collective political enterprise of increasing freedom, first developed in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, to demonstrate that the philosophical projects of Habermas and Derrida are complementary rather than antagonistic. The focus of my critique is two-fold: firstly, I contend that so-called critiques of metaphysics are always simutaneously engaging with some form of social domination or disintegration (e.g. nihilism or societal rationalization); secondly, I argue that the fault-line in Rorty's thought that structures his categories is his, Davidson inspired, naturalized philosophy of language. This philosophy of language falls afoul of Heidegger's analysis of the present-to-hand.

The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role (and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contemporary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto. This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assumptions and arguments of the manifesto.

This 2002 volume brings together major works by German thinkers, writing just prior to and after Kant, who were enormously influential in this crucial period of aesthetics. These texts include the first translation into English of Schiller's Kallias Letters and Moritz's On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, together with translations of some of Hölderlin's most important theoretical writings and works by Hamann, Lessing, Novalis and Schlegel. In a philosophical introduction J. M. Bernstein traces the development of aesthetics from its still rationalist and mimetic construction in Lessing, through the optimistic construal of art and/or beauty as the appearance of human freedom in the work of Schiller, to Hölderlin's darker vision of art as the memory of a lost unity, and the variations of that theme - of an impossible striving after the lost ideal - which are found in the work of Schlegel and Novalis.

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music.

In “The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art,” Arthur Danto argues that there were two stages to the platonic critique of the arts: ephemeralization and takeover. Danto's philosophy of art sought a rescue by detaching art from the philosophy of art in a manner that would give back to the arts the very dangerousness that so alarmed Plato in the first instance. This chapter draws Danto's theory into conversation with Stanley Cavell's and T.W. Adorno's philosophies of modernism. Ugliness or terribleness is constitutive of how these artworks mean to sustain the acts of visual attention they invite. Art can only fail to demonstrate the authority of art's own forms and modes of claiming because being mere art is the historical mechanism of art's continuing disenfranchisement, which explains why one school of the intractable avant‐garde sought the immediate re‐unification of art with everyday practice in order to end art.

In the Preface to Negative Dialectics, Adorno states that the primary ambition of the book is to find a substitute for the “supra‐ordinated” concept and to “break through the deception of constitutive subjectivity.” For a book whose ambition is to renew the Marxist idea of critique, these are puzzling claims. The notions to be criticized are Kant's in The Critique of Pure Reason ; Adorno, from his earliest studies with Siegfried Kracauer, had taken Kant's theoretical philosophy as expressing the deepest conceptual and normative commitments of capital. This chapter attempts to specify what the expressive relation between idealist conceptuality and capital is; why Adorno took the transcendental unity of apperception to express a society that was unconscious about itself; and precisely how negative dialectics is throughout key to a critique of Kant's philosophy.

Following the lead of Annette Baier, this essay argues that trust relations provide the ethical substance of everyday living. When A trusts B, A unreflectively allows B to approach sufficiently close so as to be able to harm A. In order for this to be possible, A practically presupposes that B perceives A as a person and will hence act accordingly. Trust relations are relations of mutual recognition in which we acknowledge our mutual standing and vulnerability with respect to one another. A robust account of trust assumes: first, trust relations are primary and practical, and while monitored by reason, they are not rationally constituted; second, trust can sustain its practical primacy over moral reason because it is developmentally prior to reason; and third, trust relations can be the bearers of our worth and vulnerability because they are the developmental products of first love.

Let me begin with a wisp of political history. According to the Earl of Clarendon, in 1639 the king’s “three kingdoms [were] flourishing in entire peace and universal plenty.”1 Yet by 1642 civil war had broken out, and in 1649 the king was beheaded. What had caused this breakdown of civil and political order, a breakdown that was not localized in England but, in fact, rife throughout Europe—1648 like 1848 was a year of revolutions? Clarendon himself is less than acute on the matter, opting generally for a conspiracy theory in which the traitorous plots of ill men were the cause of the rebellion. In his book Behemoth —whose title stands for the Long Parliament, which sat in session from 1640 until the surviving..