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The Tenacity of Utopia: The Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts within the Federal Republic of Germany Author(s): Hauke Brunkhorst and Jamie Owen Daniel Source: New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 127-138 Published by: New German Critique Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488293 . Accessed: 25/09/2014 14:45 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . New German Critique and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to New German Critique. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 139.82.115.34 on Thu, 25 Sep 2014 14:45:46 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Page 1: BRUNKHORST, DANIEL, 1992. the Tenacity of Utopia the Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts Within the Federal

The Tenacity of Utopia: The Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts within the FederalRepublic of GermanyAuthor(s): Hauke Brunkhorst and Jamie Owen DanielSource: New German Critique, No. 55 (Winter, 1992), pp. 127-138Published by: New German CritiqueStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/488293 .

Accessed: 25/09/2014 14:45

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

New German Critique and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve andextend access to New German Critique.

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Page 2: BRUNKHORST, DANIEL, 1992. the Tenacity of Utopia the Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts Within the Federal

The Tenacity of Utopia: The Role of Intellectuals in Cultural Shifts within the Federal Republic of Germany

Hauke Brunkhorst

In Germany, European traditions of the Enlightenment remained alien for a long time. The heated campaign against the intellectuals that Edmund Burke had launched against the philosophers of the French Revolution took hold of the German university in the nine- teenth century' and transformed the academic class of the country into an elitist caste of modern mandarins.2 The new humanities (Geisteswis- senschaften), which were the most distinguished and universally ac- claimed product of the German university, became the ground for the German ideology of a counter-Enlightenment.

The historical origin of this trend was Paris of 1789, out of which a world of enemies had supposedly arisen who would soon isolate the Reich. Well into the mid-twentieth century, French rationalism was denigrated as superficial and vulgar, while German "Dichten und Denken" was considered profound and Greco-Germanic in origin. Even as late as the 1960s, philosophy departments were dismissing Sartre's existentialism as exemplary of a typically French misunder- standing of Heidegger, whose ontology was rallying academic audi- ences who listened devoutly to every word. Most German academics of the period maintained that any ism meant superficiality and loss of in- dividuality. The symbolic capital of the German mandarins may have

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (New York: Dolphin, 1961). 2. Cf. F. Ringer, Die Gelehrten (Stuttgart, 1983), and Hauke Brunkhorst, Der

Intellektuelle im Land der Mandarine (Frankfurt/Main, 1987).

127

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been nearly depleted after twelve years under Hitler, but a characteris- tic historical compromise between the Nazi past and the democratic present continued to fuel a German skepticism toward any emphatic idea of democracy and freedom in the restorative climate of postwar culture. The acculturated bourgeoisie (Bildungsbiirgertum), most of whom were conservative, shared the opinion of right-wing intellectuals such as Arnold Gehlen, Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, or Ernst Jiinger that the egalitarian concept of freedom of the Western democracies was in essence little more than a mixture of Bolshevism and Americanism - well-intentioned at best, but certainly not something good. The stigma of degeneracy that had been attached to cultural and aesthetic moder- nity during the Third Reich outlasted Hider.

This fact notwithstanding, cultural countertendencies did emerge in conjunction with a more open attitude toward the West and the stabili- zation of a democratically constituted state in the 1950s. Indeed, for the first time in German history both the Enlightenment and an egalitarian intellectualism found a footing in the academic generation of 1945. Traces of German idealism remained in the cosmopolitan perspectives of those who had gone into exile in the West, through the eyes of Popper and Marcuse, in Marx and Freud, Theodor W. Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. At the same time, a disillusioned and pragmatically so- bering Alexander Kluge was demanding that the fifth acts in grand ope- ra be dismantled. In the 1960s, the increasingly articulate voice of this intellectualism, distinctively West German, broke through what Hermann Liibbe termed the "communicative silence" about the Nazi past, a silence that had guaranteed the cultural hegemony of the Ger- man mandarins during the first fifteen years of the Federal Republic.3

On 3 February 1965, the radio station "Sender Freies Berlin" (Radio Free Berlin) broadcast a polemical conversation between Adorno, the emigrant who had returned to Germany after the war and already be- come the representative figure of new left intellectualism, and the intel- lectual on the right, Gehlen.4 A major scholar of philosophical anthro- pology who had certainly not withheld his services from Hitler, Gehlen was still an influential thinker within the academic mandarin empire. This was the same milieu in which Adorno had grown up, but which

3. Hermann Luibbe, "Der Nationalsozialismus im politischen Bewultsein der Gegenwart," Deutschlands Weg in die Diktatur, ed. Broszat et al.

4. Reprinted as an addendum in F. Grenz, Adornos Philosophie in Grundbegriffen (Frankfurt/Main: 1974).

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he had been forced to flee, literally, to the West. Although both men initially avoided any open disagreement, the discussion between the mandarin and the intellectual nonetheless eventually came to the point. Gehlen finally put the following question to Adomo:

Yes, the child hiding behind its mother's skirts experiences both fear and the minimum or optimum of security that the situation allows. Herr Adorno, here again you will of course recognize the problem of maturity [Miindigkeit]. Do you really believe that we should burden all people with the task of dealing with fundamen- tal problems, of expending their reflective energy, of making the sorts of fundamental mistakes with profound after-effects that we made because we attempted to chart our own course [Freischwim- men]? I would very much like to know.

Adomo answered:

I can answer you quite simply. yes! I have a mental image of both ob- jective happiness and objective despair, and I would say that, as long as people are exonerated and are not expected to exercise complete responsibility and self-determination, their happiness in this world will remain an illusion. An illusion that will some day explode. And when this happens, the consequences will be devastating.

Gehlen then responded: "Now we have arrived at precisely the point at which you say yes and I say no."5

Here we have all the essential components of an intellectual dis- course that emerged first in favor of Adomo in the tendential shifts of the 1960s, and then in favor of Gehlen in the 1970s. Ultimately, the thematic difference between them is between a premodem, Aristoteli- an concept of reason, and one that is modem and, as it were, out-and- out Cartesian. Gehlen, along with Aristotle, proceeds on the assump- tion that there are always only afew people who are capable of, as Well as in a position to act rationally and reflectively on, their own initiative. The majority, however, would collapse under the burden of reflection if it were thrust upon them. It is precisely in this unfair demand that Gehlen sees the challenge posed to humanity by modem industrial culture. Any such suggestion of general maturity is truly New, the en- dangerment and crisis of modem times, the destruction of our institu- tional crutches by the power of reflection.

5. Grenz.

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Adorno proceeds along with Descartes and Kant from precisely the opposite assumption, that is, that the capacity for rational action is "the best distributed [verteilt] thing in the world" (Descartes) and that the po- tential for reflection and freedom is something that is present in equal measure in all human beings without restriction. For Gehlen, the crisis of the modem era results from an excess of reflection, while for Adorno the opposite is the case. Along with the early Kracauer, he always de- fended the thesis that capitalism rationalized too little rather than too much. Accordingly, Gehlen is interested in a therapeutic treatment of cultural crisis that draws narrow institutional parameters for transfonna- tion through freedom and reflection, while what Adorno would like to transcend is precisely institutional overdetermination, the restriction of re- flection by the forces of ideology, economics, and bureaucracy.

Gehlen is certainly no orthodox Aristotelian, but rather a modern conservative. He actually concurs with Adorno vis-ti-vis the notion of the contingency, alterability, and variability of modern institutions; to him they are no longer the mirror of timeless structures, the reflection of an ideal version of existence, the expression of an inalienable truth. They fulfill socially necessary functions and exonerate our nature, which is inadequately protected by the instincts. This same function can be realized in very different ways, and the degree of its respective necessity is always a question of experience. But while Gehlen's mod- ernism remains functionalist, Adorno's is cultural. Whereas Gehlen perceives only its anarchically dysfunctional solvent power, the de- structive tendency of what he contemptuously refers to as "avant- gardist circles," Adorno's gaze is directed toward the expansion of our freedom through an autonomous aesthetic modernity.

Characteristic of the divergence between the two men are the differ- ences in their ethical positions. After yet again extolling a reluctance to learn on the part of "many people," Gehlen resignedly admits to Adorno: "Ah, my god, you know, what I am actually seeking in reality is something honorable that one can serve. And this is what I continue to consider ethics." Adorno concedes that ethics is a matter of obligations, and thus to a certain extent an institutional concern; still, he wants to be able to distinguish between one sort of obligation and another:

But this sense of obligation can nonetheless take the form of adap- tation and subordination, such as you seem to be emphasizing here, as well as the form that I would want to emphasize more

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strongly, that is, that precisely in attempting to take this sense of obligation seriously, one attempts to change whatever prevents one - as it indeed prevents all people ... from living one's own potential, and to realize whatever potential is hidden within one.

While the functionalist Gehlen remains an ethical conventionalist, Adorno brings into play a specifically modern perspective on morality by including the autonomy and self-realization of all people.

A utopian energy is expressed in Adorno's pathos of freedom and egalitarianism, in his aesthetic avant-gardism and moral rationalism that ultimately swept up many young students in the course of the 1960s and went on to convince the majority of the populace to push for reforms. The student revolt, in which egalitarian intellectuals communicated with the masses - who could be moved to respond (a completely new phe- nomenon in postwar German history) - became a force capable of gen- erating institutions. The student revolt made possible stability of the role of the modern intellectual in Germany. On the whole, this successful act of institutionalization had a crucial and, for West Germany, a specific moral prerequisite. The postwar generation of activists of 1967 and 1968 succeeded in disrupting the "communicative silencing" of the Nazi past on a broad scale and in calling up the repressed memory of Auschwitz in the collective consciousness. This was a moral achievement, for which this generation alone would have every reason to be proud.

But in the place of this moral consciousness measured against one's own history, in a broad spectrum of former activists, the sentimental gesture of guilty consciences and self-criticism appears as a peculiarly autonomous adaptation to the Zeitgeist, a "left" variation of historical revision in which the "shift" [Wende] takes place in one's own mind, for the most part without cognizance of conservative theories and at one's own initiation. The late-Stalinist impulse toward the self-destruction of an antiauthoritarian revolt in illusory cadre parties has left its afterim- age in the self-critiques of the scene in line with Green Party alternative groups, and in the ritualistic discounting of one's own motives of yes- terday and the day before.

This situation is markedly different from that in France, where the left's avant-gardists of 1968 have become the neoconservative avant- garde of today. By means of an almost classical form of apostasy, they have retained ideological control, while the German right-wing intel- lectuals of the 1970s and 1980s were also conservative in 1968 and had long since left the ranks of what was then the "new" left.

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Between the two generations, perspectives shifted in a peculiar way. The fifty- to sixty-year-old propagandists for the conservative Wende wanted to leave behind the supposed "guilt obsession" (Michael Sturmer) of postwar Germans once and for all, an obsession that had never really existed in spite of the fact that this generation - without which there could not have been a Third Reich - had every reason to feel guilty. At the same time, the generation of antiauthoritarians that grew up after the war has deteriorated into one offering only lachry- mose admissions of guilt and self-accusations in which infantile aber- rations of the revolt and the charade of student cadre parties are equated with Stalinist terror. While the conservative generation that is in power is concerned with dispelling feelings of guilt that would have been appropriate to the actual murders but either never came to the surface or were repressed, the younger generation propels the pure fic- tion of the terror toward feelings of guilt that are false.

In contrast to the 1960s, perspectives since the late 1970s have been interconnectedpathologically in such a way that, within the totality of the conservative syndrome, the semblance of a "new obscurity" (Haber- mas) in which even left and right can no longer be differentiated has developed for the participants. A similarly pathological constellation (and this was the morally abluent achievement of the student revolts) began to disintegrate in the 1960s, when the only appropriate emo- tional response, that of moral outrage, was articulated loud and clear in the street against repression and the "communicative silence," against the disavowal of any guilt and shared responsibility for the crimes of their elders in the succeeding generation, justifiably damaging to false feelings - in a spontaneous mass movement which was very sensitive to questions of power, which consciously ran the risk of confrontation (then still comparatively hard to calculate), and which was ready to pay the price of disappointment. The sort of tearful self-criticism that is re- pentantly pursued today by everyone from Peter Schneider to "Pflasterstrand," and which intersects with the conservative critiques of antiauthoritarians from Marquand to Luibbe, has recently been chal- lenged in a brilliant essay by Lothar Baier. He writes:

For all the self-righteousness and occasional hysteria that accompa- nied the outbreak of recuperated antifascism, it must be admitted that it marked a caesura in West German postwar history: for the first time, German society in the FRG was compelled from within to confront, politically, morally, and theoretically, its National

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Socialist antecedent. For the first time, the perpetrators who had reached the age of retirement unpunished found themselves fac- ing the demand for an explanation, not from foreigners but from their own children, students, and subordinates. Even lawmakers had to tow the line and, after a period of hesitation, exclude Nazi crimes from the statute of limitations.6

In the crisis of the social state that has taken hold throughout the West since the 1970s (to the advantage of the new conservatives), the German counterintellectuals have gained in influence. With students of Gehlen and Schelsky, Carl Schmitt and Joachim Ritter, modem tradi- tionalism becomes the ideological and political agenda of what is re- ferred to beyond the Rhine as "the shift." It quite openly renounces new ideas and to a large degree corresponds to that type of modem conservatism whose fundamental principles surface in the argument between Adorno and Gehlen. The humanities (Geisteswissenschaften) and historical sciences want to equalize burdens vis-A-vis the various costs of modernization in conjunction with postmodern art and architecture; a renewed religion of culture is meant to seal the covenant of the elite.

In essence, two factors distinguish the new anti-intellectuals from the old German mandarins. First, they have given up their campaign against industry and capital, against bureaucracy and parliamentary democracy, and are no longer militant antimodernists. Second, they have lost faith in the very religion of culture that they nonetheless con- tinue to propagate. Their appeal to tradition and values has relin- quished the claim to truth. It is precisely in this that they differ from Heidegger and Gadamer.

Paradoxically, this may be what accounts for their surprising appeal, even among members of the former new left. Like conservatives since Burke, their beliefs are based in tautology and the naturalist fallacy. So- ciety is what it is, and that is all there is to it! But they no longer lay claim to truth with this statement. Rather, they quite consciously make allowances for pragmatic self-contradiction. The normative claim of tradition is supposed to be accepted without reflection, but it is no longer valid. "Society is what it is" - but this statement is arbitrary. It is both true and not true. If, along with Luhmann, we now somewhat abbreviatedly assume that the left has always drawn its argumentative upper hand from the dynamic of contradiction inherent to modernity,

6. Lothar Baier, "Selig sind die Schuldigen," Die Zeit 39, 18 Sept. 1987: 52.

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from the "negative rationality" (Hegel) of paradox - "society is, what it is not yet" - then the new, anti-intellectual designers of ideology unexpectedly gained semantic ground through the fact that they were able ideologically to activate tautological conservatism by means of a metaparadox. If they were to announce a neopagan belief in the proph- etic style of Heidegger, no one would continue to believe them, and their church would stand empty. But they do not announce it in the style of Heidegger but rather that of Genscher. That is what explains their success. They announce an ideology, but they make it clear in all their statements that they no longer believe in it. It is precisely this that makes them credible. The present chancellor of the Federal Republic embodies the new conservative paradigm more perfectly than almost anyone else. If he were to say, with Holderlin, that "mine is the speech of the Fatherland," he would disgrace himself for all time. He none- theless uses precisely the same semantics of the Fatherland as would Heidegger or Holderlin or a German officer from one of the world wars, but because of the way he delivers his address, no one believes a single syllable, and it is this fact alone that prevents him from disgrac- ing himself. A semantics that is definitively divested of the authenticity of the present can only be put forward credibly if it is presented as something incredible.

In the meantime, the government's conservative theoreticians amuse themselves by theorizing their own lack of theory in that they explain and justify why theories - that is, explanations and justifica- tions - are useless and pernicious. They propagate the general aboli- tion of the general, they labor theoretically on the downfall of theory, and they think the prohibition of thought. They announce counter- Enlightenment as Enlightenment, giving intellectual weight to the re- action against the intellectuals.

As astonishing as the provincial election victories were that suc- ceeded through this strategy of anti-intellectual ideology-design, the modern traditionalists have also taken a step backward - in their complete relinquishing of claims to truth, tradition, values, secondary virtues, and the whole religion of culture - to the legitimating force of fashion. In so doing, they destroy the remaining traces of the power of social acculturation inhering in values that were "accepted in advance" (Liibbe) without reflection, and in standards that were passed on "nat- urally." In this sense, the agenda of ideological planning that is tradi- tional within modernity - for which every ideology and every god are

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equivalent to holes in the tradition that it hastily attempts to stop up with fashions and museums - is self-destructive. Compensation does not function, at least not when it is a matter of collective consciousness. Or, in the words of the young Hegel, "A darned stocking is better than one that is torn; this is not true of self-awareness."'

This at least allows for the possibility of hope. If the utopian mo- mentum of the 1960s was motivated by a sudden, nonsimultaneous renewal of unorthodox Hegelian Marxism, then the shift of the late 1980s was less something completely new or even postmodern than it was the old hat of an aristocratic right-Hegelianism, functionalistically propped up with the all too weak legitimizing power of fashion and the museum. Once the eye grows weary of bright images and it be- comes clear that the common will cannot relinquish the power of legit- imacy, Kant might be able to gain new currency in the late 1980s, along with the Rousseau of The Social Contract, tempered by Hegel and Marx. The tautological argument that the conservatives have against the utopia of a rational society (i.e., that man in his historical circum- stances is imperfect, inadequate, and finite, and that because this is in- contestable, it is better to leave society as it is) remains a naturalistic fal- lacy that denounces the unrelinquishable utopian impulse to the bene- fit of the interests that are all too close to it.

It is this utopian impulse that Kant admires in Plato. In his Critique of Pure Reason, which appeared in 1781 - two years before Burke's repri- mand of the intellectuals, and which anticipates his arguments - Kant defends Plato's Republic against its conservative detractors:

The Republic of Plato has become proverbial as a striking example of a supposedly visionary perfection, such as can exist only in the brain of an idle thinker. ... We should, however, be better adviseb to follow up this thought and ... to help place it, through fresh ef- forts, in a proper light, rather than to set it aside as useless on the very sorry and harmful pretext of impracticability. A constitution allowing the greatest possible human freedom in accordance with laws by which the freedom of each is made to be consistent with that of others ... is at any rate a necessary idea, which must be taken as fundamental not only in first projecting a constitution but in all its laws. For at the start we are required to abstract from the actually existing hindrances, which, it may be, do not arise unavoidably out

7. G. W. F. Hegel, Werke, vol. 2 (Frankfurt/Main: 1970) 558.

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of human nature, but rather are due to a quite remediable cause, the neglect of the pure ideas in the making of the laws. Nothing, indeed, can be more injurious, or more unworthy of a philoso- pher, than the vulgar appeal to so-called adverse experience. Such experience would never have existed at all, if at the proper time those institutions had been established in accordance with ideas.8

The experience that conservative reactionaries so enjoy citing against the utopian, and that Kant contemptuously refers to as "vulgar," is, strictly speaking, apseudo-experience. Specifically, it is experience with so- cial forms of organization and institutions that are not in the least bit natural, but are rather themselves embodied ideas, ideas that are merely false, and in any case not those of the "greatest human freedom." No limit is set a priori to the realization of this idea, for any such restriction of freedom would contradict its concept. Kant continues:

For what the highest degree may be at which mankind may have to come to a stand, and how great a gulf may still be left between the idea and its realization, are questions which no one can, or ought to, answer. For the issue depends on freedom; and it is in the power of freedom to pass beyond any and every specified limit.9

Anyone who plays off freedom against utopia always destroys free- dom in the end. In Kant's practical opinion, the impulse of utopia un- avoidably belongs to the concept of freedom, as it does to every possi- ble concept of freedom that can be explicated without contradiction, as well as to the liberal and neoliberal, purely negative concept of free- dom. This expressly includes, rather than excludes, the ability to learn to draw intelligent conclusions from bad experiences and to act ac- cordingly thereafter. But no experience can restrict our freedom, even - if the occasion arises - in order to make it completely different and then perhaps better (and even constantly to attempt this anew) without sublating freedom itself. Like Bacon and Galileo, in theory and in science respectively, Kant completes in practice the shift against the Aristote- lianism of European high cultures that opens the path to moral prog- ress in the consciousness of freedom.

8. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's, 1926) 311-12.

9. See Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.

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Freedom, not experience, is the a priori of modem society. It always becomes recognizable only in retrospect; it cannot be made in advance. Thus, freedom defines the' limits of experience, and not the reverse. A practical reason that has been emancipated from the confines of metaphysics and theology precedes the historical reason that not coincidentally first arose out of the positivist tendencies of the nineteenth century. From Kant through Sartre, freedom is the overstepping of boundaries. Liberation from predetermined constraints, from preconceptions, follows the max- ims of an active reason whose moral consequences are applied to the ex- pansion of the parameters of our freedom. The destruction of progres- sive utopias is merely the reverse of the repression of past judgment.

For those for whom the rationality of the autonomous formation of volition is too negative because its central notion, morality, is thought to be too abstract - without vision and substance, nonsensuous, imageless and anemic - Kant provides in the Critique of Pure Reason a reminder of the fact that longing for the positive, guiding images of postmodern fa- miliarity is more likely to serve particular than general interests, as expe- rience has shown. The negativity of the prohibition of images (Bilderver- bot), on the other hand, has always been a concrete force that motivated action. It extended beyond the moral, aiming within the modernism of the sublime at the expansion of aesthetic freedom. For the Old Testa- ment prohibition of images is not only the theological encasement of a progressive moral view; it also liberates fantasy and inspires the imagina- tive capability for extending our autonomy vis-;A-vis the containments into which the powers that be want to relegate it. The prohibition of im- ages liberates the power of the imagination from the literalism (Konkretis- mus) of mythical narratives, from the magic spell of images and stories. Within it, the moral is linked to the aesthetic:

Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven images. ... The very same holds good of our representation of the moral law and of our native capacity for morality. The fear that, if we divest this representation of everything that can commend it to the senses, it will thereupon be attended only with a cold and life- less approbation and not with any moving force or emotion, is wholly unwarranted. The very reverse is the truth. For when noth- ing any longer meets the eye of sense, and the unmistakable and ineffaceable idea of morality is left in possession of the field, there would be need rather of tempering the ardour of an unbounded

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imagination to prevent it rising to enthusiasm, than of seeking to lend these ideas the aid of images and childish devices for fear of their being wanting in potency.'0

This is a highly dialectical notion. Instead of clashing with the power of the aesthetic imagination, the universalism of the moral will opens freedom up into the imaginative. The liberation from the literalism of graphic images and instructive stories and from the dictates of the nar- rative also liberates fantasy.

This idea is alluded to only vaguely in Kant and is then deflected in another, more conventional direction in the construction of "the beau- tiful as symbol of the moral." But Kant's allusions can be understood, as he himself often put it, as a "signal," to lead the aesthetic into the expanded horizon of a radical moral universalism - without simply subsuming it to the moral in the sense of an abstract Enlightenment (such as that which runs from Lessing to Peter Biirger) or, quite the op- posite, to sublate the political primacy of the normative within the aes- thetic of the state (be it the good one that runs from Schiller to Marcuse, or the evil one that runs from Baudelaire to Bohrer) and al- low it to degenerate into style and mere acculturation.

An unabbreviated and responsible rationalism, precisely because of the fact that, following Adorno, it ultimately implements the prohibi- tion against images as something aesthetic, becomes the key that will open up the floodgates of the imaginative and the fantastic, that will break apart the conventional limits of art without fading away into the subversive murmuring of a never-ending monologue. Who thinks ab- stractly? Reason is spicy fare, and once it has been consumed only a stale aftertaste of the "childish devices" of postmodern effulgence will linger, the trace of a memory that will soon be lost.

Only if it does not lose its faith in the power of its own ideas and al- low itself to be crushed between a social-democratic conservatism of interests and a Green Party conservatism of issues, will egalitarian intellectualism be able to keep a calm eye on the conservative occupa- tion of the aesthetic and of culture and to bide its time until this occu- pation is no longer fashionable. Unfortunately, time is growing short.

Translated by Jamie Owen Daniel

10. Immanuel Kant, The Critique ofJudgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Ox- ford: Oxford UP, 1952) 128-29.

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