Dualities of Spontaneity: Adorno’s Rethinking of a Kantian Concept

Abstract This paper examines Theodor Adorno’s critical reappropriation of the Kantian notion of Spontaneity. By tracing two distinct senses of spontaneity in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason – the relative spontaneity of the understanding and the absolute spontaneity of pure reason – the paper highlights how each addresses the problem of the subject-object relation. Adorno’s account of subjectivity within his critique of idealism and materialist doctrine of the “preponderance of the object” draws upon Kant’s relative spontaneity of the mind precisely because it establishes contact between subject and object. Adorno’s rereading of spontaneity, which seeks to critically appropriate it from Kant’s idealist conception of the subject, is shown to be central to his critique of Kantian moral philosophy in Negative Dialectics . For Adorno, the impulsive, bodily dimension of free action, which Kant’s conception of the will glosses over, corresponds to the relative spontaneity of the mind used in his materialist conception of subjectivity. This paper concludes by demonstrating how Adorno’s reinterpretation of Kantian spontaneity underpins two of his late projects, namely, the development of an ethics after Auschwitz and a messianic, micrological approach to metaphysical thought that would be attentive to the non-identical in experience.