The meaning of dialectics between critique and crisis, according to Reinhart Koselleck

• Grant number: 16/04042-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: June 01, 2016
• End date: May 31, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Philosophy - History of Philosophy
• Principal Investigator: Fernando Costa Mattos
• Grantee: Felipe Ribeiro
• Host Institution: Centro de Ciências Naturais e Humanas (CCNH). Universidade Federal do ABC (UFABC). Ministério da Educação (Brasil). Santo André , SP, Brazil

Abstract

The present research aims to analyse the notion of dialectics as it is presented in the work of Reinhart Koselleck, "Critique and Crisis". Our hypotesis is that the author presents an original view of the dialectic of modernity, whose specific meaning runs through all his thesis and makes it different from the other dialectical interpretations of modernity, whether the hegelian or the marxist interpretations, or the one presented by Adorno and Horkheimer. It was common to all these interpretations to explain how the Enlightenment movement was incounscioulsy trapped in a dualistic logic. We will seek to indicate that, in Koselleck's work, differently, one finds a dialectics that unfolds itself in a presupposed interaction between the enlighted criticism and the political crisis of the absolutist regime, between morals and politics. The intellectual criticism thus operated in the moral field, and it was in regard to the latter that it evaluated the world. Calling into question the established order, the critique then conjured the crisis of the absolutist political regime. The specificity of this notion of dialectics resides in that the moral criticism obscured the political crisis, since, from the point of view of the enlightened ones, there was no crisis at all. Their interests were then transformed into a philosophy of history, whose resolution was glided away to an uthopian future, leaving pending the political decision that the crisis demanded immediatly. (AU)