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Normativity and Metaphysics in Adorno and Hegel 1





Even the most cursory acquaintance with Adorno‟s dense and difficult work reveals that

he is a deeply moral thinker. Nobody could fail to notice that Adorno‟s work expresses

profound moral concern in the broadest sense of that term. It is true not just of Adorno‟s

specific writings on morality, but of his social theory in general and of the major works of

his mature philosophy, Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory, in particular. 2 Adorno

criticises those elements of social life that threaten the autonomy of the individual and that

encourage individuals to adopt instrumental relations to other people and things.3

Moreover, Adorno is explicit about his normative aspirations. He describes his Negative

Dialectics as „the ontology of the false state of things‟. He adds that „[a] right state of

things would be free from dialectics: just as little a system as a contradiction.‟ (ND 22)

Although Negative Dialectics is a social ontology, a theory of social being, the attributes

„false‟ and „right‟ indicate that it is intended to be critical and normative and betray his

underlying moral concern.



That said, Negative Dialectics is not a work of moral philosophy, and Adorno‟s

moral concerns are atypical. He makes no attempt to answer the central questions of moral

philosophy: What is goodness? How should one live? What ought I to do? Why be

moral?. Even when writing about Kant‟s practical philosophy, Adorno, as befits someone

who believed that “there is no right way to live in a false world” (MM 39: PDM 9) shows

little or no interest in normative ethical theory.4 Negative Dialectics for example is

concerned rather with the relation between concepts and objects. It is an immanent

criticism of Kantian epistemology and a qualified rehabilitation of metaphysics. The moral

concerns arise supposedly because, according to Adorno, universal concepts, „violate‟,

„mutilate‟, „dominate‟ and even „liquidate‟ the particulars they subsume, and because

thinking stands accused of being in league with institutional and social structures of

domination. But it is not quite clear what moral implications this thesis in neo-Kantian

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epistemology really has, or why it has them. The normative basis of his work remains

obscure.



Not only does Adorno avoid normative ethical theory, he endorses Hegel‟s well

known criticisms of Kant‟s moral theory. Adorno is faithfully Hegelian in his denial that

the task of philosophy is to “issue instructions as to how the world ought to be.” 5 Adorno

and Hegel agree that philosophy aims at truth and that, as Hegel puts it in the

Phenomenology of Spirit, „what only ought to be, without in fact being, has no truth‟ (3,

192). To put it another way, Adorno rejects moralising and external criticism in others and

expressly forbears from such criticism himself.6



This makes Adorno‟s position even less straightforward. For Hegel‟s rejection of

Kantian moralising criticism is grounded in, and depends upon, his own ontotheological

understanding of the task of philosophy, namely to recognize the rational in the actual.

Adorno emphatically rejects this aspect of Hegel‟s ontotheology. Whilst Adorno agrees

that it is not the task of philosophy to tell the world how it ought to be, unlike Hegel he

makes strong normative criticisms of presently existing reality. This brings Adorno‟s

philosophical allegiance to Hegel and concomitant rejection of moralising criticism on the

one hand, into potential conflict with his emphatic normative criticism of society on the

other. How can Adorno embrace these tensions without simply being guilty of

inconsistency? How does Adorno avoid presupposing normative criteria that are „external‟

and „moralising‟ and thus remain a consistent pupil of Hegel, whilst advancing a social

philosophy that is both normative and critical?









1. Hegel’s Metaphysical Project

I shall begin to answer this question by contrasting the Hegel‟s social philosophy,

with Adorno‟s. In the Preface to the Elements of the Philosophy of Right Hegel famously

warns philosophy against setting up of a world beyond the present one and issuing

instructions on how the world ought to be. Rather, he claims that philosophy‟s task proper

lies in comprehending „the present and the actual‟ and in „showing how the state, as the

ethical universe, should be recognized‟. Philosophy‟s job is not to formulate laws, but to

observe them and to find their „inner-pulse‟, their rational core.7 This line of thought

needs to be understood in the context of Hegel‟s distinction between actuality and

existence. Actuality, [Wirklichkeit] which is sometimes translated misleadingly as

3





„reality‟, is a technical term for Hegel which applies to a much narrower domain than that

of existence.8 Hegel often refers to the latter as „lazy‟ [träge] existence or „mere being‟.9

To understand what is lazy or dull about existence or „mere being‟ we need to ask what

makes actuality superior to it. In the domain of objective spirit, i.e. among all the

institutions, practices, customs and beliefs that count as objectifications of the spirit,

some, but not all, exist for good reasons. The difference between actuality and lazy

existence is that what is actual continues to exist for good reason, and the latter does not.10

Where an institution exists for good reasons, these good reasons as it were nourish its

existence. Further, the good reasons that support the actuality of one institution tend to

accrete to other such institutions: actuality spreads out along the axis of its underlying

rationale.11 By contrast, where an institution merely exists for no good reason, there is no

internal pressure to maintain it in existence. So lazy existence has the opposite tendency to

wither and lapse into non-existence. This does not mean that all lazy existence disappears.

In that case there would be no need for philosophy to recognize rational actuality. It is only

under favourable historical and social conditions that lazy existence dies out. Given

unfavourable historical and social conditions, lazy existence stays put. Hegel certainly

believed that in the time of ferment in which he lived, historical and social conditions

were favourable, and that the time was ripe for the development of actuality.

It is helpful to note that there are two independently necessary and jointly

sufficient conditions of Hegelian actuality.12 An institution is actual in Hegel‟s sense if

and only if

a. its existence satisfies the „right of subjective particularity‟; i.e. the institution

satisfies or does not thwart the basic interests of each subject who participates in

the institutions and practices that make up the cultural life of a community; and

b. each subject can accept the institution because it satisfies his or her basic interests.

In other words, if an institution or practice does satisfy the basic interests of each

participating subject, and if it can be accepted by each subject because it satisfies his basic

interests, then that institution is actual; and if an institution or practice is actual, it

manifestly satisfies the interests the practitioners. More concisely, actuality is what is good

and what can be known to be good.

A couple of qualifications are needed. Firstly, this account assumes that what is

good, is necessarily good for a person or persons. This becomes important when one looks

at the second condition, that actuality can be known to be good. It means that actuality can

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be known to be good (i.e. good for them) by those people for whom it is good, not by

some better knowing leader or elite, and not by some disembodied impersonal spirit.

Secondly, it is very important that there are two separate conditions which are only jointly

sufficient for actuality. For Hegel likens his philosophy to a „true theodicy‟.13 (20, 455)

This description is only meaningful if a false theodicy is possible. Hegel does not actually

talk about false theodicy, but he implies that one is possible. By implication a false

theodicy would be one which convinces us that the world is good when it is not. A false

theodicy would project the illusion of actuality onto mere existence. It would convince

subjects that what merely exists, or what was bad, is really good (for them). To use a more

modern idiom, a false theodicy would be a kind of ideology.14

The second of these two jointly necessary conditions is indispensable, because

Hegel understands actuality to be an objective correlate of subjective human freedom or

what Hegel calls „the right of the subjective will‟.15 Human beings are free to the extent

that only those things that they can recognize to be rational - and this applies across the

board to institutions, laws, practices, belief, emotions, feelings, - have authority over them.

If something claims authority on the basis of its mere existence, then that authority is, to

use an expression of Hegel‟s youth, „positive‟ or dogmatic; it is a form of domination and

unfreedom. Hegel often makes this point in another way. He contends that human

subjectivity (or the „I‟) is free when it is „at home‟ in the world and that, “„I‟ is at home in

the world when it knows it, and even more so when it has comprehended it.” 16 That is, the

rational human subject is „at home‟ or most free, where it is in its own element, the

element of objectified human reason. In other words, human subjects are „at home‟ in

actuality. There is a lot to be said on Hegel‟s multifaceted conception of freedom. Suffice

it here to say that, practically and politically speaking, Hegel‟s claim is that the subject is

„at home‟ only when it lives under laws, customs, practices and institutions the underlying

rationale of which it can recognize, i.e. understand and affirm as rational. And it can

recognize and affirm these laws because they have in their turn been made by rational

human subjects. For Hegel this is historically the case in modern times. In modernity,

claims Hegel, the actual customs, practices and institutions that shape the lives of subjects

enjoy authority and deserve respect only in virtue of their underlying rationality. Laws, for

instance, have to win acceptance insofar as they manifestly satisfy the interests of those

subject to them.17

The principle of the modern world requires that whatever is to be recognized by

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everyone must be seen by everyone as entitled to such recognition.18



The situation in which we modern (post French-revolutionary, post-Kantian) subjects find

ourselves is one in which many good institutions have already been established through

the historical and cultural labour of spirit, but in which there is still a lot of intellectual

work to do in order to recognize this fact. For the underlying rationality of actual

institutions does not lie on their surface; it is buried within them. This is why Hegel insists

that we modern subjects need not religion but a Science of Right, the task of which is to

uncover and make public the implicit rationality of custom and law.19

For what matters is to recognize in the semblance [Scheine] of the temporal and

transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.20



Thus in Hegel‟s view philosophical metaphysics - the recognition of the rational in the

actual and, more broadly, the discrimination between actuality and mere being - has an

historical and social task to fulfil. It is the task of perfecting the development of the

objective human spirit towards the ends of freedom and reconciliation - to show Hegel‟s

audience (in Berlin of the early 1820‟s) that they can be „at home‟ in their world. Beyond

this, the modes of absolute spirit, art, religion and philosophy, have the further task of

making known that what is thus at home in the world is spirit or mind, and that in

recognizing the rational in the real, self-knowing spirit recognizes nothing but itself.





2. Negativity and Immanent Criticism: Adorno’s Inverted Hegelianism



Let us now try to identify the fundamental differences between Adorno‟s philosophy and

Hegel‟s. The most noticeable and the most obviously important difference between

Adorno‟s social philosophy and Hegel‟s is that Adorno‟s conception of immanent

criticism is radically negative; it aims to condemn existing unreason rather than to

recognize and affirm the rational in the actual. Typically Adorno reaches this prima facie

unhegelian position not through a rejection of Hegel‟s ontotheology, but through a

dialectical development of it. As we have just seen, according to Hegel actuality spreads

out along the axis of its underlying rationality. By contrast „lazy‟ existence, Hegel thinks,

tends to lapse into non-existence. Adorno realizes that the fundamentally irrational

institutions that in Hegel‟s eyes are merely „lazy‟ have their own survival mechanisms,

including the ability to cloak themselves in the appearance of rationality. Take, for

example, the institution of „free wage labor‟ which, though it serves only the dominant

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interests of the capitalist class who exploit the free wage laborers by appropriating the

surplus value they produce, nonetheless appears to serve the interests of all, including

those who only have their labor power to sell. Furthermore, just as one actual institution,

according to Hegel, begets another, so, according to Adorno, irrational institutions tend to

beget others. The illusory reasons for the existence of one irrational institution encourage

other irrational institutions into being. Thus consumer capitalism begets the leisure

industry, which encourages people to waste their free time pursuing inherently worthless

activities, merely in order to recreate their spent labor power, which in turn fuels the

economic system. Whilst Hegel believes that „lazy existence‟ at worst hampers the

development of actual institutions and hinders the progress of spirit, Adorno shows that

the influence of irrational institutions is altogether more sinister and nefarious.21 However,

he is not consistent in his use of these terms which are typically used to conflate two

different views. The stronger, more pessimistic view is that there is no good in the world,

apart from the knowledge that there is no good in the world. The weaker, less pessimistic

view, is there are fragments of the good in the world - for example the experience of

pleasure granted by certain works of art, human warmth, love and spontaneity - however

only enough to allow us to notice their absence from the social totality. They are the

exception, not the rule of social reality, points of resistance to it, not its basis. Depending

on the context, Adorno tends to slide between these two views. Common to both, though,

is the firm belief that the present situation is parlous.22

Under such unpromising historical conditions the metaphysical project

metamorphoses. For Hegel, the task of philosophy was still to recognize the rationality in

the actual. For Adorno, by contrast, a philosophy whose task is to recognize the rational in

the actual would be otiose: there is no (or virtually no) rational actuality.23 A philosophy

whose task is to recognize the rational in present non-actual reality is worse than that, a

false theodicy or ideological illusion that is complicit with the structures of domination it

analyzes. It would be a philosophy which offered spurious justifications for the existence

of a fundamentally irrational reality. In order to avoid that fate philosophy must remain

content with recognizing the irrationality at the heart of an antagonistic society.

Philosophy must remain true to itself by contemplating not the true and the good, but the

untrue and the bad.24

Accordingly Adorno‟s philosophy not only has a different object to Hegel‟s it has

the opposite social objective. Where Hegel seeks to reconcile modern subjects to their

7





world, by identifying the rational in the actual, Adorno‟s ontology of the false state of

things seeks to alienate modern subjects from a social world which no longer merits their

recognition by making them consciously unhappy with it. In respect of its objective, we

can say that whilst the task Hegel‟s social philosophy is ultimately affirmative, the task of

Adorno‟s social philosophy is ultimately negative.

We can see how Adorno‟s philosophy remains within the same general

metaphysical or ontotheological framework as Hegel‟s social philosophy, but has the

opposite evaluative polarity. Now we are in a position to ask whether this most

characteristic feature of Adorno‟s philosophy - its negativity - can throw any light on the

normative basis of his social criticism. It is natural to think that it might. At least there is a

line of thought propounded both by Adorno and by many of his critics that he is doing

something called „immanent criticism‟ which needs no moral foundations and is thus

unlike the external and moralising criticism he rejects. On this view what Adorno does is

to show that the general and widespread assumption that the institutions and practices that

shape social life are good - that they satisfy people‟s fundamental interests - to be an

illusion. Furthermore he shows that this illusion is necessary to the persistence of the

social system. In so doing Adorno supposedly only measures presently existing society

against its own implicit normative/evaluative claims, but makes none of his own. This is

why Adorno‟s criticism is not empty, why the normative constraints it exerts are not

external impositions on the objects of its criticism, and why it deserves to be called

„immanent‟ rather than external criticism.

We can illustrate this minimal conception of immanent criticism with an example.

Adorno, like Marx, aims to show that although capitalist relations of production appear to

be a free and equal exchange of labour power for wages, because of the nature of what is

exchanged and the circumstances under which the exchange takes place, this appearance

of equality is an illusion. Adorno uncovers a kind of discrepancy between social reality

and people‟s understanding of it. He shows that the appearance of capitalist exchange

relations are deceptive, that both parties are deceived about their true relation to each

other, that they believe “the lie of equality”.25 He adds that neither party realizes the

„injustice‟ of the exchange, and that this ongoing mutual deception maintains the practice

and fuels the dynamic of capitalist society which blights both their lives.

This is a crude but useful illustration of what I called the minimal conception of

immanent critique. The trouble with the minimal conception is that it is vulnerable to a

8





version of Moore‟s open question argument. It begs the question whether or not this

deceptive practice is morally wrong. Moreover, because it begs that question, the minimal

conception fails to square with Adorno‟s critical practice. For Adorno‟s writing leaves us

no doubt that the deceptive practice he criticizes is morally wrong; i.e. that it ought not to

be like it is. What this suggests is that contrary to widespread opinion, indeed contrary to

Adorno‟s self-estimation, Adorno‟s immanent criticism is neither wholly negative nor

wholly immanent. Certainly the negativity of Adorno‟s conception of immanent criticism

on its own grants him no special dispensation to draw normative conclusions from non-

normative premises. What entitles Adorno to the normative conclusions he does draw is

the obvious fact (a fact which is often ignored perhaps because it is so obvious) that his

negative conception of immanent criticism depends on a metaphysics of radical evil.

This may seem controversial. Many contemporary commentators would like

Adorno to have no truck with any kind of metaphysics, let alone a metaphysics of good

and evil. This seems to stem from the desire on the part of the commentators to make

Adorno relevant to contemporary philosophical concerns, by keeping his metaphysical

commitments as low as possible. Unlike Nietzsche and perhaps also Heidegger, however,

Adorno does not think that metaphysics is something that can or must be avoided at all

costs. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment he and Horkheimer criticize Enlightenment

thinking for neutering rationalist metaphysics. They are far more scathing about

contemporary forms of nominalism and scientism. The latter have abandoned all belief in

universals and have lost the capacity to “betray the injustice of what exists...through the

incongruence of concept and reality” (DA 24).26 Presumably this is what he thinks that he

(and Horkheimer) are doing - betraying present injustice by bringing to light the

incongruence of concept and object. In other words he admits a certain affinity between

critical theory and rationalist metaphysics. Furthermore, the „injustice‟ of which he speaks

must have a moral dimension of some kind. This moral dimension stems from the fact that

the incongruence that reveals the „injustice of what exists‟ is nothing less than the failure

of the concept „good‟ to correspond to a reality that is radically evil.

To see this we need only consider the role that evil plays in Adorno‟s qualified

rehabilitation of metaphysics at the end of Negative Dialectics. The „Meditations on

Metaphysics‟ consists in a contraposition of dialectical opposites: Kant‟s transcendent

metaphysics on the one hand and the event of Auschwitz on the other. According to Kant,

the ideas of reason correspond to nothing in experience, yet they provide rational answers

9





to questions that finite beings cannot help but ask. Along with the postulates of pure

practical reason they are a set of focal points ideally projected beyond the horizon of

experience, which provide practical orientation for finite beings in the world of

appearances. For Adorno the significance of Kant‟s ideas is threefold: they signify 1. that

metaphysics is ineliminable from theory; 2. that complete despair or nihilism is ultimately

unthinkable and 3. that practice is prior to theory. (ND 375-7) On the other hand,

Adorno‟s Meditations respond to the historical phenomenon of Auschwitz. The figure of

Auschwitz in Adorno‟s work should be understood as a synechdoche for the barbaric,

inhuman and ultimately murderous treatment of other people that took place in the

ghettos, the concentration camps and the death camps under the Third Reich. The

significance of Auschwitz, thus understood, is twofold: it represents the simultaneous

culmination and betrayal of enlightenment. Auschwitz is a betrayal of enlightenment

because it violated the humanitarian ideals of the historical Enlightenment in a devastating

manner. It is the culmination of enlightenment because in that very devastation it revealed

what enlightenment always was: instrumental rationality, technological domination and

social oppression masquerading as reason and freedom. Adorno‟s strategy is to confront

Kant‟s ideas and postulates - the empty promises of enlightenment - with Auschwitz - the

blind unreason of its content. This confrontation is supposed to undermine Kant‟s

rationalist metaphysics and simultaneously to release its truth moment. (ND 400)

It turns out then, that the minimal conception of immanent criticism is both

misleading as a picture of what Adorno is doing, and inadequate as an explanation of the

normative basis of Adorno‟s social criticism. The sense in which Adorno‟s criticism is

indeed negative is inseparable from the claim that the world is radically evil. I would

hesitate to call such a mode of criticism „immanent‟. At very least I would want to say that

this version of immanent critique is much richer than the minimal conception. But if this

is right, the „negativity‟ of the minimal conception of immanent criticism will not be able

to explain the normative basis of Adorno‟s social philosophy.





3. Mimesis and Normativity

There is another fundamental difference between Adorno‟s philosophy and Hegel‟s which

may help answer our initial question. Adorno makes frequent appeals to a prior mimetic

relation between thought and things; he adverts to a concept of mimetic rationality. Both

Adorno‟s more critical and his more sympathetic commentators acknowledge this. But

10





where the former see only a desperate gesture that obscures the normative basis of social

philosophy rather than clarifies it, the latter too often just accept Adorno‟s asseveration

that there is a link between mimesis and normativity, mediated somehow by ancient magic

and by modern art. My own view is that, though the appeal to mimesis or to mimetic

rationality is a gesture rather than an argument, the gesture is not simply trivial or empty.

However quite a lot of interpretative work is needed to uncover its philosophical

significance.

The first point that needs to be made is the centrality of what Adorno calls the

shudder, [Schauder/Schauer] a term which occurs both in Dialectic of Enlightenment and

Aesthetic Theory. In the crucial opening section of the former work Adorno, drawing

heavily on studies in the history of religion and anthropology, develops a conception of

enlightenment thinking from a reconstructed prehistory of rationality.27 Roughly speaking

Adorno divides human development into five stages, although the division is more

implied than explicitly drawn.

1. The first is a pre-animistic stage in which the world is governed by a principle of mana

which is primary and undifferentiated.28 He does not say much about the structure of

preanimistic society, apart from the fact that every member participated in the process

of altering nature. He does say, that mana is born from the shudder [Schauder] in the

face of the unknown, and that it contains the lineaments of the division between subject

and object, because things are not experience directly as what they are but as the seat of

something else, mana.

2. In the second, animistic stage human beings begin to populate the world with named

deities. Through language and the mimetic power of magic they attempt to gain control

of their environment. „The cry of fear, with which the unfamiliar is experienced

becomes its name. It fixes the transcendence of the unknown over against the known,

and thereby fixes the shudder as something sacred.‟ (DA 17) Primitive forms of

thought thus distance the knower from the known and provide the first doubling of

nature into appearance (or illusion) and essence which provides the incipient basis of

myth and natural science.29 In so doing language and magic give the class of priests and

magicians privileged access to the supernatural powers, and create a social hierarchy

which from now on begins to entwine itself around the relation of human beings to the

world.

3. In the third stage myth, story-telling and collective memory emerge as a kind of

11





inchoate form of rationality. Myths attempt to subdue the unknown external world by

imposing a kind of natural order upon its infinite variety and unpredictability. However,

the „repetition of nature‟ which mythical symbols represent always turn out to be „the

represented permanence of social coercion. (DE 20 & 27: DA 23 & 28)

4. In the fourth stage metaphysics replaces myth as the best means of coming to

understand and exert control over external nature. The difference is that metaphysics

uses universal concepts rather than stories and images. Nonetheless these universals

were just as much concealed forms of domination as their precursors. (DE 22: DA 23)

But metaphysics retains a vestige of its social origins also in so far as it still aims at

discovering a truth that transcends existent reality.

5. Finally, even metaphysics is overcome as enlightenment triumphs in the form of an all

encompassing instrumental rationality which is totally in thrall to the status quo

epistemically and politically. Adorno‟s favorite examples are the natural sciences and

the logical positivism of the Vienna School. But almost any kind of formal system of

reasoning from mathematics to logic, or any kind of technological application of

scientific knowledge counts as an instance of enlightenment. (DE 27) Their sole aim,

according to Adorno, is to describe existent reality and not to criticize it. Thus they end

up slavishly subservient both to external nature and to extant socio-economic relations.

Ultimately enlightenment gives up its quest for universal truths and lapses into a

quietistic form of nominalism: it recognizes only the existence of names, of

conceptually identified objects. (DA 24)30

According to Adorno‟s anthropological story the experience of shudder arises as

the response to an originary imposition of non-identity. As befits the origin of a dialectic,

otherness [das Ungewohnte/Unbekannte] - or as it becomes in his later work - non-

identity, plays a dual role in Adorno‟s thought: it is both the danger and the saving power

of modern life, the threat and the possibility of redemption.31 The experience of shudder

mirrors this dual structure. On the one hand the impulsive response of taking flight is a

negative response to an unknown and potentially hostile other. It is the origin of purposive

rationality, of what Horkheimer calls instrumental reason and Adorno later calls identity-

thinking. The distancing operation of conceptual, reflective thought is the means by which

the subject attempts to subdue and tame the experience of shudder by controlling and

mastering what provoked it. On the other hand the shudder is, epistemically speaking, a

positive experience that is true to what is there prior to conceptual identification - the

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amorphous, the undifferentiated, the strange. It is an impulsive somatic experience that

momentarily registers the presence of what occasions it. It thus stands in a more intimate

relation to its other (to the non-identical) than do concepts and categories.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno seems to be making an historical and

anthropological claim that the shudder lies at the origins of human rationality in the

practices of magic. 32 In his later work however Adorno significantly extends his

conception of the shudder. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims that works of modernist art

can, in virtue of their characteristic autonomy, successfully capture and impart the

shudder.33 Here the shudder is not just a response to primal amorphousness and

undifferentiation; it is the appropriate response to the abstract nature of modern life.

The shudder is a reaction to the cryptically shut, which is a function of that element of

indeterminacy. At the same time however, the shudder is a mimetic comportment

reacting mimetically to abstractness. (AT 21)

But as we have seen the abstractness of modern life, its invariance, its universality, its

characteristic absence of particularity is what Adorno calls „the horror‟.34 The shudder is

the involuntary and immediate reaction of revulsion which discloses the modern

administered world as radically evil.

This in some ways far-fetched metaphysical claim serves as the basis of Adorno‟s

phenomenology of modern art. In Adorno‟s view successful works of modern art by artists

such as Schoenberg, Kafka, or Beckett, are only successful to the extent that they defeat

our cosy aesthetic expectations that they should occasion pleasure. Modern art survives its

assimilation to the functional totality - its relegation to mere entertainment - by becoming

difficult, introverted, dissonant, shocking. At the same time they remain art works and as

such, they cannot suppress an affirmative moment, what Adorno calls, citing Baudelaire,

„the promise of happiness‟.35 Modern artworks - in a deliciously dialectical irony - fulfil

this promise precisely by delaying and withholding the promised satisfaction. Thus

Adorno claims Schoenberg‟s Pierrot Lunaire shows that “there is more joy in dissonance

than in consonance”. (AT 40)

The shudder has a philosophical significance in Adorno‟s work that is deeper than,

and separate from its centrality to Adorno‟s phenomenology of modern art. It provides the

lineaments of a good answer, the only good answer Adorno has, to our initial question -

what is the peculiar normative basis of his social criticism? I should make clear that this is

not an answer that one will find in Adorno. It is an argument which I construct out of

13





materials I find in Adorno‟s work. It is faithful to Adorno in as much as it builds on his

concepts of mimesis and metaphysics.





4. Metaphysical Experience: Shudder as Inverted Wonder

So far we have seen that the shudder is not just a mimetic reaction to primary,

undifferentiated otherness. It is also, and more importantly for our purposes, a

spontaneous and somatic response of revulsion at pure identity. But even in this extended

sense the shudder is not merely a negative response. The shudder fulfils a positive

epistemic function. It is the gateway to the path of truth. It allows what is to disclose itself

as radically evil. As such, the shudder is the form which metaphysical experience assumes

under social conditions of total identity.

This may explain the only sense in which Adorno‟s social criticism deserves to be

called „immanent‟. The normative criterion of Adorno‟s social philosophy is immanent to

what he call metaphysical experience, namely a particular kind of somatic, non-

conceptual, experience of the world. The mimetic response of shudder and metaphysical

experience are two sides of the same process. What needs to be explained is the way in

which experience connects with the conception of radical evil, in a way that elucidates the

normative basis of Adorno‟s social criticism.

So far I have presented Adorno‟s metaphysics as a kind of inversion of Hegel‟s

ontotheology. However if we step back from Adorno‟s interpretation of his own work, we

can see how it reflects a much older and broader tradition of metaphysics than the German

Idealist tradition.36 Let us call this tradition classical metaphysics. I take the deliberately

broad and rather vague term classical metaphysics to include a whole tradition of

metaphysical thinking from Aristotle through to Hegel. Classical metaphysical thought

understands itself as a theory of what is. Kant‟s transcendental idealist view of

metaphysics as a doctrine of categories and of ideas and their relation to the empirical

world of appearances is, on this view, a variant of classical metaphysics. Hegel sits more

firmly within the tradition of classical metaphysics than does Kant, because he

understands the dynamic interrelation of categories and ideas to be the fundamental

structure of reality in itself. 37 I shall make the further assumption that Aristotle‟s account

of the origins of philosophy in book I of the Metaphysics is, in a very general way,

emblematic of the whole tradition of classical metaphysics. In this well-known passage

Aristotle shows that philosophy and science originate in the experience of

14





wonder/amazement [thauma] at the appearance of the world.

For it is because of wondering [tÕ qaum|zein] that human beings first began to

philosophize and that they still do now...Now one who is perplexed and amazed (Ð

[d¢porîn kaˆ qaum£zwn] supposes that he is ignorant, (whence a lover of myths too is a

kind of philosopher), for myth is composed of wonders [™k qaumas…wn]) so if they

indeed philosophized in order to avoid ignorance, it is clear that they pursued

knowledge for its own sake and not because of some use.38



Classical metaphysics thus begins in the experience of wonder and puzzlement at the

appearance of the world. This experience prompts the question „why‟ and sets in train the

inquiry into first causes and principles. This inquiry traces a path from ignorance to

knowledge in the course of which wonder and puzzlement are replaced by the contrary

state, understanding.39 It is important that the experience of wonder underlying classical

metaphysics is not evaluatively innocent. Wonder is appropriately directed only at what is

worthy of it, at what is truly wondrous. Classical metaphysics is thus not neutral as regards

the existence of the world: it holds that what exists is good - at least in the sense that it is

worthy of contemplation.

When we compare Aristotle‟s account of the origin of classical metaphysics with

Adorno‟s account of the origin of rational thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment some

striking and important parallels emerge. Adorno‟s story of the origins of enlightenment

thinking is not so much an historical account of the genesis of rational thought, as an

account of the grounds on which rational thought is based. Like Aristotle, Adorno holds

that philosophy or rationality arises from and is based on a kind of originary experience of

the world. Adorno‟s notion of metaphysical experience resembles Aristotle‟s also in that it

is also not evaluatively innocent. The significant difference is that Adorno‟s philosophy

arises from and is based on the metaphysical experience of a corrupt world: in the

aftermath of the Third Reich, and of the reifying effects of consumer capitalism, the world

no longer gives rise to thauma. On the contrary, as Adorno makes clear in Negative

Dialectics, the false ontology, the reality of a totally administered world, is a kind of

horror epitomized by the death camps. Shudder, then, is a response arising from the

metaphysical experience of a world without wonder. Shudder is the equivalent in the

modern, disenchanted, capitalist world of the classical metaphysical experience of wonder:

it is the gateway to the path of truth; but the truth to which it leads is that the world is

radically evil.

15





As the correlate of truth the shudder is has a positive epistemic significance for

Adorno. Adorno thinks that the world is not wondrous, but that even if it were, human

beings would not be capable of wondering at it. For the subjective capacity for experience

has been so reified by exchange relations, so stultified by rampant consumerism, human

subjects have been so homogenized and stupified by mass culture that their capacity to

experience wonder has atrophied.40 Of course, because the world is not wondrous the

incapacity for wonder is not a detectable problem. In Aesthetic Theory Adorno claims that

the albeit self-inflicted damage to our rational and sensible capacities is so extensive that

even the human capacity for shudder, the capacity to experience the true horror of the

world for what it is, may disappear.41 In which case our only access to the truth will

disappear with it.

If at one time human beings in their powerlessness against nature feared the shudder as

something real, the fear is no less intense, no less justified, that the shudder will

dissipate. All enlightenment is accompanied by the anxiety that what set enlightenment

in motion in the first place and what enlightenment ever threatens to consume, may

disappear: truth. (AT 80)



Fortunately Adorno thinks that the capacity for shudder has not yet been completely

extinguished from human life. One reason why Adorno values modern art so highly is that

it manages to preserve the shudder even under social conditions that militate against

experiences of the truth. Whilst this is so, it is the primary task of philosophy to interpret

that metaphysical experience, and thus to keep alive the possibility of true social criticism.





5. Metaphysical Experience and Bourgeois Coldness.

The role of shudder as inverted wonder is the clue to the real normative basis of

Adorno‟s social criticism. Metaphysical experience is an experience of reality interpreted

mimetically into the appropriate evaluative reaction. The two moments of experience and

interpretation are coeval and reciprocal. There are no facts that are not already morally or

evaluatively interpreted. Adorno‟s view is very different from the Kantian picture he

attacks, in which the moral will imposes order on an external manifold of sensibility. On

Adorno‟s view what experience delivers is always already moralized or evaluated. The

trouble is that this kind of metaethical view seems to conflict with Adorno‟s disdainful

rejection of Scheler‟s intuitionist and realist view of value. Adorno dismisses out of hand

the very idea that values exist (and can be known to exist) objectively. He considers this to

16





be a return to a pre-critical Platonic metaphysics motivated by an atavistic longing for

moral order. (PDM 180-1)

That said, one can see from Adorno‟s criticism of Kant that he has more in

common with the intuitionist and the moral realist than he might suspect. For Adorno

moral rules are at best ancillary and what is paramount are the underlying goods the rules

protect and the evils they prohibit. At worst the rules themselves are part of the problem.

Adorno‟s chief complaint against Kant is not that his moral theory is phenomenologically

inaccurate. On the contrary, Adorno accepts that Kant‟s theory is a correct description of

the historical phenomenon of bourgeois morality, but he thinks that there is something

deeply wrong with that phenomenon. He thinks that Kantian moral agents, because they

are required (or require themselves) to follow universalizable rules and to act out of duty,

become detached from the underlying goods the rules protect and the underlying evils they

prohibit.42 Ultimately their moral sensibilities are blunted. They become insensitive, cold,

indifferent. Adorno thinks this weakness in Kantian morality is evidenced by the moral

catastrophe in Germany under the Third Reich. The „coldness‟ or „indifference‟ of law

abiding, middle-class German citizens contributed to the collective haemorrhaging of their

moral sensibility, and helped turn ordinary individuals into Hitler‟s blind followers and

executioners.

In spite of his criticisms and reservations about the Kantian view of morality,

however, Adorno cannot break away from the view moral theory just is Kantianism. He

does not have any alternatives clearly in view. So instead of exploring the resources of

alternative moral theories, he looks for an alternative to moral theory. In Negative

Dialectics Adorno tries, with limited success, to make his ongoing critical struggle with

Kant serve as this alternative. He attempts not to revitalise but to overcome Kantian moral

theory by reconnecting it with somatic and immediate experience.

One ought not to torture: there ought to be no concentration camps...These sentences

are only true as impulses, when it is reported that somewhere torture is taking place.

They should not be rationalised. As abstract principles they lapse into the bad infinity

of their derivation and validity. (ND 281)43



For Adorno these imperatives only have determinate content as immediate responses to

concrete and particular instances of injustice. As such they lack the kind of natural-

scientific lawlikeness which Kant requires of the moral: they are not valid a priori in the

way in which Kant thinks laws of nature are.

17





Of course to suggest, as I have, that Adorno wishes to by pass moral rules, and to

reconnect human subjects - via the channels of experience - with the moral goods the rules

were supposed to protect, is to put things much too positively. The goods that Adorno in

his more optimistic moments concedes are still there - spontaneity, human warmth and

affection, sympathy, artistic beauty etc. - are being eradicated as identity-thinking in the

shape of scientific and technological advance, consumer capitalism and the culture

industry, increasingly determines patterns of human behavior and thought. Moreover,

Adorno thinks that the ideological manipulation of human sensibility has damaged our

ability to detect and respond to such goods.44Thus the situation cannot be remedied simply

by educating people to love and to want those goods. Things have deteriorated well

beyond the point at which Schiller‟s idea of an aesthetic reeducation of sensibility may

still have provided a solution.45 In „Education after Auschwitz‟ Adorno laments people‟s

general inability to love as well as their general unworthiness to be loved. In particular he

notes the failure of the Christian religion to reform the coldness or indifference of the

bourgeois social order by preaching human love and warmth. He concludes that “the first

thing therefore is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it

arose.”46

The first and most pressing task for philosophy is to enable subjects to recognize

the underlying context of evil. This is exactly what the shudder does. Adorno still clings to

the belief that in spite of ideological distortions and the manipulation of sensibility human

subjects have an intuitive ability to detect evil; they know a bad thing when they see it.47

The normative aim of his social theory is to make people aware of and to respond

appropriately to the underlying evil which they have formed and which has formed them.





6. The Fact of Auschwitz

Of course, it is all too easy to say that the shudder discloses social reality as

radically evil. The question is, how does it do this? What makes it into a reliable

mechanism of disclosure? For example how does one know that one is shuddering at the

appropriate actions or situations? If Adorno were a non-cognitivist and anti-realist about

moral values he might appeal to a criterion of moral rightness that is wholly internal to the

moral domain, say to the criterion of agreement.48 On such a view what would make the

act of shuddering at a particular act of gratuitous cruelty appropriate would be the very

fact that other things being equal everyone shudders at that act. But this is clearly not

18





Adorno‟s view. Given the homogenizing effect of the ideological illusions propagated by

mass culture, the mere fact that everyone shudders at certain acts is irrelevant. That may

simply reflect a craven desire for conformity in judgment - the simple desire not to be out

of step with everyone else. Besides, there simply is no widespread agreement about many

of Adorno‟s more recondite and contested normative judgments, say, that DIY is a

depraved form of pseudo-activity or that sport is just covert training for work. Mere

agreement cannot vouchsafe the truth of these particular judgments.

Adorno holds something much closer to the opposite view, namely that torture and

genocide are appropriate objects of shudder because they are objectively wrong. The

criterion of appropriateness is the very presence of wrongdoing, the existence of evil.

Adorno is, after all, a kind of moral realist.49 Two pieces of evidence for this claim seem

to me to be instructive, if not decisive. Firstly, Adorno makes frequent gestures towards a

„materialist‟ morality, and he does so in part because the experience of shudder is a

response to something other than and independent of itself, to something real. Secondly,

Auschwitz is the paradigmatic instance of secular evil and Adorno obviously does not

think that widespread spontaneous revulsion at what happened at Auschwitz is what

makes it morally wrong. On the contrary the evil that Auschwitz objectively is, is what

makes the shudder appropriate. In fact the figure of Auschwitz is the keystone of the

normative framework of Adorno‟s social philosophy. This can be seen from his remark in

the Meditations on Metaphysics:

„Hitler has imposed on humankind in the condition of its unfreedom a new categorical

imperative: to order their thought and actions such that Auschwitz never reoccur, and

nothing similar ever happen.‟ (ND 358: EA)

Adorno certainly means that Auschwitz is objectively wrong, although this feeble

description is wholly inadequate to the evil it describes. Adorno denies, however, that

what made Auschwitz morally wrong is that it violated an antecedent moral law. It would

be „heinous‟, he writes, to attempt to justify this imperative conceptually.50 Auschwitz

figures in Adorno‟s work as an historical landmark of secular evil which, not least because

it exceeds and confounds any attempt to understand its wrongness as a violation of a law,

serve as a memorial and orientation point for metaphysical contemplation. Auschwitz is

the fact of unreason. It requires neither justification nor explanation. Everyone ought

simply to be able to see that Auschwitz is wrong, to feel the evil that Auschwitz is. There

is nothing to say to someone who cannot, apart from that their moral sensibility is

19





defective.

I am making two claims: that the presence of evil is the criterion for the

appropriateness of the shudder, and that Auschwitz is the paradigm instance of evil. These

two claims support the normative framework of Adorno‟s social philosophy. But this

interpretation seems to leave Adorno open to an obvious objection. It might be plausible

for Adorno to suggest that the objective wrongness of Auschwitz is simply there to be

seen; but it is surely implausible to say that the wrongness of DIY, light music, television,

spectator sports, or jazz is similarly there to be seen. Is the shudder and the implicit

charge of moral evil appropriate to these practices? If it is not, on what basis does he so

emphatically condemn them?

Adorno can answer this objection. For he need not claim that these apparently

trifling and harmless components of modern consumer culture are bad per se and can be

known to be bad per se. Adorno only need claim, and indeed does claim, that Auschwitz is

bad per se and can be known to be bad per se. At the same time Auschwitz is the result of

the tendency of enlightenment (or identity-thinking) to instrumentalize all relations to

others and to reduce all forms of thinking to the formal calculation of the efficiency of

means. Auschwitz is the culmination of the functionalization of the social order that

ensues when instrumental modes of behavior and identitarian modes of thinking get out of

control. Adorno‟s normative strategy is to show that those aspects of cultural and social

life which have adapted to the functionalized social order, even those which fail to resist

it, are complicit with that order. DIY, spectator sports, light music, television and jazz all

lie somewhere on the slippery slope towards the total elimination of freedom and

individuality; they thus condemn themselves by analogy to the social mores and culture of

Nazism that led to Auschwitz.51

In my view Adorno‟s social philosophy implicitly relies on this kind of analogical

argument to give it the considerable normative force it has. I take it that such arguments

are consistent with Adorno‟s theoretical practice, if not with every detail of his own

methodological self-understanding. The appeal of this way of looking at Adorno‟s social

theory rests in part on the fact that it does not attempt to breathe life into Adorno‟s many

rather vague gestures towards a kind of metaphysical or epistemological violence

perpetrated by reason or concepts on the particularity of material things. Although richly

suggestive and compelling, the normative ethical significance of these gestures is unclear

and thus unpersuasive. My reconstruction of Adorno‟s makes Adorno‟s conception of

20





secular evil and the response it calls forth into the normative basis of his critical social

theory. Moreover the understanding of secular evil at issue can be made intelligible and

palpable through the real historical example of Auschwitz, namely through the

perpetration on an unprecedented scale of the kind of violence and mutilation that matters

most, namely physical violence to other human beings. The new categorical imperative

testifies that Adorno believed that such secular evil might well reoccur. The same fear

haunts Adorno‟s writings on education. Adorno does not make autonomy the aim of all

education after Auschwitz because he cherishes autonomy as a fundamental good, but

because he believes that under present circumstances it is the only human quality that may

prevent the reoccurrence of such evil. For only those individuals who can think for

themselves and who have the capacity for critical self-reflection stand a chance of resisting

integration into the functional order and of escaping the relapse into barbarism.

If my reconstruction of Adorno‟s social theory is correct, there is heavy empirical

and sociological burden on Adorno‟s social philosophy. His analysis of society must

convincingly demonstrate the thoroughgoing similarities between the microstructure of

post-war consumer culture and the pattern of the bourgeois culture that allowed Auschwitz

to happen. It is hard to see how it can bear that weight. From our perspective, three

decades after Adorno‟s death, it may seem implausible that he pursues those analogies

right into the apparently trifling and harmless details of everyday life. The force of this

objection may explain why commentators are so ready to interpret these analogies as

nothing more serious than ingenious rhetorical exaggerations. Yet if I‟m right, when

Adorno for example in his essay „On the Fetish character in Music and the Regression of

Listening‟ compares the cult of the conductor to that of the Führer, when he claims in the

Dialectic of Enlightenment that enlightenment „behaves towards things as a dictator

behaves towards people; it knows them insofar as it can manipulate them‟, and when he

compares jazz enthusiasts to the blind followers of totalitarian regimes, he means it

literally.52 The exaggerations are not only meant to be true, they are not strictly speaking

even exaggerations. The claims of Adorno‟s social philosophy may be outlandish, but he

believed its outlandishness to be commensurate with the extremity of the evil that exists.

Deflationary interpretations do Adorno a disservice by cashing in these claims about

putative analogies between Nazism and the consumer culture of America and later of West

Germany as stylistic exaggerations of more modest and empirically defensible claims.

This simply domesticates and trivializes Adorno‟s concerns and, instead of making his

21





social criticism relevant, deprives it of its normative basis.

I am not denying that Adorno as German-jewish emigré may have had very

compelling psychological motives for judging Western high-capitalist culture in the way

he did. Nor do I mean to underestimate how closely American society may have resembled

the Third Reich in certain respects during the McCarthy era and the Cold War. Finally, I

do not intend to denigrate Adorno‟s considerable achievement of paying rigorous critical

attention to the minute, unobvious cultural conditions of political and social catastrophe.

Nevertheless, the objection stands: the normative force of Adorno‟s social philosophy

relies heavily on an alleged network of subtle and sinister analogies between Western

consumer culture and the Fascism of Nazi Germany, many of which cannot be sustained.





7. Conclusion: Metaphors of the Absent Good

The normative basis of Adorno‟s social philosophy as I have presented it depends

on two reciprocal and mutually supporting moments: the figure of Auschwitz and the

mimetic response of shudder at the horror of pure identity. These two moments support a

framework of arguments by analogy between the cultural conditions of the elimination of

freedom that led ultimately to the elimination of millions of people and the cultural

conditions of unfreedom in Western consumer culture that, in Adorno‟s estimation,

threaten to do the same. Thus Adorno avoids the standard criticism that his social

philosophy is surreptitiously based on normative ethical assumptions, smuggled in under

the cloak of his aesthetics. It is based, rather, on Adorno‟s conception of secular evil. I am

not denying that Adorno‟s aesthetics have an ethical dimension. If one is looking for the

ethical dimension of Adorno‟s thought, that is where one has to look. But the ethical

dimension of Adorno‟s aesthetics does not provide the normative basis of his social

theory.

Adorno‟s social philosophy, as I have presented it, is consistent with his

philosophical allegiance to Hegel. It is a development of Hegelian metaphysics. More

specifically, it is a dialectical and axiological inversion of the Hegel‟s ontotheology,

namely of the thesis that the task of philosophy is to comprehend the rational in the actual.

In turn, this inverted Hegelianism fits within the broader framework of classical

metaphysics which undergoes a further axiological inversion at Adorno‟s hands.

Whilst my interpretation of Adorno here might be thought to yields a relatively

simple solution to the question of the normativity of Adorno‟s social philosophy, it may

22





also be thought to lead to an unpalatable consequence. On my view, the shudder is the

only appropriate response to Auschwitz. But the shudder, as I already noted is complex

and inchoate mimetic response in which positive and negative elements are combined.

Positively speaking the shudder is a response to the redemptive power of the non-

identical. An adequate and generous interpretation of Adorno would treat the positive and

negative aspects of the shudder not as separate items, but as opposing elements of a single

complex phenomenon. But if that is so Adorno is saddled with the implication that

Auschwitz - the paradigm instance of shudder - has some positive, redemptive

significance?

In fact Adorno can and does face this consequence squarely. Auschwitz is the

historical manifestation of the horror of pure identity. At the same time according to the

logic of Adorno‟s negative dialectic pure identity passes over into pure non-identity and

back again. These two moments, identity and non-identity stand in perpetual tension. They

are not secured within a more overarching identity as in Hegel‟s logic. There is thus a kind

of non-identity to the figure of Auschwitz in Adorno‟s philosophy, sublimity aspect, that

appears in the form of the sublime. Auschwitz is secular evil of such magnitude that it

shatters our moral categories and exceeds our attempts to comprehend it as the mere

violation of antecedent moral laws. The upshot is that the positive aspect of the shudder is

not exhausted by its epistemic significance, namely the apprehension of the truth that the

world is radically evil. In Minima Moralia Adorno cites F. H. Bradley, „Where everything

is bad, it must be good to know the worst - (MM 83) It is not good just because it is good

to have true beliefs. There is a more subtle dialectic in play. Not even Auschwitz - the

ultimate horror - warrants the response of total despair. Adorno is a brinksman, but he is

not a nihilist. So long as we can know the worst - that what is, is radically evil - then not

everything can be irredeemably bad. That is because truth is, in Adorno‟s eyes, not just a

relation of correspondence to the facts, but as it is for Plato, the source of illumination that

radiates from the good.

Adorno does not provide any philosophical discussion of the constellation of truth,

evil and goodness. Instead he has recourse to an intriguing metaphor in the crucial final

section of Negative Dialectics of a colorless light source, made visible and present only

through its scattered and refracted traces.

Consciousness could not despair over the grey, if it did not harbor the concept of a

different color whose scattered traces are not absent from the negative whole. (ND

23





370)

It is what is possible, never what is immediately actual that blocks off utopia: thus in

the midst of existence what is possible appears to be abstract. The inextinguishable

color comes from non-being. Thought serves it, a bit of existence which, negative as

always, reaches over to non-existence. Only the utmost distance would be nearness;

philosophy is the prism which captures its color. (ND 66)





No light falls on human beings and things, in which transcendence does not shine back.

In the resistance against the fungible world of exchange is the indelible resistance of the

eye, which does not want the colors of the world to be obliterated. In the semblance is

the promise of something that is not semblance. (ND 394)

As metaphors are apt to be, they are more suggestive than conclusive. They suggest that

the good is a source of illumination, invisible apart from what it falls upon; grey [das

Grau] suggests the horror [das Grauen] of extant evil; philosophy is the prism that scatters

the traces of colour; and the colours are the present traces of the absent good. The

suggestion is that philosophical truth is ineliminably related, through the presence of

secular evil, to a good that is at once transcendent and absent. But if that is so, this is

where Adorno‟s criticism decisively departs from Hegel. The colour and greyness are

situated within the existing world. Philosophy, in its pursuit of truth, tries to think the

possibilities that are lit up by the inextinguishable and invisible light source located on the

far side of the threshold between being and non-being. In this metaphor of goodness

Adorno begins to think, not with Hegel, but against him, not only in the manner of his

presentation, but in the insistence on the transcendence of the good.

These metaphors suggest that the evil we can know always stands in relation to a

good that we cannot, and that the pursuit of philosophical truth is therefore never a

worthless exercise. The irony is that even here, in these metaphors of transcendent

goodness, where Adorno consciously and decisively breaks with Hegel, there remains an

inverse symmetry which testify that Adorno remains the latter‟s most consistent pupil. In

his lectures Hegel writes provocatively that Plato‟s idea of the good “is not beyond reality,

in heaven... the idea is just reality brought nearer”, whereas for Adorno “only the utmost

distance would be nearness.” 53



1

Thanks to Iain Macdonald and Caterina Deligiorgi for their generous comments on

earlier drafts.

24





2

In 1951 Adorno published, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Existence: an

ensemble of micro-dialectical reflections on the good life in a post-war consumer society

that was, in his view, increasingly emptied not only of goodness but of vitality. See the

Dedication and the epigraph “„Life does not live‟ Ferdinand Kürnberger‟” Minima

Moralia, pp. 15-19. In 1963 he held a lecture course entitled, Probleme der

Moralphilosophie. (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1996) tr. Problems of Moral Philosophy,

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999) Apparently Adorno was preparing a book on morality

shortly before his death. (Check reference with Henry?)

3

Obviously I do not mean moral „autonomy‟ in Kant‟s sense, about which Adorno is

highly critical. I mean something more like Mündigkeit which is sometimes misleadingly

translated as „maturity‟ but means literally having one‟s own voice. Adorno takes the term

from Kant‟s essay „An Answer to the Question „What is Enlightenment?‟, Political

Writings (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 54.

4

See the first Model, „Freedom: On the Metacritique of Kant‟s Practical Reason‟. In spite

of the title it is not so much an essay on Kant‟s practical philosophy as a critical

commentary on Kant‟s metaphysics of freedom, illuminated by Adorno‟s interest in

psychoanalysis and social-psychology. The same is true of his 1963 lectures on moral

philosophy.

5

Hegel Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. A. Wood, tr. H.B. Nisbet, (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991) p. 21.

6

Roughly we can call a criticism „moralising‟ if it presupposes a prior conception of

moral right and wrong. I shall talk about what makes a criticism „external‟ below.

7

Hegel‟s immediate targets here are Plato‟s recommendations on childcare and Fichte‟s

unnervingly prescient prescription that people should carry a painted likeness of

themselves on their passports, so that they can be identified at all times. Hegel‟s point is

that the science of right can do without making such particular and determinate

prescriptions. Such details form part of what he deems to be the „brightly colored

covering‟ [bunte Rinde] of the appearance of actuality not of its underlying rationale.

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface, p. 21

8

Shierry Weber Nicholson, translator of Adorno‟s Hegel: Drei Studien, refers to Hegel‟s

teaching of the „rationality of the real‟. (Hegel: Three Studies, (Cambridge Mass.: MIT

Press, 1993) p. 85 This is an accurate translation of Adorno‟s very uncharitable

interpretation of Hegel‟s Doppelsatz as the mere “the justification of what exists” [des

25







Seienden] p. 82 & 85, but it should not be mistaken for Hegel‟s view. Despite Adorno‟s

affinity with Hegel, he uncritically inherits the conflation of actuality and existence, along

with the conservative and quietistic interpretation of Hegel, which was widespread among

Old and Young Hegelians, and which later almost reached the status of orthodoxy within

Marxism.

9

On the relation between „Existenz‟ and „Wirklichkeit‟ see G. W. F. Hegel Werke, eds. K.

Michel and E. Moldenhauer, (Frankfurt a/M: Suhrkamp, 1986) volume 6, p. 201; hereafter

(6 201).

10

To take a recent example from British political life, whilst the House of Lords may be

said to exist for a reason, namely as a check on the legislation passed by the House of

Commons, the hereditary principle does not. There is no reason in the 1990‟s why people

should be born into this office.

11

A good example is the cold weather payments which have, due to a decision of the High

Court, recently found its way into the institution of the British welfare state. If there is

good reason to issue cold weather payments to women over 60, there is reason to issue the

same payment to men over 60, and not only to men over 65.

12

This is an elegant way of presenting Hegel‟s metaphysics that I have taken up and

adapted from Raymond Geuss.

13

Leibniz argues that God‟s perfection is such that this world, although it contains evil, is

the best world that it was possible for God to choose create, because the evil in it is always

accompanied by a greater good. Leibniz: Selections ed. Phillip Wiener, (New York: C.

Scribner & Sons, 1951) pp. 509-522 This doctrine is better known for being mercilessly

and unfairly lampooned by Voltaire in Candide as Dr. Pangloss‟s panacea that, „all is for

the best in the best of all possible worlds‟.

14

In Hegel‟s eyes it is organized religion, predominantly Christianity, that has done most

to promulgate this false theodicy. For the Christian religion has made us think that this

world is simply a trial and preparation for another kingdom, in which our true interests

will be satisfied. See Hegel, History of Philosophy III, tr. Haldane and Simpson (London:

1892???): pp. 21-22: „On the appearance of Christianity it is initially claimed that : „My

kingdom is not of this world.‟ But the realization of this kingdom has and ought to

transpire in the present world. In other words, laws, customs, constitutions and everything

that belongs to the actuality of spiritual consciousness should be made rational.‟

15

Elements of the Philosophy of Right §132, p. 158-9

26





16

Hegel uses the terms „bei sich‟ and „zu Hause sein‟. See Elements of the Philosophy of

Right, §4 Addition (Hotho and Gans) p. 36.

17

Hegel thought that in ancient times by contrast the law command respect and veneration

in virtue of its mere existence. To illustrate this Hegel adduces lines 456-7 of the Antigone

by Socrates, lines that are spoken by the eponymous heroine. „They (the heavenly powers)

are there, and nothing more; this is what constitutes the awareness of its relationship to

them. Thus, Sophocles in his Antigone acknowledges as the gods of unwritten and

infallible right [Recht]: “not just today and yesterday but forever / they are there, and no-

one knows when they appeared.” As Hegel saw it, the main problem of ancient Greek

political life was to make good laws and to establish good institutions. There apart,

political life in Ancient Greece was all the more straightforward because the Greeks

implicitly recognized the mere existence of institutions and laws. However, Socrates

interrupts and corrupts this happy naivete of Greeks ethical life, by introducing into it the

principle of critical reflection. Indeed Hegel believes that, in no small measure because of

the modernizing effects of world historical figures like Socrates, the naive recognition of

the mere existence of customs and laws is no longer possible for modern agents, who,

because they are all critical and reflective, recognize only what conforms to their reason as

having authority over them. The lives of modern subjects are based on recognition of the

reasons for the existence of institutions.

18

Elements of the Philosophy of Right §317 A, p. 355. See also: The reflective culture of

our life today make it a necessity for us in respect of our will no less than of our judgment

to adhere to general points of view and to regulate particular matters according to them, so

that universal forms, laws, duties, maxims are what have validity as grounds of

determination and are the chief regulative force. (13, 25)

19

ibid. p. 10,11, &17. Notice that Hegel does not say that the task of philosophy is to

create good institutions. That is a matter for concrete historical practice, which precedes

the reflective task of historical comprehension. In his own time Hegel endorsed the

reforms undertaken by Stein, Hardenberg, Humboldt and Altenstein and identified these

relatively liberal institutions as actuality of the Prussian State.

20

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Preface, p. 20.

21

Hegel is not unaware of this. He admits that the accumulation of wealth leads to the

impoverishment of a whole class of people. And he concedes that the inner logic of civil

society leads to the establishing of colonies. ibid. p. 265-7.

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22

Hauke Brunkhorst makes the mistake of not taking Adorno‟s claim that the world is

radically evil at face value. For example he interprets the dictum that there is no right way

to live a false life to mean “only that there is no entirely true life in a false life”, in other

words, that under present circumstances there is no entirely good way to live a life. That

strikes me as too tame. In the next paragraph Brunkhorst‟s interpretation of Adorno shifts

significantly. He attributes to Adorno the claim that “true life”, is not possible “in the case

of a completely false life”, but that a human life that is at least not misspent is nonetheless

imaginable. This is consistent with the stronger view I have outlined. Finally, two lines

later, Brunkhorst attrributes a third position to Adorno, namley the view that “the damaged

life is not yet the completely false life.” This is now more like the weaker view outlined

here. H. Brunkhorst, Adorno and Critical Theory, (Cardiff: University of Wales Press,

1999) p. 64.

23

For just this reason Adorno rejects empirical approaches to sociology. “For the object

itself is derivative, secondary, superficial. Because today the subjects are objects of

society, not its substance.” (GS 14: 398-99) This is an inversion of Hegel‟s doctrine in the

Phenomenology of Spirit that „substance is subject‟, which is just another way of saying

that the world basically consists in rational actuality.

24

Michael Theunissen observes with his usual percipience that the concept of negativity

with which Adorno constructs his dialectic is not the formal negativity of non-being but

rather “the ontic negativity of what ought not to be” namely “the bad which can only be

addressed as false, because he has a concept of untruth which picks out bad reality.”

Michael Theunissen „Negativität bei Adorno‟ in Adorno-Konferenz eds. L. von

Friedeburg and J. Habermas, (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt, 19983) pp. 41-2.

25

„Progress‟ in Adorno: Critical Models tr. H. Pickford, (New York: Columbia University

Press, 1998) p. 159.

26

„Die Aufklärung hat schließlich nicht bloß die Symbole sondern auch ihre Nachfolger,

die Allgemeinbegriffe, aufgezehrt und von der Metaphysik nichts übriggelassen als die

abstrakte Angst vor dem Kollektiv, aus der sie entsprang.‟

27

The title of the opening fragment „Begriff der Aufklärung‟ must be read as a subjective

and objective genetive. It suggests both that the „concept‟ in play here is a product of

Enlightenment thinking, and that it takes Enlightenment as its object.

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28

This is implied by the claim that this early principle survives in Greek religion, where it

is projected onto what is „unknown and alien‟ or what „transcends experience‟. (DE 15:

DA 17)

29

The doubling of nature into semblance [Schein] and essence [Wesen]...which first

makes both Myth and science possible, stems from the human fear which comes to

expression in explanation [Erklärung] (DA 17)

30

“Enlightenment finally consumed not just magic symbols but their descendants

universal concepts, and left nothing of Metaphysics in tact apart from the abstract fear of

the collective, out of which it arose.”

31

Adorno, like Heidegger before him, alludes to Hölderlin‟s ode „ Patmos‟: „Near is, and

hard to grasp, the God. But where the danger lies, there lies also the saving power.‟ (DA

45)

32

There are echoes here of Schopenhauer‟s conception of the primal differentiation of the

will and of Vico‟s theory that language originates in fear of the unknown, which may well

betray Horkheimer‟s influence.

33

Artworks ... are truly afterimages of the primordial shudder (Schauer) in the age of

reification; (AT 79: See also 51)

34

See the passage from (ND 129) quoted in section 2 above.

35

Actually the quotation is from Stendhal. But Stendhal writes only that „la beauté n‟est

que la promesse du bonheur‟. He implies that beauty is not objective; it lies in whatever is

found beautiful by someone. De L‟Amour XVII. Baudelaire cites Stendhal approvingly

when he writes that the „eternal potion‟ of beauty is „the soul of art‟ and the‟ variable

element‟ is „its body.‟ The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays ed. J Mayne

(London: Phaidon Press, 1995). The latter is closer to the thought Adorno has in mind.

36

I differ from critics like Jay Bernstein who elucidate Adorno‟s concept of metaphysical

experience, with the help of Hegel and Benjamin, to whom Adorno explicitly alludes. For

example, Bernstein interprets experience as a relation of self-recognition in otherness that

obtains when one beholds an art-work appropriately, and which can serve as a kind of

normative exemplar of a non-instrumental and non-subsumptive relation to other things

and other persons.

37

Not for is Hegel sometimes viewed as the Aristotle of the modern world. I am leaving

aside the central scholarly question of whether the difference between Hegel‟s

29







metaphysics and Kant‟s metaphysics is a difference within the Kantian paradigm or a

difference from it.

38

Aristotle Metaphysics I 2.982b 10-20. I cannot begin to offer an adequate exegesis of

this passage, or even attempt to put it into context. I adduce it here because it is an

illuminating point of comparison between classical metaphysics and Adorno‟s

metaphysics. Thanks to Niko Strohbach and Burkhardt Hafeman for help with Aristotle.

39

Aristotle‟s interesting aside about the philomythos (literally: the lover of myths) is very

interesting and a little puzzling. His point, is that the philomythos, insofar as he too is

amazed, is a kind of philosopher Aristotle is just being respectful of the mythmaking of

the Greek cosmologists who preceded him. He clearly implies that not just nature but also

myths also are sources (and appropriate objects) of wonder. Aristotle shows his

metaphysical respect for myth also at Met. XII, 8 1074b1 where he notes that an ancient

myth called the first substances gods. Whilst this subsequently led to a lot of mistaken

anthropological projection, Aristotle claims that the underlying thought, that substance is

divine, is correct.

40

(ND 74-6, 66 & 132) on „The Impoverishment of the Subject‟ and „The Nominalist

Aspect‟.

41

Hence Adorno‟s judgment that the death camps rendered even the most basic human

fear of death banausic. „Abolute negativity is predictable: it no longer surprises anyone.‟

(ND 355).

42

Adorno is at this point already reading Kant through his critics Schiller and Hegel. For

Kant there are no underlying moral goods. There are conditional goods which are not yet

moral, and there is the one unconditional moral good, goodwill. But the latter is

constituted by the subjective act of willing a maxim in accordance with and for the sake of

duty. Hence the criticism that moral duty is apt to come apart from the underlying

subatantive good and evil, does not apply.

43

See also „Education after Auschwitz‟ in Adorno: Critical Models tr. H. Pickford, (New

York: Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 202

44

For example Adorno interprets the inability of an immigrant he encounters on the New

York subway to return his sympathetic smile as “Hitler‟s triumph”. He has not only taken

away our country, our language, our money, but also confiscated that last little smile. The

world he has created will soon make us as evil as he is. (GS 20, II 585 ff.)

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45

Pace Marcuse in ch. 9 of his Eros and Eivilisation, (London: Routledge, 1999) p. 172-

197.

46

„Education after Auschwitz‟ in Adorno: Critical Models tr. H. Pickford, (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 202.

47

„[T]he crisis of the situation is precisely that while everyone feels the crisis, the words

brigning resolution are missing.‟ „Progress‟ in Adorno: Critical Models tr. H. Pickford,

(New York Columbia University Press, 1998) p. 144.

48

By non-cognitivist I mean the view that moral statements or judgments are not truth apt,

i.e. they do not even aspire to truth. By anti-realist I mean the view that moral properties

are not „located‟ in the physical world, and do not supervene in any reliable way on

properties that are located in the physical world.

49

He is a moral realist according to Geoffrey Sayre-McCord‟s definition of realism, not

because he believes that moral properties are located in the physical world, but becuase he

subscribes to both meta-ethical cognitivism and success theory. See „The Many Faces of

Moral Realism‟ in G. Sayre-McCord ed., Essays on Moral Realism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell

University Press, 1988) p. 1-15. Adorno believes that moral judgments are capable of

being true and false, and he believes that some moral judgements are true.

50

Adorno may have in mind the metaphysical point about the constitution of secular evil.

Or he may be making the point that the wrongness of Auschwitz is self-evident and that

anyone who needs to be shown by argument why the nes categorical imperative is valid,

has defective moral sensibility. But Adorno surely does not mean that we don‟t need the

capacity for practical reason to find out what our obligations are. That is clearly false. The

new categorical imperative implies other obligations, say, not to commit genocide or mass

murder. Of course, that may not be something we need to discover by reason, because

genocide and mass murder are equally thick ethical concepts we already know how to

apply. But eventually we may find that one or other of our intuitively justified concepts

has implications or applications to new situations which are not immediately obvious.

The fact that we have arrived at these new judgments or norms through reason and

reflection does not itself invalidate them.

51

For example Adorno explicitly compares jazz enthusiasts to the blind followers of

totalitarian regimes. „What is common to the jazz enthusiast of all countries, however, is

the moment of compliance, in parodistic exaggeration. In this respect their play recalls the

brutal seriousness of the masses of the followers in totalitarian states, even though the

31







difference between play and seriousness amounts to that between life and death.‟ (PS

128)

52

Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed J. M. Bernstein,

(London: Routledge, 1991) p. 39 & (DA 12).

53

Hegel Werke 19 p. 39.