Fabian Freyenhagen
Moral philosophy used to be full of promises. In ancient times, it aimed at providing a guide to the good life that integrated moral matters with other concerns (such as our intellectual, aesthetic and prudential interests). In modern times, it set out to present a supreme principle of morality (such as Kant’s categorical imperative, or the greatest-happiness principle of utilitarianism) from which a fullbown system of obligations and permissions was meant to be derived, guiding or constraining our conduct.
However, if Adorno is to be believed, the promises of moral philosophy have not been fulfilled: neither the good life, nor even the moral life, is currently available. In this sense, his position can be characterized as a negative moral philosophy. What makes this position interesting is why Adorno thinks that both the good life and the moral life are blocked and what implications he draws from this in terms of criticizing the dominant strands of modern moral philosophy and suggesting how we should live our distorted and deformed lives.
In this chapter we shall look at each of these aspects and ask the following questions:
Adorno is not alone in thinking that something is problematic about ethical practice and theory in the modern social world. For example, contemporary Aristotelians often lament the breakdown of traditional social practices which (supposedly) underwrote the exercise of the virtues.1 Yet Adorno’s thesis that “[w]rong life cannot be lived rightly” (MM: 39) is distinctive in a number of ways.
First, Adorno’s thesis is distinctive because of his particular conception of the modern social world. One way to describe this conception is to say that the modern social world (especially in the post-1930s stage of “late capitalism”) is radically evil. This is not to invoke theology, where talk of “radical evil” traditionally had its place, but to express this twofold claim: (1) late capitalism is evil to the root (evil is not accidental to it, or only a surface phenomenon); and (2) this evil is particularly grave (it does not get more evil than this).
The clearest example of why Adorno thinks that late capitalism is radically evil is the genocide of the European Jews. For Adorno, this genocide was not an accidental relapse into barbaric times, or due to the fact that modern civilization had not fully taken root in Germany. Rather, these events mean that enlightenment culture as a whole has failed in important respects (ND: 366f). This culture, and the modern social world that gave rise to it, are deeply implicated in the moral catastrophe of Auschwitz. They constitute the “objective conditions” for its occurrence and, unless they are overcome, a moral catastrophe of the same kind is possible again (CLA: 20f). More generally, what happened to the victims in the concentration camps is what late capitalism is moving towards: the liquidation of anything individual, the degradation of people to things, and the triumph of bureaucratic rationality at the expense of deeper reflection about ends and means. Here is a clear example in which late capitalism is radically evil in the two senses mentioned: Auschwitz was a moral catastrophe of the gravest kind and its occurrence (and the threat of its recurrence) is systematically connected to our current social world.
Adorno says that right living is not possible because, in a radically evil social setting, whatever we do short of changing this setting will probably implicate us in its evil — either indirectly in so far as we contribute to maintaining this social setting where it should be changed, or directly by actually participating in and furthering particular evils within it. In other words, in most cases we can only hope that we do not participate actively and directly in evils. However, even if we do not participate actively and directly, to think that this would constitute right living would mistake a lucky and merely partial escape for more than it is. Even then, we would still be part of a guilt context; that is, we would still contribute to the continuity of an evil world.2
Secondly, Adorno’s thesis that we cannot live rightly in this social world is phrased in a distinctive way. Adorno always speaks of “right life” (“richtiges Leben”), rather than the more traditional “good life” (“gutes Leben”).3 He does so deliberately. With the phrase “right life”, he can exploit an ambiguity between the normative sense of “right” which contrasts with “wrong” (as in “this is not the right thing to do”), on the one hand, and the factual sense of “right” which contrasts with “false” or “counterfeit” (as in “this is a false beard”), on the other. Exploiting this ambiguity allows Adorno to say both (a) that moral living is not possible today, and (b) that no real living is taking place. While these two aspects are dialectically entwined, I shall begin by analysing them separately before considering the underlying explanation for both.
The possibility of morally right living is blocked, partly because we are caught in the guilt context of our evil society, but partly for further reasons. First, within this guilt context we almost always get caught in ideologies, that is, we hold a set of beliefs, attitudes and preferences which are distorted in ways that benefit the established social order (and the dominant social group within it) at the expense of the satisfaction of people’s real interests. To defend our behaviour (e.g. holding on to our possessions while others face severe deprivation), we often end up implicitly defending what should be criticized, namely, late capitalism or elements thereof (e.g. its property regime).4 And even where we do not attempt to justify our way of life, we tend to fall prey to ideological distortions, so that we accept social arrangements as they are, instead of changing them as we should (this is true even of those who are most disadvantaged by these arrangements). Thus, either by endorsing or by unreflectively accepting distorted truths or half-truths, we entrench the social status quo and fail to do what we should.
Morally right living is also impossible because we face practical “antinomies”. Adorno uses this Kantian term, which traditionally denotes “irresolvable conflicts”, in this sense: we are faced with conflicts that are not fully resolvable within the current social system, so that whatever we do, we cannot do the right thing. One example of such conflict involves compassion (PMP: 173f). On the one hand, while compassion is the right reaction to the suffering of others, it often only mitigates injustices and suffering within the current social system. It might thereby contribute to their persistence. On the other hand, working towards overcoming (not merely mitigating) injustices and suffering might mean that we do not always show people in need the compassion required by their situation. This is not just owing to a lack of imagination, but because of the social structures in which we find ourselves.
In effect, Adorno thinks that we constantly face practical antinomies of this kind, and that, while tragic conflicts exist in all societies, at least some of these antinomies are irresolvable only within (or only occur because of) the social world we live in. Their pervasive existence is another reason why life in this social world is wrong and why right living is blocked.
The second aspect of Adorno’s thesis involves the thought that what we normally refer to as the life we live actually falls short of life (what might be called “surviving” or “getting by”). “Life does not live” (MM: 19)5 for two reasons. First, under a capitalist economy and culture, life becomes more and more uniform and impoverished (and this is true even of that small part of humanity who can make full use of the goods and opportunities afforded by late capitalism). Secondly, and related to this point, life does not live because we do not actually and actively live it. We lack autonomy because we cannot exercise our capacity for self-determination. At most, we merely react to external or internal pressures, and this is connected to the social world that surrounds and forms us. Even where we seem to act against society by following our self-interest, we are, in fact, serving and maintaining a social system that often relies on people acting in this way.6 In other words, Adorno turns Adam Smith on his head: instead of capitalism’s invisible-hand mechanisms making possible a prosperous and moral society, they enable a radically evil society that depletes natural and human resources to sustain itself.
Finally, this points to Adorno’s distinctive explanation for why right living (in both senses of the term) is impossible. It is not merely that traditional social practices are lacking, or that the boundless reflection characteristic of modern reason destroys ethical knowledge. Rather, right living is also blocked because society undermines our autonomy. This marks an interesting shift from traditional philosophical conceptions of obstacles to freedom: instead of first nature (natural events or our psychological make-up) endangering our freedom and autonomy, “second nature”, or society, is the main obstacle. In other words, Adorno agrees with Kant and the tradition that “human beings are unfree because they are beholden to externality”. But this “externality” is not independent of human beings (as nature is said to be) but made and sustained by them as part of society (ND: 219, tr. mod.). As Adorno puts it: “the intertwining of man and nature is also the intertwining of man and society” (PMP: 176).
The “intertwining of man and nature” has two social dimensions. First, the prevailing way of thinking about first nature — as a closed, determined system — does not adequately reflect it. Rather, it reflects a particular social reality and its impact on our relationship with nature. For Adorno, our conception of nature is shaped for the purposes of domination and exploitation, and this is why we think of nature as a closed system (ND: 269). Thinking about nature in this way serves our purposes by facilitating predictions (and control) of natural events. However, if we abstract from the way we conceive of nature for the purpose of dominating it, we have no good evidence for thinking that nature — whether external nature or internal nature (our physical impulses and psychological make-up) — determines us in a way that endangers our freedom or autonomy.7 So we need not appeal to Kant’s metaphysical thesis of a different world underlying nature to make room for freedom. Rather, we should concentrate on the real factors that block our autonomy: autonomy is blocked by society, not first nature.
Secondly, the intertwining of human beings and nature has a social dimension because we mistake determination by society, which we do in fact experience, for determination by nature. We do so partly because capitalist society is not the product of a consciously made history, but of something approximating natural growth — it is part of our natural history as vulnerable creatures who aim to master our surroundings to gain security. We also make this mistake because capitalism presents itself as if it were first nature, as if its “laws” were as fixed as the law of gravity. For example, capitalism operates mainly in an impersonal way — it is not a warrior elite that forces people to work and lead a certain life, but market pressures and other structural forces. It is therefore natural to overlook the real obstacles to our autonomy and to right living. To uncover these obstacles requires the kind of complex analysis of the underlying structure of capitalism that Karl Marx presented in Capital.
In this section, we have seen what Adorno means by “wrong life cannot be lived rightly” and his reasons for making this claim. Now, we should turn towards its implications for moral theorizing and for whatever practical guidance Adorno can offer us.
So far I have presented Adorno as saying that modern society creates the obstacles to moral living. Yet, even so, his moral philosophy might not differ greatly from traditional ones that theorize about examples, or conceptually analyse, say, the faculty of volition, to generate practical guidance in the form of principles for action, duties and permissions, or ideals and aspirational virtues. However, Adorno is sceptical of such projects. Although we shall see that he does not completely exclude the possibility of moral theory containing some limited practical recommendations and prescriptions, he questions whether philosophers can offer us more than a minimalist ethics. In other words, he rejects the idea that moral theory could currently provide or underwrite a full-blown morality or a canonical plan for the good and right life.
Adorno’s scepticism is broadly Hegelian in nature: the good and right life would actually have to be realized and institutionalized in the current social world to a significant degree for moral theory to provide a fully worked-out conception of the good life or morality.8 Otherwise, we are faced either with highly abstract, indeterminate and ultimately empty ideals, without any detailed practical guidance; or we are stuck with a substantive ethics built on the wrong kind of social practices and institutions, so that we end up entrenching or legitimizing unjust or bad states of affairs. Instead of adopting either of these extremes, Adorno thinks that the dialectical relations between them should be played out.
If one combines these Hegelian concerns with Adorno’s premiss that right living is currently impossible, then scepticism about moral theorizing is the natural conclusion. From this perspective, problems of moral practice (right living) affect moral theorizing, and the latter cannot directly solve these problems — only a change in social practices would help. Indeed, this is why Adorno says that moral philosophy today should consist mainly in the critique of moral philosophy: however much modern moral philosophers might differ, mainstream philosophers tend to suggest that complete practical guidance is possible. Adorno’s scepticism is directed against this confidence.9
With respect to moral theories, Adorno both criticizes and values Kant’s. This ambiguous stance is explained by the fact that he thinks Kant’s ethics reflects better the problematic state of affairs of moral theory and practice in the modern social world. Kant’s ethics is the most fruitful moral philosophy because, even where it gets things wrong, it captures best the antinomies and problems of moral living and theorizing in the modern world.
To see this more clearly, let us consider two of Adorno’s criticisms of Kant. For Adorno, Kant’s ethics is characterized by its focus on principles (morality is anchored in a supreme principle, the categorical imperative10); by its formalism (its supreme principle is not a substantive, but a formal principle); by its emphasis on intentions rather than consequences; and by the idea that we can (and often should) act independently of our desires and physical impulses. Adorno objects to all these characteristics, but let us concentrate on Kant’s formalism and on his idea that we acquire moral worth in virtue of our good intentions (our “good will”).11
With respect to formalism, Adorno rejects Kant’s claim that the categorical imperative generates a set of specific duties. Equipped with this imperative alone, that is, with the demand that our subjective principles for action (“maxims”) be suitable as universal laws, we shall either be left completely in the dark about what to do in specific circumstances; or, if we do hit upon specific obligations and guidelines, we shall have to import them from somewhere else, for example from the social norms we internalized as children.12
Secondly, Adorno criticizes Kant’s idea of an ethics of conviction or intention as follows. If moral worth lies in intentions, then there is the grave danger that people may behave self-righteously and irresponsibly by simply aiming at morality without any sense for the havoc they might cause in doing so. Adorno illustrates this by discussing Henrik Ibsen’s play The Wild Duck,13 where the main character, Gregers Werle, seems in many respects a perfect example of a Kantian moral agent in that he consistently strives for the good — even at the expense at his own self-interest. However, as Werle exposes what he perceives as moral wrong-doing, his actions (and thereby the Kantian idea of moral agency) are called into question when they drive an innocent person to suicide.
Far from suggesting here that we should not aim to eliminate moral wrongs, Adorno argues that we need to be sensitive to consequences as well — moral worth cannot be uncoupled from conse-quences.14 Moreover, in developing this objection to Kant’s ethics, Adorno also questions the very idea of having a pure intention to act morally. Making use of Freudian insights, he argues that, more often than not, what looks like a purely moral intention is actually the result of repressed drives or feelings of guilt (PMP: 162f).
These examples also illustrate that Kantian ethics might be interesting and reflect some truth, even where it is (allegedly) wrong. For Adorno, Kant’s formalism is in part the natural extension of criticisms of traditional, premodern moral systems and in part a response to the breakdown of these systems which once provided people with exemplary roles and practical guidance. Many of these systems were too narrow in their conception of moral agents or rights-holders. The breakdown of these systems meant that a broader conception of moral agents or right-holders as well as new ways of generating moral duties were needed. Many critics (including Kant) thought that abstract equality (expressed, for example, in the universality requirement of Kant’s categorical imperative), and the principles based on it, would be suitable for these tasks. Their mistake did not come into full view until the breakdown was complete. In this sense, Kant, who lived during the transition, might not have fully realized that his ethics both eroded and relied upon the substantive moral systems that preceded him.15
Similarly, it is natural to adopt an ethics of intention, given that we can be even less assured of how the consequences might work out in the modern world than in a traditional society where roles and responsibilities were clearly assigned (PMP: 98f). Adorno thinks that whatever we do in late capitalism, we get caught in the guilt context of our radically evil society. If, in these circumstances, it is natural, and even to some extent admirable, to try to save morality by consigning it to the “sphere of interiority”, or intentions, this can also have the unacceptable consequence that what actually happens to people is not assigned sufficient importance by ethical theory and its adherents (as in the example from The Wild Duck).
However, an ethics more sensitive to consequences and less based on formal principles is not a better solution. As an alternative, Adorno considers Hegel’s idea of “ethical life”, which has consequentialist elements while tying morality to social norms and practices. According to Adorno, adopting Hegel’s substantive ethics of responsibility today would make morality too dependent on the way of the world; it would surrender morality, which tells us what we ought to do, to what is the case. Moral norms would then lose much of their critical edge and individuals would be subordinated to the way the world actually is (PMP: 163—6). Hence a substantive ethics of responsibility, rooted in the current social world, cannot underwrite right living either — for it is complicit in what makes right living impossible: the radically evil society that overwhelms us.
Apart from these two options — a formal ethics of conviction and a substantive ethics of responsibility — Adorno does not discuss moral systems in detail. This is presumably partly because he thinks that these two options exhaust most of the space of (credible) moral theories, so that if they cannot offer us a guide to right living in our current social world, then this is also true of moral theory generally.16
However, Adorno makes some dispersed and brief remarks on other options. For example, he objects that Nietzsche’s proposal to proclaim new values does not take seriously his own critique of morality (ND: 275; PMP: 172—4). He has nothing good to say about existentialism, whose notion of choice and talk of authenticity he rejects as ideological.17 And he thinks that “the concept of virtue has taken on an archaic sound” because of the breakdown of the social practices and institutions that made the exercise of virtues possible (PMP: 98).18 With its emphasis on character and dispositions, virtue ethics tends to detract from real problems and their real cause, namely, the radically evil and overwhelming capitalist society (ibid.: 10—16). Finally, Adorno would probably not have accepted a full ethics based on compassion, since, as we have seen, compassion gives rise to an antinomy in this society.
In sum, Adorno contends that the problematic nature of living in late capitalism affects moral theorizing deeply and cannot be fully addressed by such theorizing. His moral philosophy mainly takes the form of fighting the illusions and pretensions to which moral philosophy itself gives rise, namely, its claims to guide, or underwrite, right living. However, Adorno’s own moral philosophy is not restricted to this critical function, as we shall now see.
Adorno’s moral philosophy may seem to consist solely in critique, lacking any positive views or practical recommendations. And this is, indeed, a widely held view, among both his critics (who think that it is problematic for a theory with emancipatory intent not to have practical import),19 and some of his defenders (who think that his theory is merely explanatory, not normative).20 However, there are both textual and other grounds that speak against this view. And, in the last decade, some authors have argued that Adorno’s philosophy contains an ethics, or even that it is ethical through and through.21 What speaks for the claim that Adorno’s philosophy contains an ethics is that he puts forward an amalgam of ethical ideals, prescriptions and even a categorical imperative of his own.
For example, Adorno suggests that, in the absence of the possibility of living morally, one should aim to live one’s life in such a way that “one may believe oneself to have been a good animal” (ND: 299, tr. mod.). Among other things, a good animal would identify with others and their plight, as well as show “solidarity with the tormentable body” (ibid.: 285). Such solidarity arises out of the abhorrence of physical suffering, which has direct motivational force for human animals (ibid.: 365), and for other animals as well in so far as Adorno situates this abhorrence within the context of natural evolution.
What is at issue here is not a rationalized form of pity, motivated by thoughts of reciprocity or reward, since such thoughts would undermine identification-based solidarity.22 At issue, rather, is natural compassion — a “physical impulse” (ND: 285) of which other animals are allegedly capable (though perhaps only in exceptional circumstances, as in the rare instances of an animal raising young of a different species). Adorno thinks that one of the problems of modern society, and the pre-eminence of instrumental reasoning within it, is that such solidarity is disappearing. Our social context engenders the opposite of identification-based solidarity, namely, bourgeois coldness. It is this coldness — the ability to stand back and look on unaffected in the face of misery — that made Auschwitz possible (ibid.: 363). Identification-based solidarity is, therefore, important for counteracting bourgeois coldness and finds its expression in the moral impulse against suffering (ibid.: 286, 365). At the same time, solidarity is something to which we can only aspire; it is not fully achievable.23
Without a socially institutionalized and fully functioning ethical life, the conditions for the cultivation of solidarity are not given. In this sense, Adorno is not so much advancing a prescription as describing an ethical ideal. And one can find other ethical ideals in Adorno’s writings, such as his suggestion that modesty might be the only suitable virtue in our current predicament. By suggesting this, he means to say that we should “have a conscience, but not insist on our own” (PMP: 169f; ND: 352); that is, we should make ethical demands on ourselves and others, but without behaving self-righteously. Adorno is not confident that we shall succeed in this delicate balancing act — it is again something towards which we can only strive.
Adorno also advances “negative prescriptions” of how to live wrong life. In particular, he puts forward the prescription that we should resist what society makes of us (PMP: 167; ND: 265). Although resistance will be futile most of the time, trying not to join in (or, where joining in cannot be avoided, at least not to do so full-heartedly) is something we are obligated to do, given the radical evil of our current social world.24
In one instance, Adorno further suggests that we face a “new categorical imperative”, namely, “to arrange our thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen”. This new imperative is unlike Kant’s in many ways: it mentions Auschwitz (and a set of events), rather than being merely formal and ahistorical; it refers explicitly to actions and consequences, rather than focusing on principles or intentions; it is only negative, minimalist and strict in its prescription, rather than enjoining wide, positive duties and underwriting a full-blown morality; and it is “imposed by Hitler upon human beings in their state of unfreedom”, rather than being the self-legislated principle of autonomous, individual agents. Nonetheless, Adorno’s categorical imperative, arguably, shares one property with its Kantian predecessor: it is categorical in the sense that the normative force of its prescription to stop another Auschwitz from happening is not dependent on whether we have the requisite inclinations, ends or attitudes. For even if “morality survives” only “in the unvarnished materialist motive” that (bodily) suffering should cease (ND: 365, tr. mod.), the new categorical imperative applies also to those who ignore, repress or lack this motive.25
In sum, Adorno advances both ideals and negative prescriptions, including one of a categorical nature. Hence he does subscribe to an ethics of sorts, giving whatever guidance is possible about how we should live and how we should not live our wrong lives. This ethics offers only negative and minimalist guidance in so far as it tells us mainly what we should avoid and provides us with only a general sketch, not a fully worked-out picture. Yet Adorno would say that nothing more than this limited guidance can be offered today. In the absence of the possibility of right living, and the inability of moral philosophy to underwrite it, the most we can do is to live less wrongly.
However, one might object that no practical recommendations or prescriptions, even if they were merely of a negative and minimalist nature, could flow from Adorno’s philosophy. If individuals are determined by society, how can they resist it? And how can moral theory prescribe resistance to society? Does this not violate the principle “ought implies can”, that is, the principle that people are obligated to do something only if they are able to do it?
In reply, we must extend our understanding of Adorno’s conception of freedom. As we saw earlier, autonomy involves the capacity for self-determination, but such autonomy (or, as Adorno also calls it, positive freedom) is currently denied to us.26 However, along with this idea of autonomy, Adorno takes from Kant a more limited conception of freedom, namely, negative freedom as independence from external determination.27 As we have also seen, Adorno denies that external determination comes from first nature. Rather, we have to make ourselves independent from determination by society in order to be negatively free. And while autonomy is completely blocked in late capitalism, Adorno does not reject the possibility of negative freedom within it. As he writes, “There has been as much free will as people who willed to free themselves” (ND: 265, tr. mod.).
Now, to admit that negative freedom is possible (at least sometimes, and to some extent) is not sufficient for a full-blown morality, as Adorno is well aware. Instead, it is possible only to make negative and minimal prescriptions. Such prescriptions are compatible with Adorno’s conception of freedom because they simply ask us to use our negative freedom to resist society and the forms of wrong life within it. Still, negative freedom will never be sufficient for living autonomously: even on the few occasions where we resist determination by society, we are not directing our lives, but merely reacting to “changing forms of repression” (ND: 265).28 Moreover, while negative freedom might make resisting wrong life possible in some instances, there will be too few of them to add up to right living. Hence this defence of Adorno is compatible with his negative moral philosophy presented in the first two sections of this chapter.
However, problems remain. For example, even if the possibility of negative freedom sufficed to underwrite a minimalist ethics, Adorno would owe us an account of how individuals are capable of such freedom. Sometimes he makes it sound as if the social world determines us to such an extent that even resistance to it is impossible.29 Either this is an exaggeration meant to bring to our attention the precarious nature of our predicament, or Adorno has to tell us how it is possible for some individuals, when they are lucky, to see through the workings of late capitalist society and resist it (ND: 41).
Moreover, Adorno faces perhaps an even graver problem. He has long been criticized for not being able to underwrite the normativity contained in his philosophy, for being unable to account for the standards with which he operates in criticizing late capitalism and prescribing resistance to it.30 In particular, his philosophy is thought to be too negative. Critics argue that any account of normative standards requires knowledge of, and an appeal to, the good — for example, we can only say a sculpture is bad if we invoke the idea of a good sculpture. However, within Adorno’s philosophy, knowledge of the good (or the right) is impossible for the following reasons: late capitalism is deeply evil and we therefore cannot learn about the good from this world. Since our conceptual capacities are deeply implicated in this evil, they are of no use either in gaining such knowledge. Even our imaginative capacities are too damaged to acquire any determinate idea of what a free society and the good life would be like (ND: 352).
This might be called the problem of normativity. It is especially pressing when it comes to Adorno’s moral philosophy: to deny that right living is possible and to prescribe certain forms of living seem to require knowledge of the good. In the literature, a number of responses have been suggested, ranging from (1) a denial of the problem, to (2) the suggestion that the good (or a good) can be known within Adorno’s philosophy and used to underpin his ethics, to (3) the claim that Adorno can account for the normativity inherent in his philosophy without appeal to the good or the right.31 Still, this is a very live issue in contemporary debate and more needs to be done to solve it, if, indeed, it can be solved.
We have seen why Adorno thinks that (right) living has become problematic in the modern world. We have also seen that moral theory cannot point to a way out of these problems, but is deeply affected by them. However, Adorno does offer us limited guidance on how to live and what to do in our current predicament. In this sense, the objection that his moral philosophy is devoid of practical recommendations can be rejected, as emphasized by a wave of publications over the last decade. While other objections may not have been fully answered in the literature, it is fair to say that Adorno presents us with an important challenge to the way we normally think about our lives and moral theory. It may not be a systematic theory and it may not give us all we expect from a moral philosophy, but we have seen that there are reasons why this is the case and why moral philosophy cannot provide or promise anything more in our current predicament.
1. See A. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd edn (1985).
2. This raises the complex issue of individual responsibility. Since society determines individuals, it would seem that they are not responsible for their wrong-doing (see, for example, ND: 219). In fact, Adorno was sceptical of conceptions of freedom (such as Kant’s) in which people can be held responsible and punished (see, for example, ibid.: 215, 232, 255). Yet he also rejects the suggestion that those who do evil should be let off, specifically the perpetrators of Nazism (see ibid.: 264f, 286f). Hence his thinking appears to be inconsistent. Yet Adorno responds that this inconsistency expresses an “objective antagonism” (ibid.: 286) or “antinomy” (ibid.: 264) between the legitimate desire (and social need) not to let crimes go unpunished, and the impossibility of pinning evil acts on individuals as agents responsible for them.
3. Unfortunately, some translators (such as Rodney Livingstone) use “good life” and “bad life” for “richtiges Leben” and “falsches Leben”, obliterating the ambiguity with which Adorno plays.
4. See, for example, MM: 39.
5. This is a quotation from the nineteenth-century Austrian writer Ferdinand Kürnberger; it is employed by Adorno as a motto for the first part of Minima Moralia.
6. See, for example, ND: 261f.
7. Admittedly, this does not fully settle the matter, for even a non-deterministic nature may be inhospitable to human freedom. (For further discussion of this problem, see my “Adorno’s Negative Dialectics of Freedom”, Philosophy and Social Criticism 32(2) (2006), 429—40.)
8. Hegel expresses this view in the preface of Elements of a Philosophy of Right (1991).
9. For an excellent discussion of how Adorno’s views differ from the central claims of the dominant strand of modern moral philosophy, see Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (2005), ch. 1.
10. In its universal law formulation, the categorical imperative states: “act in accordance with a maxim that can at the same time make itself a universal law”. See Kant, Practical Philosophy (1996), 86.
11. Ibid., Part I.
12. See, for example, PMP: 81—3; ND: 270f; on formalism, see also ND: 235—7.
13. See PMP: Lecture 16.
14. For an interesting Kantian reply, not to Adorno’s objection specifically, but to objections of this type, see B. Herman, The Practice of Moral Judgment (1993), especially Chapter 5.
15. See PMP: 116f; see also ND: 243. We encounter here what Adorno calls “metacritique”, that is, his attempts to supplement the philosophical critique of other theorists with sociological considerations that show why they got things wrong, or could develop only a limited point of view. It is important to note that for Adorno “metacritique” is a supplement to philosophical critique; it cannot replace it (PMP: 152; ND: 197). On Adorno’s conception of metacritique, see also Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (1998), 12, 153—7, and Ståle Finke’s chapter in this volume (Chapter 5).
16. Thus, a more formal consequentialism (of the sort familiar from contemporary ethics and as intended by Max Weber in his “ethics of responsibility”) is not a live option for Adorno either, though it is less clear why this is so. Perhaps he accepts the Kantian criticisms of such a moral theory (e.g. that it is too demanding) as true in respect to the current society; he might also be worried that such an ethics is open to the formalism objection (either it is empty, or it implicitly relies on current social norms, for example in using a particular conception of welfare as its criterion for measuring the goodness of consequences).
17. See Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity (1973); see also ND: 49—51, 276—8; PMP: 13f, 176.
18. See also C. Menke, “Virtue and Reflection: The ‘Antinomies of Moral Philosophy’ ”, Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory 12(1) (March 2005), 36—49. There are, hence, some parallels after all between Adorno’s and the Aristotelian accounts of the problematic nature of moral life in the modern social world.
19. The charge that Adorno’s theory has no practical import was made by his New Left critics in the 1960s and 1970s, but is not restricted to them. It also played an important role in the reorientation of the Frankfurt School by second- and third-generation theorists; see, for example, Axel Honneth, Critique of Power: Reflective Stages in a Critical Social Theory (1991), Chapter 3, especially 95f.
20. For a recent example of the latter view see G. Tassone, “Amoral Adorno: Negative Dialectics Outside Ethics”, European Journal of Social Theory 8(3) (2005), 251—67.
21. For the first of these views, see J. Gordon Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable”, European Journal of Philosophy 10(1) (2002), Section 3; for the stronger view, see J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001).
22. See, for example, MM: 33.
23. Espen Hammer and Alison Stone also comment on bourgeois coldness in this volume (Chapters 4 and 3).
24. Adorno never explicitly and directly prescribed the overthrow of society (as one would expect him to do). This might have to do with a number of factors: the cold war context in which he mainly wrote; his fear that this prescription could backfire (e.g. by provoking a repressive backlash); and his belief that currently only resistance is possible because the moment for a revolution is missing.
25. However, this interpretation of Adorno’s categorical imperative does not answer further puzzles about it, such as whether a particular historical event can give rise to a prescription of a categorical nature and whether this prescription is meant to hold indefinitely.
26. See, for example, MM: 37f; ND: 231f, 241.
27. See Kant, Practical Philosophy (1996), 94. Note that negative freedom for Kant and Adorno includes both freedom of action from external constraints and freedom of thought from such constraints (that is, it includes the idea of Mündigkeit: the courage to think for oneself without direction from others). Marianne Tettlebaum also discusses negative freedom in this volume (Chapter 8).
28. See also ND: 231. Perhaps the idea of negative freedom allows us to rescue a limited notion of individual responsibility: if we are negatively free, we are responsible for our acts to the degree that we can be obligated to act in certain ways (such as resist the pressures to join in) and be blamed (albeit not necessarily legitimately punished) for failing to do so. Full responsibility would require that people (a) live in a social arrangement where their acts would have real, attributable effects (ND: 264); (b) are able to avoid living wrongly; and (c) are autonomous, not just negatively free.
29. See, for example, “Unfreedom is consummated in its invisible totality, which no longer tolerates an outside from which it might be seen and broken” (ND: 274, tr. mod.). See also ibid.: 243.
30. Jürgen Habermas was perhaps the first to state this criticism explicitly in “Theodor Adorno: The Primal History of Subjectivity: Self-Affirmation Gone Wild”, Philosophical-Political Profiles (1983), 99—110, especially 106.
31. The first strategy is implicit in the non-normative reading of Adorno’s philosophy; see Tassone, “Amoral Adorno”. For the second, see Finlayson, “Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable” (2002). I have been working on the third strategy in an unpublished manuscript, “The Good, the Bad and the Normative”.