I've always puzzled about Adorno, moral philosophy and the tacit ought claims of his social philosophy. I concur with this article. by James Gordon Finlayson, who argues that Adorno's philosophy does not needlessly embrace paradox and aporia, that it lapses into irrationalism and mysticism, and so is nihilistic and anti-Enlightenment.
I've sensed the buried ethics in Adorno's texts, especially in Minima Moralia, and interpreted this ethical sub-current as a form of non-universal ethics concerned with the good life (understood as human flourishing).This is a critical theory of morality that is concerned with the contradiction of good living in a false bad life that is governed by the ethos of an instrumental reason that damages us in a variety of ways.
Though there is no way we can live a good life in a false society autonomy is a central ethical value or virtue for Adorno; this virtue is gained through critical reflection on the repressive content of our moral categories to achieve insight into their liberating aspects. It suggests that we ought not co-operate with, or adjust to, a false life in a liberal bourgeois society. We ought to do this so that Auschwitz does not occur again.
I've always read this ethical current in Adorno in opposition to the old Marxist claim that denounces moral philosophy as a repressive ideology of domination and to the repudiation of the ethical by the Bataille and Klossowski. Adorno remained closer to Nietzsche on these ethical concerns.
Though I'd got this far I found very little work on Adorno and ethics to bounce off.
Update: 24 May 2004
I've just remembered that I had read J.M. Bernstein's work on Adorno. From memory Bernstein has been arguing against the solutions offered by both Habermas and the proponents of deconstruction. In his The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno Bernstein argued that Adorno's aesthetic modernism provides the ethical counterpoint to instrumental rationality that deconstruction cannot. In his 1995 Recovering Ethical Life: Jurgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory, Bernstein argued that Adorno, and not Habermas, offers hope for contemporary ethical life.
Bernstein had argued in those works that neither discourse ethics nor deconstruction addressed the primary failure of contemporary life–our inability to think and relate responsibly to concrete particulars. But he did not show Adorno could offer any substantial alternative. Once again Adorno's ethics remained buried.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 23, 2005 11:57 PM | TrackBack