May 25, 2005
Adorno & moral philosophy
My understanding is that Theodor W. Adorno had long concerned himself with the problems of moral philosophy in the sense of asking whether the good life is a genuine possibility in the present.
This approach to ethics is a reworking of Aristotle, which breaks with a modernist ethics as a discipline of abstract rule-following, and addresses our inability to think and relate responsibly to concrete particulars, such as someone bleeding badly from a shooting.
Adorno's way of doing situational ethics is undertaken within the context of a materialistic metacritique of German idealism.
In Negative Dialectics for instance, the section on "Freedom" in Negative Dialectics (ND 211-99) conducts a metacritique of Kant's critique of practical reason whilst the section on "World Spirit and Natural History" (ND 300-360) provides a metacritique of Hegel's philosophy of history.
Problems of Moral Philosophy consists of a course of seventeen lectures given in May-July 1963. These were captured by tape recorder and present a somewhat different, and more accessible, Adorno.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at May 25, 2005 11:51 PM | TrackBack