Below is a nice quote that indicates how Adorno's negative conception of immanent critique depends upon tacit ethical commitments:

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.

The quote is from James Gordon Finlayson's Normativity and Metaphysics in Adorno and Hegel. Auschwitz is ethically bad, we know it to be bad, we consider it to be objectively wrong, and we are revolted by the evil. We resist Auschwitz because it stands for a world that is bad. Finlayson says:

"...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."

Comments

Posted by: Michael Vandelaar | June 11, 2005 4:47 PM

Posted by: Gary Sauer-Thompson | June 12, 2005 9:27 AM