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August 24, 2005
Bernstein's account of Adorno's thesis of 'wrong life cannot be lived rightly' in his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics has similarities with Alasdair MacIntyre's account of the disintegration of a moral language in modernity. Both argue that affirmative ethical life has disintegrated: our human moral conventions---agreements in ways of living and talking---have been undermined, decayed, corrupted, blighted and destroyed. This is the process of nihilism.
In para 18, 'Refugee for the Homeless', in Minima Moralia Adorno gives an account of the effects of nihilism on the ethical understanding of dwelling. He says:
Dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible. The traditional residences we grew up in have grown intolerable: each trait of comfort in them is paid for with a betrayal of knowledge, each vestige of shelter with a musty pact of family intersts. The functional modern habitations designed from a tabula rasa, are living-cases manufactured by experts for philistines, or factory sites that have strayed into the consumption sphere, devoid of all relation to the occupant; in them even the nostalgia for independent existence, defunct in any case, is sent packing ... Anyone seeking refuge in a genuine, but purchased, period-style house, embalms himself alive. (p.38)
He says that we homeowners are the fortunate ones, for we have houses. The homeless are in a far worse position.
As the common understanding of what it is to dwell at home has become defiled and nothing has replaced it, so we become aware of the fragility of nomos, the slippage and corruption of our moral language and the disintegration of a moral community. Betrayal, deceit and violation take root, and they become the norm in personal relationships.
Reflection on this fosters an ethical awareness.
What, then is Adorno's response? He says:
The best mode of conduct, in face of all this, still seems an uncommitted, suspended one: to lead a private life, as far as the social order and one's needs will tolerate nothing else, but not to attach weight to it as something still socially substantial and individually appropriate. 'It is even part of my good fortune not to be a home owner', Nietzsche already wrote in The Gay Science. Today we should have to add: it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home.
I find this a bit thin and unsatisfying. This is the process of nihilism we are talking about--the decay of thick ethical concepts of ethical life to the point we where indivduals are without the support of these ethical supports.
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