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August 23, 2005
In his Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics R.M. Bernstein says that Adorno's reflections in Minima Moralia are a taking the pulse of moral possibilities and hence the rationality potential latent in them. This is the philosopher as physician diagnosing the sickness of our civilization.
Bernstein says:
Adorno's detection of aporia in these spheres [of romance, love, marriage] is hence precise: these practices do not provide a path to right living, rather they prohibit what they promise, and do so in a way that suppresses the moment of prohibition, thereby substituting moral illusion for moral truth.
Though we can detect the illusions of romantic love, for instance, we are not able to live rightly because the deformations of feeling and will remain.
Is this not a description of the process of nihilism described by Nietzsche as a diagnosis of the ethical failure of modernity? Our present practices in ethical life lack rational coherence and ethical meaningfulness. They have an indequacey in regulating, orientating and giving meaning to everyday life.
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