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August 1, 2005
If the major institutions of liberal democracies have become increasingly shaped and rationalised by the reproduction of capital through the process of the market, then these institutions are no longer available as spheres of ethical practices.
Is that not what is happening to our universities? The liberal university of yesteryear is becoming a corporation ruled by a business ethos of cash flows, profits and takeovers in the marketplace.
What has happened is that the ethical practices that belonged to, and were a part of, civil society have increasingly retreated into private existence; into a world that is remote from, but not untouched by, the processes of capital reproduction.
Hence we live a damaged life. Ethical life is deformed, stunted and distorted:
To assert that our ethical life is damaged is to claim that that for us the good life is longer possible, and hence that now all philosophy can do is to survey the damage, to read the ruins of ethical life as a negative expresson of what has been lost and/or what we intend and hope for.
That quote is from J.M. Bernstein's Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (p.40).
Update: 3 August
I have some doubts about Adorno's line of argument. Has ethical practice in our ethical life decayed to the point where all that is left is reflection on individual experience?
Is there not a problem in concentrating on the individual when modernity places the individual at the centre of its mode of life? I don't see that this reliance on individual experience is unavoidable, the only option, or all that is left.
Are there not fragments of ethical practice in civil society?--eg., a skin specialist helping with cancer because they are concerned with helping people to live healthier lives rather than just doing it for the cash. Civil society is not reduced to the cash logic of the marketplace.
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Thematic for Bernstein (as well as, he claims, Hegel and Adorno) is the idea that philosophy alone can't (and so we discover never could), tell us in principle how to live. In the Adorno book, Bernstein will argue (and cf. near the end of the lectures what he calls "the bad news for philosophy") that philosophy's problem is that it can't respond to the demands of the complex concept, can't respond to the demands of the nonidentical except in unseemly ways. For example, in Weberian terms, Bernstein argues (p.367) that authority is established through exemplification, not bare concepts. He continues, (p.369) "in themselves, however, principles are not explanations for action, and when they are something untoward is occurring. If the authority of norms is situational, then the ground of my action had better be, for example, the awfulness of this situation and not the belief that cruelty is wrong."
Bernstein's argument works toward the following: (p.420) "Modernist ethics is not an ethics that, so to speak, conveniently fits the contours of late modernity; rather, the fugitive character of ethical experience now makes perspicuous for the first time the truth of ethics, and thus what the normative force of ethical norms and actions has always been. Modernism is the truth of ethics; it is precisely the fact that fugitive ethical experiences satisfy the demands of the critical rationality of the complex concept that makes this claim compelling. The fugitive character of ethical modernism refers thus only to its rarity, the way in which ethical actions and experiences in late modernity are enclosed on all sides in rationalized institutional structures and social practices. Hence the fugitive character of ethical experience is the experience of the ethical as withdrawn from the possibility of general circulation....Modernist ethical experience, if there is any, is the experience of transcendence; modernist ethical experience, if there is any, is the experience of the promise of a form of life escaping nihilism."