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March 11, 2006
Now to return to James Gordon Finlayson's interesting article on Adorno's ethical theory that we had been considering earlier.
Finlayson says:
Adorno and Horkheimer claim in the preface to the Dialectic of Enlightenment that even though Enlightenment is a form of domination in the interest of self-preservation, it is not only that, for ‘social freedom is inseparable from Enlightenment thinking’ (DA 3). This is the thought from which Adorno later weaves the fabric of Negative Dialectics. Even if concepts are instruments, they can and do point beyond themselves and thereby transcend their own instrumental value. .....but the value lies in experience of being shown something, of becoming self-consciously receptive to something that is more than can be put into words, a surplus, which Adorno takes as a promise that the realm of the possible outstrips the real and the conceptual (MM 253).
What is of interest is the way that Finlayson interprets this surplus as otherness ---it is almost in an Heideggerian way of tacit knowing based on a disposition to act.
Finlayson says:
The value of the experience of being shown something is inherently practical, for ineffable knowledge just is a disposition to act in certain ways. On this reading the three virtues, which I have argued are necessary conditions of an ethics of resistance, just are states of ineffable practical knowledge, competencies which enable subjects to bring about the goods of Mundigkeit, humility and love.
Is this nonconceptual knowing ---ineffable knowledge as a disposition to act in certain ways---an embodied form of knowing?
Finlayson does not explore this. But it is straight out of Aristotle, who says that the virtues of character are dispositions to act in certain ways in response to similar situations, the habits of behaving in a certain way. Thus, good conduct arises from habits that in turn can only be acquired by repeated action and correction, making ethics an intensely practical discipline. Virtues,are exercised within practices that are coherent, social forms of activity and seek to realize goods internal to the activity. The virtues enable us to achieve these goods.
Can we link this understanding of virtue ethics to an account ofAdorno's conception of mimesis as a positive experience that is true to what is there prior to conceptual identification --- the amorphous, the undifferentiated, the strange. The tacit assumption here is that mimesis is an impulsive bodily experience---disposition to act in certain ways"--- that momentarily registers the presence of what occasions it.
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