Budhi is an interdisciplinary journal of philosophy that seeks to encourage creative and critical contemporary interpretations and appropriations of the history of ideas as well as theoretical constructions addressing contemporary culture and society.

The journal is devoted to the practice of philosophy in its interdisciplinary engagements with art, culture, history, religion, technology, and the social sciences. It seeks to provide an arena for exchanges between mainstream traditions and work from the geopolitical margins, particularly from the local history and culture of the Philippines. Budhi therefore crosses geographical borders as well as intellectual boundaries within philosophy and within the humanities and the social sciences.

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• u l

A JOURNAL OF IDEAS AND CULTURE

r----.J

Of Sanskrit origin

the Tagalog word "budhi"

(pronounced "bood-hee ")

is a global notion that symbolizes,

rather than represents,

at one and the same time,

life, intuition,

understanding, discernment,

conscience, and will.

r----.J

EDITOR

Jean P. Tan, Ateneo de Manila-University, Philippines

AssociATE EDITOR

Remmon E. Barbaza, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

BoARD oF EDITORIAL ADVISERS

Luis S. David, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Founding Editor & Senior Adviser

Peter Beilharz, LaTrobe University, Australia

James Bernauer, Boston College, USA Agnes Brazal, St. Vincent School ofTheology, Philippines

In Suk Cha, Seoul National University, South Korea

Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago, USA

J. Neal C. Garcia, University of the Philippines, Philippines

Leovino Ma. Garcia, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

John T. Giordano, Assumption University, Thailand

Caroline S. Hau, Kyoto University, Japan

Trevor Hogan, LaTrobe University, Australia

Patricia Huntington, Arizona State University, USA

Rainier R. A. Ibana, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Lukas Kaelin, University of Vienna, Austria

James Keenan, Boston College, USA Zosimo Lee, University of the Philippines, Philippines

Peter Murphy, Monash University, Australia

Marjolein Oele, University of San Francisco, USA

Adriaan Peperzak, Loyola University Chicago, USA

Michael Reder, Munich School of Philosophy, Germany

Benilda Santos, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

COPY EDITOR

Jacqueline Marie D . Jacinto

©2012 Ateneo de Manila University

fSSN 0118-5942

ARTICLES

1 BART VANDENABEELE

contents Volume XVI, Number 3

December 2012

Why Share a Language or Tradition? Gadamer and Davidson in Dispute

22 RoY ALLAN B. ToLENTINO

Abraham's Silence

54 J. PILAPIL JACOBO

Diaphany: A Disseminar on Carapace

78 PAoLO A. BoLANOS

Philosophy from the Standpoint of Damaged Life: Adorno on the Ethical Character ofThinking

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture 16.3 (2012): 78–93.

Philosophy from the Standpointof Damaged Life: Adornoon the Ethical Character of Thinking

Paolo a. BolañosUniversity of santo TomasPhilippines

AbstractIn this paper, I reconstruct Theodor W. adorno’s philosophy from the standpoint of damaged life, which is a rhetorical way of rethinking the normative force of the philosophical enterprise after, or in the face of, the trauma of auschwitz. adorno’s ethical response to damaged life is informed by the “wrong state of things” which, for him, is the basis for philosophy’s revaluation of its language and the activation of the ethical character of thinking. I will argue that far from being a pessimistic stance, adorno’s position is an emphatic rethinking of the role of philosophy in a life that is seemingly devoid of hope—especially the hope of pre-modern metaphysics—and a recasting of philosophical thinking as a materially constituted ethics that is aware of its very own reflexivity and aporias. I reinforce adorno’s position by invoking, albeit in a very provisionary way, Ernst Bloch’s notion of “anticipatory consciousness,” which revivifies the former’s call for the possibility of thinking the just life.

Key terms Adorno, Auschwitz, damaged life, philosophical guilt, ethics of thinking

Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93.

There has been in recent years an earnest attempt to revive the spirit of the first generation Frankfurt School through the works of the most

dynamic of its members, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). This revival has amassed a significant body of secondary literature which is still currently growing in number. Nonetheless, little work on Adorno has been done here in the Philippines, let alone on the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. This paper is part of a larger project of introducing the philosophic significance of Frankfurt School critical theory to various academic circles in the Philippines. In particular, I will attempt to do this by presenting a reconstruction of Adorno’s “philosophy from the standpoint of damaged life”—a rhetorical way of rethinking the normative force of the philosophical enterprise after, or in the face of, the trauma of Auschwitz. My underlying assumption is that Adorno evinces a kind of ethical standpoint that is normatively1 informed by the “wrong state of things” in society, and that our entry point, as intellectuals or philosophers, is our critical outlook on the language of our discourse—that is to say, the language of philosophy, and how it profoundly shapes the way we think of and treat the objective world and our social relationships.

According to Adorno, the experience of Auschwitz has irrevocably changed philosophy. Auschwitz, as the ultimate expression of the pathologies of modernity, has damaged life—prompting Adorno to write in Prismen, “to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”2 Adorno extends this critique of art or poetry to the language of philosophy, for art and philosophy are our creative ways of making sense of the world we live in. Specifically, philosophy is a discourse that is characterized by the creation of ideas. Is the discourse of creating ideas still possible after Auschwitz, or has Auschwitz shown philosophers complicitous with or their ideas ineffectual in the face of the destruction of human life? If it is indeed still possible, philosophy from the standpoint of damaged life would be anything but innocent! I will argue that far from being a pessimistic stance, Adorno’s position is an emphatic rethinking of the role of philosophy in a life that is seemingly devoid of hope—especially the hope of pre-modern metaphysics—and a recasting of philosophical thinking as a materially constituted ethics that is aware of its very own reflexivity and aporias. I suggest, in the end, that the revival of hope could be reinforced by invoking Ernst Bloch’s notion of “anticipatory consciousness,” a kind of future-oriented thinking which revivifies our

1 The term “normative,” as it is used in this paper, refers to societal conditions, either emancipatory or oppressive, that affect how we think and live; these are also the very conditions that effectuate within us, especially in social groups, the instinct to challenge oppressive conditions.

2 Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1967), 34.

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utopian energies that condition philosophy’s revaluation and rethinking of the possibility of a “just life.”

Guilt and the Materiality of Philosophy

If we follow Adorno, our inquiry, albeit vexed, about the role of philosophy in a post-Auschwitz era is indeed a deeply socio-ethical one. This theme of the role of philosophy “after Auschwitz” has been taken up by Jay M. Bernstein and Lambert Zuidervaart, and both commentators offer their individual readings of the last section of Negative Dialectics, “Meditations on Metaphysics.” They both highlight Adorno’s attempt to revive, or better yet revise, the role of metaphysics after an event like Auschwitz. Bernstein and Zuidervaart, the latter more emphatically, claim that Adorno’s intention is the reflection of the possibility of recasting the meaning-giving capacity of metaphysics within the context of social reality, while abandoning its putative ahistoricality.3 Philosophy, for Adorno, is indeed a profoundly historical endeavor. What this means, roughly, is that philosophical thinking could be understood, on the one hand, as a reflective engagement with social, political, and historical conditions, and, on the other hand, a dialectical interaction between philosophical presuppositions and social reality. The facticity of philosophical thinking is perhaps the main presupposition of the early members of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse). What this ultimately implies for the first generation Frankfurt School is the reorientation of philosophy into the reality of life.

Having mentioned what Bernstein and Zuidervaart outline as the intention of Adorno in the last section of Negative Dialectics—namely, the move from metaphysical ahistoricality to a metaphysics oriented in social reality—it is necessary, then, to qualify what kind of metaphysics Adorno criticizes. The revision of metaphysics entails, according to Bernstein, an abandonment of “what was once upon a time understood as providing life with just a meaning beyond its immanent terms of reference.”4 Rather, metaphysics should be transformed in order to properly respond to social reality. This is, however, the role that Adorno ascribes to philosophy as a whole. Philosophy, therefore, should be materially constituted, a view which owes itself to a staunch critique of essentialist philosophy or “traditional metaphysics,” which ironically finds its way in 20th century positivism, despite the latter’s chide against the former. “Traditional metaphysics,” in

3 See Jay M. Berstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 371–414; and Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48–76.

4 Bersntein, Adorno, 414.

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this specific sense, could be understood, to follow Max Horkheimer, as the “integration of all knowable reality into a unified whole; and the attempt to provide an ultimate and intrinsic foundation for the universal validity of knowledge.”5 It is in this context that we understand the basic framework of traditional metaphysics as “essentialist”; and its “positive” identification of an ultimate and intrinsic foundation renders it positivistic, if by positivism we mean an attitude of dogmatic assertiveness guaranteed by either the categories of essentialist ontology (I believe Neo-Scholastic Thomism falls under this category) or the putative exactness of the scientific method, as the logical positivists believed. However, to be more precise, Adorno’s worry regarding this kind of “traditional” or “positivistic” philosophizing is its socio-politico-historical naïveté. If we were to reference instances of philosophical traditions that, for Adorno, are socially and politically naïve, then his critique of logical positivism and the phenomenology of Heidegger could be cited. In his essay, “Why Still Philosophy?,” Adorno points at the great divide between two opposing camps in 20th century philosophy (now referred to as the Analytic and Continental divide): one is inspired by logical positivism, initiated by the Vienna Circle, which later on became dominant in the Anglo-Saxon tradition; and the other is stimulated by the ideas of Martin Heidegger, which became influential in Germany and France. Adorno argues that both camps are problematic in their flight from societal concerns. Both traditions seem to postpone apprehending the status of philosophy under present societal conditions. In other words, philosophy succumbs to naïveté and thereby fails to criticize itself. Adorno writes: “In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naivety reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously.”6

Philosophers participate in this naïveté by washing their hands of dirt, that is, by deliberately isolating themselves from the historical and sociological forces that make philosophizing possible in the first place. Philosophy blindly justifies its distance from the social by invoking its self-proclaimed appellation from its mythical past; according to Adorno, this “was passed down from the idea of philosophia perennis—that philosophy is the vested bearer of eternal truth.”7 Philosophers blindly submit to this mythical assumption. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the gesture

5 Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 1989), 11.

6 Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 12.

7 Ibid., 15.

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of submission is not done out of mere ignorance, but rather out of hubris. Thus, philosophy commits the mistake of confusing its object of study with its role in society. Positivist metaphysics then—if we may be allowed to use a rather awkward coinage based on the qualification given above—is the attempt to reduce—quite ironically via an elaborate network of theoretical concepts—finite experiences grounded in human history to either a set of reified logical propositions or a set of self-absorbed and sacred jargon. For Adorno, this reduction is precisely what characterizes the approaches of both logical positivism and Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.

While Adorno’s criticism appears to be dismissive of both towering traditions of 20th century Western philosophy, especially of Heidegger, we must not forget that his misgivings of logical positivism and Heideggerian fundamental ontology were conditioned precisely by the social and political milieu during the years immediately after the Second World War. Seen in this light, Adorno’s disappointment is understandable. Against the backdrop of the social and political pathologies of the 20th century, the overrated epistemic status of logical positivism and the jargon of authenticity of fundamental ontology were the very weaknesses of these philosophies. To be more precise, on the one hand, despite logical positivism’s obsession with the empirical status of its claims, its folly lay in the formalization of what it observed; on the other hand, despite fundamental ontology’s claim about historicity and finitude, it failed to grasp these ontological givens in the context of societal reality because of its obsession with jargon—“in the jargon,” Adorno remarks, “man himself becomes something like a supernatural nature-category,” and as reified jargon, “it hides from men the unalleviated discriminations of societal power: the differences between hunger and overabundance, between spirit and docile idiocy.”8 In other words, traditional philosophy’s fixation with a notion of essential subjectivity unwittingly ignores the objectivity, that is to say, the concreteness of social reality. In effect, what fundamental ontology imposes on us is an exclusivist argot that pays “tribute to a blank nominalistic theory of language, in which words are interchangeable counters, untouched by history.”9 Both logical positivism and fundamental ontology share this, one might say, profoundly bourgeois character of the language of traditional philosophy, thus lending themselves to the propensity of human thought and action to ideology. Ultimately, for Adorno, what logical positivism and fundamental ontology lack is the attempt to dialectically mediate subject/concept and object/society, and both remain “without any perception of the praxis which brings about changes.”10

8 Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will (London: Routledge, 2003), 53, 54.

9 Ibid., 5.10 Ibid., 89.

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The lacuna in logical positivism and fundamental ontology that Adorno identifies speaks of these traditions’ obliviousness towards the normativity and materiality of the language of philosophy. Such is the case despite the fact that both traditions claim to have privileged language above everything else. The end result of this privileging, however, is the reification of the language of philosophy as opposed to its self-understanding. Adorno’s critique ultimately spells the difference between “materialism” and “idealism,” and, more importantly, the valorization of the former. In his programmatic collection of essays, Critical Theory, Horkheimer remarks:

“Materialism” . . . does not mean simply a questionable view of such a reality as such; it stands also for a whole series of ideas and practical attitudes. . . . it is true that the measure in which general points of view become decisive for action depends on the agent’s concrete situation at any given moment. . . . for the materialist, judgments which embrace all reality are always questionable and not very important, because far removed from the kind of activity which generated them.11

Adorno, speaks of this materiality of philosophy more specifically in Negative Dialectics, as a “new categorical imperative,”12 which he reiterates in his Metaphysics: Concept and Problems in the following words:

Metaphysics has been changed in its innermost motifs. I could, if you like, give this a moral-philosophical twist and say that Hitler has placed a new imperative on us: that, quite simply, Auschwitz should not be repeated and that nothing like it should ever exist again. It is impossible to found this imperative on logic—it has that in common with the Kantian imperative. . . . The extra-logical element to which I am appealing—to make this quite clear and to rule out irrationalism—is really what is conjured away by philosophy and rationalism. But what they conjure away is not irrational moments or values, as is claimed, but the converse: it is quite simply the moment of aversion to the inflicting of physical pain on what Brecht once called the torturable body of any person.13

11 Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 16–20.12 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1999),

365.13 Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 2001), 116.

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Here, Adorno strikes an implicitly Spinozist move—that the “body” is the fulcrum upon which thinking rests, notwithstanding, of course, the parallelism, as opposed to the dualism, of mind and body. Adorno never declared himself to be a Spinozist, but we are reminded of Spinoza’s observation in the Ethics, “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great number of things, and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a great number of impressions,”14 which I take to be comparable with Adorno’s own remark in Negative Dialectics, “All mental things are modified physical impulses.”15 Adorno further writes in Metaphysics: Concept and Problems:

If I say to you that the true basis of morality is to be found in bodily feeling, in identification with unbearble pain, I am showing you from a different side something which I earlier tried to indicate in a far more abstract form. It is that morality, that which can be called moral, i.e., the demand for right living, lives on in openly materialist motifs. The metaphysical principle of the injuction that “Thou shalt not inflict pain”—and this injuction is a metaphysical principle pointing beyond mere facticity—can find its justification only in the recourse to material reality, to corporeal, physical reality, and not to its opposite pole, the pure idea.16

With this, Adorno declares that metaphysics “has slipped into material existence.”17 As philosophers, however, we are not in a “privileged position” to speak “realistically” of the suffering of others, precisely because the “metaphysical” language of our discourse is far removed from the materiality of suffering. Rather, our standpoint, according to Adorno, is that of “guilt.” To quote him once more:

Guilt reproduces itself in each of us . . . since we cannot possibly remain fully conscious of this connection at the very moment of our waking lives. If we . . . knew at every moment what has and how our own existence is interwoven with calamity, even if we have done nothing wrong, simply by having neglected, through fear, to help other people at a crucial moment, for example—a situation

14 Benedict de Spinoza, proposition XIV in part II of Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989).

15 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202.16 Adorno, Metaphysics, 116–17.17 Ibid., 117.

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very familiar to me from the time of the Third Reich—if one were fully aware of all these things at every moment, one would really be unable to live. One is pushed, as it were, into forgetfulness, which is already a form of guilt. By failing to be aware at every moment of what threatens and what has happened, one also contributes to it; one resists it too little; and it can be repeated and restrained at any moment.18

But guilt is, nevertheless, merely an aftereffect. It is by no means a privileged position of philosophical thought. Moreover, the guilt of philosophy worsens if, faced with the utter brutality of Nazi atrocities, it recoils to the safe house of metaphysical thought experiments. The resistance to guilt is not the resistance to the horror of Auschwitz, but, rather, the exacerbation of violence—a case of adding insult to injury! Hence, the only proper response of philosophy/metaphysics to damaged life is an ethical one informed by guilt. Adorno does not offer us a positive action-specific prescription, but, rather, he repeats again and again the new imperative wrought by the experience of Auschwitz: the self-critique of philosophy, specifically of its atemporal stance, and the reorientation of philosophy towards the materiality of thinking. In other words, the only way for philosophy to overcome its imminent death is by reorienting itself in history by, first, a revaluation of its own language—that is to say, subjecting its presuppositions and aims to self-critique so that it may avoid the reified language of logical positivism and the false sacrosanctity of the jargon of fundamental ontology. The painful experience of Auschwitz forces philosophy to step down from its imagined ivory tower and subject itself to self-critique. This self-critique should be an exposition of the somewhat naïve innocence of traditional philosophy, especially the more metaphysically informed ones. If philosophy intends to survive after all these, then it has to reckon with its own guilt, replacing its putative, sanitized, reified, or sacrosanct language with a more dialectically informed one.

The trauma of Auschwitz renders life seemingly unlivable. The unlivable ambience—the stench of death, albeit just a memory, precisely as memory haunts us with guilt or intensifies our guilt—of the post-Auschwitz world demands a revaluation of our philosophical presuppositions, a reassessment of our metaphysical biases, by rethinking such presuppositions against the reality of the suffering of others. Bernstein notes that this is precisely the normative force of Adorno’s admonition which “already includes a

18 Ibid., 113.

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highly elaborated specification of the form of reasoning that Adorno thinks is capable of responding to the exigencies of an event like Auschwitz.”19 Bernstein adds that a response to an event like Auschwitz entails a revision of the relation between “universal” and “particular,” wherein the particular becomes the basis of the universal.20 In the case of Auschwitz, or any similar atrocity, “the sufferings of others are among those particulars that have remained unacknowledged by universalistic reason.” As such, philosophy’s feeling of guilt becomes “orientational for ethical reflection.”21

Although conditioned by different social and political circumstances and although these events pale in comparison with the gravity and systematic precision of what were done (e.g., systematic profiling, forced labor, human experimentation, and genocide) in Nazi concentration camps, such as Auschwitz, I would argue that horrible events like the Mendiola massacre on January 22, 1987, and the Ampatuan massacre (in Maguindanao, Mindanao) on November 23, 2009, should strike the same ethical chord within us Filipino intellectuals—lest we forget!22 Moreover, the Gulag labor camps in the Soviet Union between 1930 to 1960 and, more recently, the American-run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba are places of extrajudicial punishments, such as, forced unpaid labor, torture of varying kinds, sexual assault, and even medical experimentation.23 These places resonate with the dismal state and the thoroughly systematic organization of Auschwitz.

19 Jay M. Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz,’’’ New

German Critique 97, 33, no. 1 (2006): 31. 20 See ibid.21 Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies,” 31.22 In the recent history of the Philippines, the 1987 Mendiola Massacre and the 2009

Maguindanao Massacre are perhaps examples of the “wrong state of things” in the Philippine context. The Mendiola Massacre or Black Thursday took place in January 22, 1987, along Mendiola Street in Manila adjacent the Malacañan Palace, where militant farmers who marched to Malacañan to protest the problematic state of land reform in the country were violently attacked by the government’s anti-riot forces. Around thirteen protesters were killed and numerous others wounded as government forces open fired. Meanwhile, the Maguidanao Massacre, believed to have been perpetrated by the Ampatuan clan and a private army headed by Andal Ampatuan, Sr., happened on November 23, 2009. In a desperate attempt to stop Esmael Mangudadatu from filing his certificate of candidacy for the mayoral race the following year, the perpetrators attacked, abducted, and mercilessly killed people who joined his convoy—which included a group of journalists, lawyers, and supporters, including Mangudadatu’s wife and two sisters. A total of 57 deaths were reported after the carcasses were retrieved from a manmade mass grave. See “Mendiola Massacre,” GMA News Online, January 22, 2008, http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/77487/news/mendiola-massacre, accessed December 10, 2012; and “They Own the People: The Ampatuans, State-Backed Militias, and Killings in the Southern Philippines,” Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2010, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2010/11/17 /they-own-people, accessed December 10, 2012.

23 Henry A. Giroux recounts the events that transpired in Abu Ghraib in 2003 and relates it to the prospects of education, an inflection of Adorno’s question of the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz. See “What Might Education Mean After Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Education,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004).

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An event like Auschwitz interrupts the calmness of metaphysical thinking, punctures the bubble of reason, and ultimately destroys any epistemic and moral justifications for thought and action we have hitherto derived from the silver linings of our philosophical assumptions. The comfortable bourgeois notion of the “good life” is put into question, and any hope for a utopia is rendered questionable because it is indifferent to the particularity of suffering. But, as I will indicate in the last section of the paper, thinking about utopia becomes possible again once thinking or philosophy is radicalized by damaged life. The traumatic memory of the past is something that we have to work through; here Adorno is calling out to philosophers: “The attitude that everything should be forgotten and forgiven . . . is practiced by those party supporters who committed the injustice.”24 The death of philosophy is spelled out in this bourgeois attitude of forgetfulness. The imperative that philosophy would have to reckon with is the courage “of staring into the unsayable,” to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s turn of phrase, “even at the risk of discovering that what evil knows of itself, we can easily find in ourselves.”25

The response of a remote witness, as he is confronted by the abject character of a Mendiola or Maguindanao Massacre, is either one of ethical significance or sheer indifference. Unfortunately, philosophical discourse in the Philippines seems to exhibit the very naïveté of which Adorno accuses logical positivism and fundamental ontology, as it remains content with giving voice to the “invisible” (sacred?) essence of the human person, while being indifferent to the normative force of the wrong state of things in society. The bourgeois character of philosophical discourse in the Philippines fails to give voice to the unsayable; the unsayable ironically is the most visible.

Reorienting Our Ethical Sensibility

Adorno’s emphasis on guilt constitutes an ethical response to the Holocaust; it does not only speak of the orientational, thus transformative, effect of guilt upon philosophy, but also discloses the tendency of the bourgeois population to numb its ethical sensibilities. Despite the great loss of physical lives and ethical deprivation, the perturbing experience of a “life that does not live”26 should be a constant reminder of the dialectical negativity of philosophy and action. Adorno writes in Problems of Moral Philosophy:

24 Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3.

25 Giorgo Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 33.

26 See Theodor W. Adorno, part one of Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005).

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“I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness—rather than covering it up with sticking plaster—will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today.”27

To stare at Auschwitz in the face and, more importantly, to be changed by the horrendous sight is the painful, yet ethical, demand of “justice” overdue—our bourgeois indifference, then, is the worst kind of injustice. If philosophy could still promise a utopia amidst “the wrong state of things,”28 it “would consist in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged.”29 The negativity of Adorno’s ethical stance is partly a response to the positive character of transcendental moral philosophy envisaged most prominently in Kantianism. It should be noted, however, that Adorno is by no means throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he criticizes Kant, as he is more wary of the implications of the Kantian deontological position than abandoning Kant’s philosophy wholesale. A moral philosophy grounded in an abstract notion of “duty” as absolute—that is, a priori30—guarantor of human agency seems to undermine the facticity and contingency of human conduct. Adorno also maintains that, “the obligation Kant postulates as absolute, as formally absolute, is not itself unconditioned, as it seems to be in his work, but contingent.”31 The contingency of duty or obligation means that it can be substantively conditioned by historical factors. For instance, the reign of Hitler became catastrophic partly because Hitler himself was able to cunningly sway the dutiful, law abiding, middle-class citizens of Germany into embracing the ideals of the Nazi Party. A specific case in point is Adolf Eichmann’s invocation of Kant’s categorical imperative as justification for his allegiance to the Nazi party and its ideals during his trial in Israel in 1961. This reveals that one need not be a psychopath in order to proliferate evil, one could be as “normal” as Eichmann who claimed to have dutifully followed the orders of his superiors.32 The genius of Hitler’s command was

27 Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 167.

28 See Adorno, Negative Dialectics.29 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 167–68.30 Kant says: “pure practical laws . . . are prescribed to us not in an empirically conditioned but

in an absolute manner, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone, therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason, and allow of a canon.” Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 632.

31 Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 82–83.32 Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen,” in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on

the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 135–37.

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that he was able to both activate and empower the nationalistic impulse of the dutiful Germans, and at the same time deceive their consciousness—this is, indeed, “reason” crippling reason that results in a kind of collective schizophrenia. From a philosophical standpoint, the Kantian emphasis on universal duty manifests indifference to the materiality of experience.

In his Negative Dialectics, Adorno attempts to overcome the Kantian model by penning descriptive-figurative statements which speak of the visceral, as opposed to a purely rational and sanitized, ground of the ethical impulse. Allow me to quote a few passages:

In the concentration camps it was no longer an individual who died, but a specimen—this is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative measure.33

No man should be tortured; there should be no concentration camps . . . the humanity of civilization is inhumane . . . . The lines are true as an impulse, as a reaction to the news that torture if going on somewhere.34

We criticize morality by criticizing the extension of the logic of consistency to the conduct of men; this is where the stringent logic of consistency becomes an organ of unfreedom.35

In these passages, Adorno presents a materialist ethical response grounded in the immediacy of concrete instances. This is a deliberate distanciation from the attempt of Kant to rationalize ethical responses. In other words, Kant’s notion of “practical reason” remains an inert metaphysical silver lining if it could not be realized in actual concrete situations. In this sense, Adorno, one may perhaps conjecture, is closer to a Humean account of ethical sensibility—that emotion, and not reason, is the basis of ethical response.36 Adorno, therefore, has an ambivalent relation to the Kantian procedure, as he speaks about the Kantian “block,” namely, “the chasm of the alienation of human beings from one another, and the alienation of

33 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362.34 Ibid., 285.35 Ibid., 285–86.36 We are, of course, reminded here by David Hume’s argument, “that reason alone can never be

a motive to any action of the will,” and that, reason “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will.” See A Treatise of Human Nature, in Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. by Henry D. Aiken (New York: Hafner Press, 1948), 23.

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human beings from the world of things.”37 The chasm is the split between the Kantian subject and society. The Kantian position could be revised and reinforced by the reorientation of our ethical sensibility in the real, painful, experience of injustice. Justice remains an abstract principle if injustice is not acknowledged.

The experience, however, is dialectical, or to be more precise, the experience is emphatically negative and gut-wrenching. This is the new ethical imperative: to experience “damaged life”! In an essay entitled “Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno bemoans the fact that even education is in crisis. Because of the wrong state of things, education is unable to revive our confidence in ideals, such as, love and sympathy with the suffering of others. Even worse is the tendency of education to unwittingly contribute to the ebb of critical consciousness. Moreover, Adorno singles out the failure of Christian education to curb the “coldness” of the bourgeois because it resorts to transcendent moralizing and indoctrination instead of reaching “into the societal order that produces and reproduces that coldness.”38 The only way, Adorno maintains, “is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it arose.”39

Epilogue: Gesturing towards Anticipatory Consciousness

In The Principle of Hope, Ernst Bloch presents a model of ideology critique which takes “utopian thinking” as its normative basis. Bloch speaks of utopia from the standpoint of Marxist materialism. Briefly, utopia for Bloch is the attempt to think or imagine the “new” or the “not yet” (noch nicht) as a counter-claim against present societal conditions; utopia is “anticipatory consciousness.”40 Ultimately, what is presupposed in utopian thinking is a reflection on “what is” (damaged life) and the ethical rejection of the same via a radicalization of utopian hope that is based on a vague notion of the “good life.” Nonetheless, it should be noted that what is involved in Bloch’s notion of anticipatory consciousness is neither simply the representation or reproduction of damaged life, as to render it banal by the very process of reproduction itself, nor the presupposition of an idealized and fixed

37 Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Rodney Livingstone (California: Stanford University Press, 2001), 174.

38 Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz?, 31.39 Ibid.40 See Ernst Bloch, part two of The Principle of Hope, vol. I, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge,

Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995).

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future state of affairs.41 Rather, anticipatory consciousness is fundamentally provisionary as it merely conditions the possibility of thinking the not yet. Adorno maintains the ambiguity of utopia, as “a togertherness of diversity.”42 Ultimately, what this means for philosophy is its very own self-reflection amidst the experience of guilt in order for it to reflect on the normative meaning of the good/just life, where diversity and tolerance are the normative bases of the good life, however vaguely construed. We may perhaps recall here an actual agreement between Adorno and Bloch on the substantive, yet provisionary, character of utopia, that is to say, the possibility of imagining “the transformation of the totality” (Adorno) and the realization that “something’s missing” (Bloch) in the current state of affairs of society.43

In recasting philosophy in the light of utopia, Adorno deliberately avoids relapsing to prescribing a “positivistic” metaphysics. In the face of ultimate injustice, “our feelings,” writes Adorno, “resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wrongdoing the victims.”44 It is in this sense that immutable essences of traditional metaphysics can no longer be construed as “true,” and the momentary, yet visceral, reality of injustice as mere “appearance.”45 Is is all the more so because, it “appears,” to view squarely/to recognize/to acknowledge the sight of the tortured body and the senselessness of death becomes the new ethical imperative, as Adorno emphatically points out. In relation to this revalued ethical context of philosophical thinking, of thinking that is informed by the testimony of the senses, it is difficult to miss the ethico-political force of Walter Benjamin’s seemingly confounding words in relation to Adorno’s ethical response to damaged life reconstructed above: “only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope.”46 With this, we may rethink—revaluate—the language of philosophy and activate the profoundly ethical character of thinking.

41 Compare this to comments made by Gerhard Richter on Bloch’s aesthetics of music, in Thought-Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (California: Stanford University Press, 2007), 77–78.

42 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150.43 See Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W.

Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988).

44 Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361.45 Ibid.46 Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. I (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,

1996), 356.

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