The 'new categorical imperative' and Adorno's aporetic moral philosophy

The ‘‘new categorical imperative’’ and Adorno’saporetic moral philosophy

Itay Snir

Published online: 1 August 2010

� Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Abstract This article offers a new interpretation of Adorno’s ‘‘new categorical

imperative’’: it suggests that the new imperative is an important element of

Adorno’s moral philosophy and at the same time runs counter to some of its essential

features. It is suggested that Adorno’s moral philosophy leads to two aporiae,

which create an impasse that the new categorical imperative attempts to circumvent.

The first aporia results from the tension between Adorno’s acknowledgement that

praxis is an essential part of moral philosophy, and his view according to which

existing social conditions make it impossible for moral knowledge to be translated

into ‘‘right’’ action. The second aporia results from the tension between the

uncompromising sensitivity to suffering that underlies Adorno’s moral thought, and

his analysis of the culture industry mechanisms which turn people into happy, sat-

isfied customers—an incompatibility which threatens to pull the rug out from under

Adorno’s moral philosophy. My interpretation of the ‘‘new categorical imperative’’

focuses on two characteristics it inherits from the ‘‘old,’’ Kantian one—self-evidence

and unconditionality—in order to present the new imperative as a response to these

two aporiae.

Keywords Adorno � Kant � New categorical imperative � Auschwitz � Critical

theory � Culture industry � Experience

1 Introduction

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was not a systematic philosopher. He did not present

a rigorously structured philosophical system, and his thought challenges traditional

philosophy in both its content and the unusual form in which it is stylized.

I. Snir (&)

Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

e-mail: [email protected]

123

Cont Philos Rev (2010) 43:407–437

DOI 10.1007/s11007-010-9151-8

His works are deliberately uncommunicative, often fragmented and aphoristic. In

fact, Adorno is known no less for his short, enigmatic aphorisms than for the general

theoretical context that grants them their full depth and meaning. One of the most

celebrated and quoted of these aphorisms appears in the last part of his NegativeDialectics: ‘‘A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree

mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat

itself, so that nothing similar will happen.’’1 [Hitler hat den Menschen im Standeihrer Unfreiheit einen neuen kategorischen Imperativ aufgezwungen: ihr Denkenund Handeln so einzurichten, dass Auschwitz nicht sich wiederhole, nicht Ahnlichesgeschehe.]

The idea of adopting the Kantian term ‘‘categorical imperative’’ for framing a

‘‘new categorical imperative’’ is not original. Karl Marx, whose influence on

Adorno was considerable, had already written of ‘‘the categorical imperative to

overthrow all relations in which man is a debased, enslaved, forsaken, desperate

being […].’’2 But while Marx’s use of the Kantian phrase merely emphasizes the

urgent call for action embodied in Marxist teachings, I argue in this study that

Adorno’s words are not intended merely to stress the importance of his moral

teachings or to state a conclusion deduced from his moral theory. The new

categorical imperative is an important element of Adorno’s complicated moral

philosophy, and at the same time, runs counter to some of its essential features.

Adorno’s new categorical imperative is a crossroads of two major motifs running

through his work: morality and the Holocaust. The moral interest, always present in

Adorno’s thought, forms the backdrop even for issues seemingly distant from moral

philosophy. The critical theory developed by Adorno and his Frankfurt colleagues at

the Institute for Social Research (Institut fur Socialforschung) cannot be understood

without attention to the moral sensitivity that nourishes and directs it. Yet until

recently, the ethical aspect was marginal in research on Adorno and the Frankfurt

school.3 Perspectives have changed over the past 10–15 years, as interest in

Adorno’s moral philosophy significantly increased, and several studies have

contributed to filling this lacuna.4

Matters are different with regard to the Holocaust, however. Adorno scholars

agree that the rise of Nazism to power in Germany and its catastrophic outcomes

1 Adorno (2003b, p. 365).2 Marx (1975, p. 182).3 The canonical interpretative literature on Adorno presents him mostly as a theorist of aesthetics and a

sharp critic of popular culture, or as an empirical sociologist who studies Fascism and Anti-Semitism, but

leaves in the shadows a discussion of the moral aspects of his thought. For example: Jay (1974) and

Buck-Morss (1977).4 The most comprehensive study on this subject is Bernstein’s (2001). In 2003, Adorno’s 100th

anniversary, a conference on ‘‘Adorno and Ethics’’ was held at the University of California, Berkeley, and

in 2006 an entire issue of New German Critique was dedicated to articles from this conference. Christina

Gerhardt, the volume’s editor, writes in her introduction: ‘‘[A] thorough engagement with the ethical

merits of Adorno’s thinking has been strikingly absent.’’ See: Gerhardt (2006a, p. 3). It is interesting to

note that some of the articles in this issue have no more than a vague relation to moral issues.

The current interest in Adorno’s moral philosophy belongs to a trend of renewed interest in ethical

issues in continental and post-modern philosophy, ongoing for the last two decades. For a concise

discussion of this ‘‘ethical turn’’, see: Dews (2002, pp. 33–37).

408 I. Snir

123

were a major factor in Adorno’s thought and personal life, and that the impact of

these historical events on collectives and individuals alike is undoubtedly one of the

focal points of his entire philosophy. Nevertheless, even studies directed at

Adorno’s response to the Holocaust do not dwell on its constitutive role with regard

to morality. As a result, attempts to clarify the new categorical imperative, or to

examine it with regard to Adorno’s entire moral philosophy, are sparse and

insufficient.5

A systematic and exhaustive discussion of Adorno’s moral philosophy exceeds

the limits of this study. The task it undertakes is to reconstruct the main outlines of

Adorno’s moral philosophy, in sufficient detail to present both its radicality and its

problematics, and then to develop an interpretation of the new categorical

imperative in light of this complex position. The thesis I offer suggests that

Adorno’s moral philosophy leads to two aporiae, which create an impasse that the

new categorical imperative attempts to circumvent. The first aporia develops from

within Adorno’s moral philosophy: While Adorno acknowledges that praxis is an

essential part of moral philosophy, his own philosophy implies that existing social

conditions make it impossible for moral knowledge to be translated into ‘‘right’’

action. The second aporia results from the tension between two incompatible

elements of Adorno’s moral thought: on the one hand, the uncompromising

sensitivity to suffering that underlies the moral dimension of critical theory, and on

the other hand Adorno’s analysis of late capitalist society, according to which the

mechanisms of the culture industry turn people into happy, satisfied customers. The

incompatibility between people’s subjective consciousness and the objective

condition in which they live threatens to pull the rug out from under Adorno’s

moral philosophy.

I begin my study by discussing the connection Adorno draws between morality

and Enlightenment, with particular attention to his critique of Immanuel Kant, for to

understand the new imperative one must ask first what is wrong with the old one.

I then turn, in Sects. 2 and 3, to a discussion of the two aporiae in which Adorno’s

moral philosophy is entangled, and in the final two sections I offer an interpretation

of the new categorical imperative that presents it as a response to these two aporiae.

This response rests on two characteristics that the ‘‘new’’ imperative inherits from

the ‘‘old’’ one: Sect. 4 considers the way the self-evidence of the new imperative

responds to the second aporia, and Sect. 5 interprets the categorical nature of the

imperative as an attempt to answer the first aporia and preserve the moral dimension

of critical theory.

2 Morality and enlightenment

Adorno’s moral philosophy is not dissociated from the wider context of his thought; it

is an integral part of the larger picture he draws of Western civilization, that is, of the

dialectics of the Enlightenment process that characterizes it. Morality is anchored,

5 Finlayson, for example, writes that ‘‘Auschwitz is only a vivid and horrible example of the radical evil

of the social world.’’ See: Finlayson (2002, p. 2).

The ‘‘new categorical imperative’’ 409

123

according to Adorno, neither in culture nor in reason, but in an ‘‘impulse, intramental

and somatic in one,’’ which is ‘‘the rudiment of a phase in which the dualism of

extramental and intramental was not thoroughly consolidated yet’’6—a phase that

precedes civilization, when subjective consciousness, along with the awareness of a

difference between the subject and its natural and human surrounding, has not yet been

formed. The irrational impulse Adorno is talking about is therefore a ‘‘sense of

solidarity’’7 that urges human beings to share and sympathize with the pain and

suffering of others, to feel as if it was their own. Against the backdrop of this pre-

civilizatory state of nature, the formation of subjective, individual identities—which is

the seed from which Enlightenment grows—appears to be dialectic because self-

interested individuals can better protect themselves against nature, but pay the price of

alienating themselves from nature and from each other. The history of moral thinking

and practice, in Adorno’s view, is the process by which the impulse of solidarity has

been weakened, eroded, and repressed under the pressure of Enlightenment.8

Enlightenment is a process in which rationality, anchored in humanity’s need for

protection and self-preservation, attempts to dissociate itself from nature in order to

dominate it, to harness it for human necessities: ‘‘In its most general sense of

progressive thought, the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from

fear and establishing their sovereignty.’’9 But sovereign domination is a traumatic

process, for the established relations between nature and culture are hierarchic and

antagonistic: ‘‘It is not merely that domination is paid for by the alienation of men

from the objects dominated: with the objectification of spirit, the very relations of

men—even those of the individual to himself—were bewitched.’’10 The wider the

cleavage rent by Enlightenment between the subject and its surroundings, the

greater its effect on social interaction and psychological construction. The moral

impulse of solidarity is not left untouched: From the rational, enlightened point of

view, this impulse is a threat to the subject’s self-preservation. Instrumental reason

(‘‘subjective,’’ as Horkheimer called it11), works only in the service of its agent’s

self-interest, even at the expense of others12; it acknowledges no intrinsic,

‘‘objective’’ values.

Culture has, indeed, tried to compensate for this loss by forming various value

systems in communitarian, religious and philosophical contexts; but Enlighten-

ment’s inner logic ultimately caused these systems to collapse. Reason eventually

realizes that ‘‘[e]very substantial goal which men might adduce as an alleged

rational insight is, in the strict Enlightenment sense, delusion, lies or

6 Adorno (2003b, p. 228).7 Adorno (2003b, p. 286).8 On the role of the solidarity impulse in Adorno’s moral philosophy, see: Menke (2004, pp. 302–327)

and Schweppenhauser (2004, pp. 333–4). The argument about culture squandering solidarity originates in

Rousseau. See: Rousseau (1987, p. 35).9 Adorno (2001, p. 3).10 Adorno (2001, p. 28).11 Horkheimer (1996, p. 3).12 Habermas recognizes here a Nietzschian moment, which tries to break the illusion of disinterestedness

that accompanies the bourgeois presumptions to reach universal truths, thus exposing the immanent

connection of reason and power: Habermas (2005, p. 124).

410 I. Snir

123

‘rationalization.’’’13 That is, the ends to which culture has tried to ascribe values are

exposed from the enlightened point of view as empty, unfounded, and impossible to

substantiate. Strict Enlightenment allows no action to be taken for its own sake,

absent a designated external goal14: ‘‘Science in general,’’ writes Adorno, ‘‘relates to

nature and man only as the insurance company in particular relates to life and death.

Whoever dies is unimportant: it is a question of ratio between accidents and the

company’s liabilities.’’15 In other words, even human life is stripped of intrinsic

value, and regarded as a datum in the economical calculations.

Furthermore, modern social reality, in which rational domination has grown to an

unprecedented degree, exerts a severe impact on the subject itself. It requires the

subject to dominate its natural, emotional and singular aspects and keep them under

the surface. The subject becomes fungible, exchangeable, devoid of every particular

quality that might have characterized her as an individual. Since society is, in fact,

deprived of all the assets formerly furnished by its normative value systems, the

meanings and values that religion and philosophy provided to people’s lives and

actions are no longer relevant, and the individual suffers moral disorientation and

confusion.

To substantiate these claims and examine their implications, Adorno focuses his

attention on the philosopher who is generally regarded as Enlightenment’s brightest

light, namely Immanuel Kant. Kant is always present in the background of Adorno’s

thought, even when not discussed explicitly. He accompanies Adorno all along as a

silent interlocutor and point of reference, shaping the questions asked and the

directions in which the answers are sought.16 Adorno’s reading of Kant, therefore, is

not entirely critical. Aspects of Kantian philosophy are integrated into Adorno’s

thought, though they often acquire very different meanings. It is important to note,

however, that Adorno is not primarily a Kant scholar, and some of his

interpretations, while no doubt influenced by his general views of reason and

Enlightenment, might be controversial; these interpretations are nevertheless crucial

to understanding Adorno’s philosophy.

In tune with the current of the Enlightenment, Kant’s moral philosophy attempts

to ground morality not on tradition or religion, but on reason alone. However, Kant

does not allow any instrumental-functional uses of reason, manifested in hypothet-

ical imperatives, to determine the moral laws. A hypothetical imperative is

conditional on an end already set by the agent, which means that they use reason

heteronomously, while moral rational principles are autonomous and bind the agent

independently of her natural or contingent ends. The moral law does not apply

merely because the agent happens contingently to have some desire; rather, it is a

necessary, universal prescription. This is why Kant formulates the moral principle

as an unconditional, categorical imperative: ‘‘This imperative is categorical. It has

13 Adorno (2001, p. 82).14 Horkheimer (1996, p. 37).15 Adorno (2001, p. 84).16 On Kant’s influence on Adorno (which began at an early age when he read the Critique of PureReason under Siegfried Kracauer’s guidance), see: Brunkhorst (1999, pp. 21–30); Buck-Morss (1977,

pp. 2–3).


123

to do not with the matter of the action and what is to result from it, but with the form

and the principle from which the action itself follows.’’17 The categorical

imperative, then, derives its specific content not from contingent ends but from

moral law itself. The only end morality can have is ‘‘humanity’’: for when the moral

law takes humanity as its end, it rests precisely on the lack of relevant differences

among rational beings. In Horkheimer’s terms, it is a morality based on ‘‘objective’’

rather than ‘‘subjective’’ reason. Thus, by relying on reason’s universality, Kant

tried to create an option of rational moral thought in which instrumentalization and

domination play no role.

Adorno’s criticism of Kant points to theoretical problems in Kantian thought but

also reveals the connection between the problematic philosophy and the historical

context from which it emerged. Adorno calls his critical reading of Kant a ‘‘meta-

critique,’’ one aimed at articulating the connections between philosophical concepts

and social experience, at showing how the formation and change of concepts are

subject to changes in historical reality.18 The aim of negative dialectics, Adorno

once wrote, is ‘‘to give the [Kantian] Copernican turn an ‘axial twist’’’19: Adorno

turns on its head the Kantian transcendental philosophy that sought a priori

conditions that make experience possible, and he claims that it is historical

experience that determines philosophy’s conditions of possibility. His discussion of

Kant’s moral philosophy, therefore, aims to show that Kantian ethics actually

achieve the opposite of its intention and that, unintentionally, it surrenders to and

collaborates with oppression.

Following Hegelian and Marxist readings, Adorno seems to interpret the Kantian

position as empty formalism. According to Adorno, the rigorous formalism in which

Kantian ethics takes pride, is bound to result in ethical impotence.20 This formalism

is expressed in the first formulation of the categorical imperative, the principle of

universalization, understood as a rational procedure for testing what can be willed in

a rationally consistent manner. The categorical imperative can tell us that breaking a

promise to return borrowed money is wrong, as Kant’s celebrated example goes,

because the maxim into which such promise is incorporated cannot be universalized

without contradiction: One cannot consistently will that everybody break promises,

for if everybody did break their promises it would inevitably result in a complete

loss of trust and the inability to promise anything. In other words, a false promise

implies the agent willing both the moral law—keep your promises—and, at the

same time, her new law—I shall break promises as convenient; she inconsistently

singles herself out for special consideration. As moral agents, therefore, we should

disregard our particular interests and act only in accordance with maxims we can

want everybody to follow. However, by ignoring the socio-historical circumstances

17 Kant (1996b, p. 69).18 Jarvis (1998, pp. 155–156).19 Jarvis (1998, pp. 183–184).20 It is worth noting that the charge of empty formalism, and consequently of insufficient motives for

moral rational action, is controversial among Kant scholars. Wood tries to defend Kant against this

charge, and points to Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, where he lists four feelings that are presuppositions

of moral agency: ‘‘moral feeling’’, ‘‘conscience’’, ‘‘love of human beings’’, and ‘‘respect’’. See: Wood

(1999, pp. 35–40). This interpretation brings Kant significantly closer to Adorno.

412 I. Snir

123

and the concrete interests of everyone involved, namely by taking the loan as a

given, the imperative has nothing to say about the morality of a world in which

people desperately need to borrow money in order to sustain themselves. The need

for a change of the social reality, therefore, remains out of its scope.21 For this

reason Adorno claims that Kantian ethics implies accepting the existing social

reality rather than aiming to bring about its radical change. Ethics, writes Adorno,

suppresses the real question, without which moral discussion becomes pointless:

This is ‘‘the question that should form the basis of every deeper reflection on moral

or ethical questions, namely the question whether culture, and whatever culture has

become, permits something like the good life, or whether it is a network of

institutions that actually tends more and more to thwart the emergence of such

righteous living.’’22

Another aspect of the problem, to which Adorno devotes considerable attention,

is expressed in the third of the four ‘‘antinomies’’ Kant identifies in traditional

philosophy—four alleged contradictions which result from the failure to differen-

tiate between the phenomenal and the noumenal worlds. The third antinomy

concerns the incompatibility between the concept of freedom, regarded as a

precondition for every moral action, and the category of causality, which applies

necessarily to everything in the phenomenal world. It seems, says Kant, that reason

can prove, on the one hand, that free will, undetermined by any previous cause, does

exist, and on the other hand that the whole world operates by strict causal

determinism.23 Kant’s solution to this antinomy places freedom within the

transcendental subject, while in the empirical world of experience strict determin-

ism still reigns. From a critical viewpoint, one can argue that this merely evades

rather than solves the problem. Good free will, on which Kant insists, is supposed to

be applied in the phenomenal world, which leaves no room for free spontaneous

action; freedom applies only to ‘‘inner action’’—the good will—but is irrelevant in

empirical reality, which continues to flow according to undisturbed necessity. The

separation between the realms of freedom and nature creates an unbridgeable gap

between moral law, guided by reason, and moral action. It implies a fundamental

inability to translate good will into action in the world of experience. As Adorno

puts it:

Kant finds himself caught up in a certain contradiction. On the one hand, he

has strictly to maintain the distinction between the intelligible and the

empirical. For the fact is that to tie the intelligible or absolute to empirical

conditions, it would be at the cost of its absolute character and its absolute

authority. But on the other hand, if these two spheres are absolutely separate

and have nothing in common with each other – and indeed this seems to be

21 While Kant does have requirements about realizing the highest good, which do press Kantian agents to

change reality, these requirements do not pertain directly to the categorical imperative, and remain

outside Adorno’s discussion. See: Yovel (1980, pp. 29–80).22 Adorno (2000, p. 14).23 In the concise phrasing of the Prolegomena: ‘‘Thesis: There exist in the world causes through freedom.

Antithesis: There is no freedom, but everything is nature.’’ See: Kant (2002, p. 130).


123

what Kant is saying elsewhere – then it would be quite impossible to speak of

any morality and any such distinctions between right and wrong behavior.24

Kant’s solution to the third antinomy, therefore, is paid for by an essential element

of morality: the transition from moral consciousness to moral action. Hence,

freedom remains an idea never to be realized.25 Kant’s moral philosophy, then,

amounts to an admission of complete impotence as regards the intentional shaping

of social reality, and ethics appears to be a withdrawal into an inner, private place in

which bourgeois individuals can uphold their claim to autonomy. Turning inward,

toward the subject, implies renouncing activity in the outside world, since

‘‘activity’’ cannot mean anything but good will evidenced only within the subject’s

consciousness.

As mentioned above, Adorno traces the problems in Kant’s moral philosophy to

the historical context in which Kant writes. These problems cannot be solved until

the conflicts in social-historical reality itself are resolved. This position permeates

the views of Marxist thinkers such as Gyorgy Lukacs, who was an important

influence on Adorno. According to Lukacs, taking up moral philosophy is nothing

but avoidance of the challenge of the political problem, which can be solved only

through revolutionary praxis.26 Adorno, however, does not think that a revolution-

ary uprising of the proletariat is possible in the context of late capitalism. More

importantly, he claims that a revolutionary act that transfers control of the means of

production to the hands of society as a whole can solve nothing, for it misses the

root of the problem, namely the cleavage between subject and object created by

Enlightenment at the dawn of civilization. The primacy that Marxism grants to

praxis over theory—a position characterized in the 11th thesis on Feuerbach as a

challenge to the entire philosophical tradition—is, writes Adorno, yet another

expression of the Enlightenment trend: It is a ‘‘program of an absolute control of

nature,’’27 that is, instrumental reason.

Adorno concludes that to develop a critical stand on existing reality, one has to

work one’s way up the theoretical-metaphysical categories that can penetrate the

shield of objective phenomena and expose their falseness. Philosophical thinking,

then, once again plays a leading role in moral discussion: Adorno’s aim is to keep

intellectual activity separate from political praxis in order to base on it a new

understanding of morality: ‘‘For the right practice, and for the good itself, there

really is no other authority than the most advanced state of theory.’’28 But if

theoretical understanding is indeed ‘‘for the right practice,’’ we must ask whether it

can be translated into action: Can Adorno’s moral philosophy reach beyond mere

intellectual criticism and effect the world? The interpretation I offer below argues

that it cannot. It attempts to demonstrate that Adorno’s moral philosophy is trapped

in an impasse, which will be articulated in the form of two aporiae.

24 Adorno (2000, p. 53).25 Adorno (2000, pp. 112–113).26 Lukacs (1971).27 Adorno (2003b, p. 244).28 Adorno (2003b, p. 242).

414 I. Snir

123

Adorno’s stringent position is concisely phrased in his well known aphorism,

‘‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’’29 [Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im Falchen].

The ‘‘wrong life’’ evidently has a double meaning: On the one hand, it is life in

which good-doing is impossible, and on the other, it is false from the point of view

of the individual, who looks in vain for a meaningful and valuable life. Each of

these two meanings stands at the heart of one of the two aporiae to be identified in

Adorno’s moral philosophy.

3 First aporia: ‘‘there is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneselfand others’’

Adorno expresses his agreement with the Kantian claim that the question ‘‘What

ought we to do?’’ is the decisive one in every moral philosophy.30 I argue, however,

that Adorno’s moral philosophy is incapable of answering this question: His moral

philosophy implies the impossibility of any moral action in reality, thereby negating

itself as a moral philosophy. The problem of practical impotence, common to both

Kant and Adorno, is the axis on which the first aporia of Adorno’s moral philosophy

turns.

The primacy Adorno grants to theory over praxis, of course, is not in itself a

sufficient reason for this impotence. Prima facie, moral consciousness and moral

knowledge can, perhaps even should, guide moral actions. Adorno’s thought,

however, implies that this is not possible, and that moral knowledge cannot be

translated into praxis. The rationale for this radical position is epitomized in the

decisive claim that ‘‘the whole is false’’31—that good does not exist in present social

reality.32 Nevertheless, Adorno emphasizes that moral knowledge cannot rest on

abstract metaphysical speculation alone but should also be a critical examination of

reality—an ‘‘immanent critique’’ of social phenomena that identifies the evils

embedded in each of them and exposes just how wrong and immoral they are. The

path to realizing the false essence of reality passes through endless negations of its

components, to the understanding that ‘‘Evil, therefore, is the world’s own

unfreedom.’’33

The moral knowledge thus attained, however, is always ‘‘negative’’ and never

‘‘positive,’’ that is, asymmetrically limited to the ‘‘evil’’ end of the moral scale

without ever reaching the ‘‘good.’’ The good remains shrouded by a thick, misty

cloud of uncertainty. The positive content of morality only shows itself in blurred

outline, sketched by the negation of existing reality; its concrete manifestation

29 Adorno (2002, p. 39).30 Adorno (2000, p. 3).31 Adorno (2002, p. 50).32 Gur Ze’ev identifies a similar position in Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Benjamin, who dub existing

reality simply ‘‘hell.’’ See: Gur-Ze’ev (2000, p. 186).33 Adorno (2003b, p 219).


123

remains beyond the horizon of moral understanding34: ‘‘There is no moral certainty.

Its mere assumption would be immoral, would falsely relieve the individual of

anything that might be called morality.’’35 This does not mean that Adorno is a

nihilist—he by no means shares the view he ascribes to the Enlightenment,

according to which nothing has intrinsic value. Moral values do exist, but in the

present reality they cannot be grasped, much less realized. In other words, in the

absence of positive moral knowledge, it is impossible to translate moral content into

right action.36

But the reason for Adorno’s radical position is not only epistemological. It is

primarily ontological: Moral action is impossible because reality itself is not value-

free but distorted and saturated with evil.37 Hence, a good deed can have no hold in

it: ‘‘The more mercilessly an objective-antagonistic society will comport itself in

every situation, the less can any single moral decision be warranted as the right

one.’’38 Since every action in existing reality involves elements of this reality that

are necessarily immoral, the action itself is destined to be immoral. In such a reality,

the best intentions are not enough, for even ‘‘[u]nrestricted benevolence becomes

affirmation of all the bad that exists.’’39 Every action (or abstention from action) is

bound to contribute, in the long run, to the strengthening and deepening of the

whole, which is false: ‘‘By dint of moral zeal, the well-meaning become

destroyers.’’40 This is why ‘‘[e]very impulse in the direction of better things is

not only rational, as it is to Kant; before it is rational, it is also stupid.’’41 We usually

deem such impossible situations to be restricted to extreme, extraordinary

circumstances, such as cruel regimes and, of course, concentration camps, in

which reality liquidates the possibility of right action—‘‘situations in which one’s

choice was always between murder and murder: ‘choose which of your children will

die; if you fail to choose, then both die. If you commit suicide, both die.’’’42

Adorno’s position, then, can be understood as generalizing the horror, arguing that

what seems to be an exception is, in fact, the rule: Returning a loan, to take up the

Kantian example, strengthens capitalism and the institution of private property, just

34 For a lucid discussion of the epistemological impossibility of a positive conception of the good, see:

Finlayson (2002, p. 4).35 Adorno (2003b, p. 242).36 According to Menke, ‘‘false life only knows false representations of the right one, or, more precisely,

’false’ culture developed only pictures or models of life which make it impossible for individuals to lead a

right life any longer.’’ See: Menke (2004, p. 309).37 In an article concerning Adorno’s moral philosophy, Schweppenhauser (2004) makes the claim that

Adorno perceives morality as aporetic in nature. However, Schweppenhauser does not ascribe the aporia

to Adorno’s own position. Rather, he maintains that Adorno’s call for critical reflection on the

ambivalence of moral categories of morality can, in fact, be used to change reality. He is mistaken, I

believe, in underestimating the ontological aspect of the aporia, which makes it inescapable in principle,

thus applicable to Adorno’s philosophy as well.38 Adorno (2003b, p. 242).39 Adorno (2002, p. 77).40 Adorno (2002, p. 179). Compare Horkheimer’s words: ‘‘We are devils too, even we.’’ See:

Horkheimer (1978, p. 135).41 Adorno (2003b, p. 277).42 Quoted from: Bernstein (2006, p. 37).

416 I. Snir

123

as every attempt to assist others requires planning, namely application of

instrumental reason that deepens its hold of reality.

This line of thought applies to daily moral actions within existing reality but also,

perhaps primarily, to an action aimed at changing this reality as a whole: ‘‘Whatever

an individual or a group may undertake against the totality they are part of is

infected by the evil of that totality; and no less infected is he who does nothing at

all.’’43 No action, therefore, whether aimed at radically changing social reality or

correcting a lesser, local wrong, will be able to break through the hold of existing

evil. It might even intensify that evil and tighten oppression, but regardless of its

effect, it will be wrong.44

Adorno, in sum, thinks that in the present conditions one cannot live or act in a

right way. For this reason, the question ‘‘What ought we to do?’’ which even amoral

thinkers such as Marx and Lukacs could answer, cannot be answered in Adorno’s

thought. He admits, ‘‘There is no remedy but steadfast diagnosis of oneself and

others.’’45 In other words, the moral knowledge acquired by way of a theoretical

negation of false reality remains within the boundaries of consciousness alone; it is

incapable of providing either instructions for or restrictions on concrete actions.

Adorno’s moral philosophy is therefore devoid of a prescriptive quality. It is,

indeed, a reflection on the moral values of things, but it is by no means worthy of the

obligatory title, ‘‘moral philosophy.’’46

43 Adorno (2003b, pp. 242–243).44 The following words of Gur-Ze’ev, regarding Horkheimer, no doubt apply to Adorno as well: ‘‘[T]he

demand for justice cannot be in force and be integrated into this world, but by way of its complete

transformation to its opposite.’’ Gur-Ze’ev (2000, p. 234, my translation).45 Adorno (2002, p. 33).46 Finlayson presents an interpretation that offers another way of introducing normative content into

Adorno’s moral philosophy. Finlayson is well aware of the danger of complete paralysis that threatens

Adorno’s philosophy: ‘‘[Adorno’s moral philosophy] appears to ask us to resist everything at once. What

can total resistance amount to, practically speaking, apart from total inactivity?’’: Finlayson (2002, p. 9).

Nevertheless, Finlayson thinks that a satisfactory answer to this question can be found in Adorno.

Adorno’s ethics, Finlayson argues, contains normative contents and is able to answer the question ‘‘What

ought we to do?’’ because it tells us what we ought not to do—we ought not to adapt and cooperate with

universal fungibility: Finlayson (2002, p. 6). Furthermore, Finlayson extracts from Adorno’s thought

three virtues that might guide moral action in line with Adorno’s demands—maturity, humility, and

affection: Maturity (Mundigkeit, oftentimes translated as autonomy) is, following Kant’s ‘‘An Answer to

the Question: what is Enlightenment?’’ the ability to take one’s own critical stand without surrendering to

dictates from the outside; humility (Bescheidenheit) is one’s awareness that one might be mistaken; and

affection is the ability not to be indifferent to the fate of others. Finlayson thinks, therefore, that Adorno

accepts the translation of moral knowledge into action if it relies, on the one hand on recognizing the

prohibitions, and on the other hand on the guidance of the three virtues. I find this solution tempting, since

it takes seriously the limitations within which Adorno’s moral philosophy must operate, but it seems to

me highly unsatisfactory. Even if Finlayson is right in arguing that valid knowledge can be extracted from

negation, he is certainly too hasty when claiming that from the knowledge of the evil embedded in social

reality one can deduce prohibitions on actions—not performing an action has an effect in the world, just

the same as performing one. Since it is part of a contradictory reality, it is trapped in the same normative

mist that characterizes this reality: One can never know in advance what its outcomes will be, and how it

might contribute, despite its good intentions and the knowledge it wishes to articulate, to evil itself.

Adorno, in fact, says explicitly, with regard the need to choose between different bad options, that

abstention from choosing cannot be a proper solution, for it, too, might lead to a disaster : Adorno (2003b,

p. 243), Adorno (2002, p. 26). As to the three virtues Finlayson describes, maturity, humility and affection


123

Adorno, certainly, is not pleased with this conclusion and does not readily

renounce the prescriptive nature of his moral thought. In a short text titled

‘‘Marginalia to Theory and Praxis,’’ he sets out to formulate a solution to the

problem of the inability to act rightly. At the first part of his essay, Adorno claims

that reflexive criticism is itself a good and valuable act: ‘‘Thinking is a doing, theory

a form of praxis.’’47 So, thought itself is presented as an event occurring in and

affecting reality. Hence the question, ‘‘What ought we to do?’’ is to be answered by,

‘‘Think!’’ However, while intervention in theoretical discourse or influencing the

thoughts of others can rightly be called ‘‘actions’’ in the world, Adorno does not

deny that a mental act transpiring in the subject’s consciousness, accessible to her

alone, still differs from an action in objective reality that may possibly affect others.

Fine as the borderline between the two may be, a certain translation of

consciousness to the language of reality is required for its influence to reach out

and touch the outside world. Adorno therefore withdraws from the decisive stand he

takes at the beginning of the article, which took thought to be action in the full sense

of the word, and claims that critical thought ignites the ‘‘practical impulse’’ that

produces action.48 This impulse, as we have seen above, attempts to become an

‘‘Archimedean point’’ that makes praxis possible; it is, however, not identical with

praxis, and it cannot solve the problem that praxis, in the existing social reality,

simply cannot be right.49 Blurring the line between theory and praxis, moreover,

might be an even deeper blow to Adorno’s agonized moral philosophy, for it implies

that even critical thought might be immoral.50

With these conclusions, the first aporia in which morality is trapped begins to

become apparent: ‘‘The dialectic is hopeless: that through praxis alone is it possible

to escape the captivating spell praxis imposes on people, but that meanwhile as

praxis it compulsively contributes to reinforcing the spell, obtuse, narrow-minded,

at the farthest remove from spirit.’’51 But for the impasse towards which we are

Footnote 46 continued

are undoubtedly virtues that might characterize the critical person, the one who knows how to say ‘‘no,’’

as Adorno visualizes him. But the road from here to positive moral content is still long. Even if we accept

the claim that these virtues are necessary conditions to moral action, they can by no means solve the

problem of the impossibility of right action: Though every act of mature, humble, and affectionate

behavior remains subject to the limitations mentioned above, it is not difficult to think of wrongs done by

people trying to be mature, humble, and affectionate. Bernstein, too, thinks that refusing to cooperate with

‘‘the moral choices on offer’’ can be right moral action, and my criticism of Finlayson applies to him as

well. See: Bernstein (2001, p. 56).47 Adorno (1998, p. 261).48 Adorno (1998, p. 264).49 Adorno (1998, p. 274). The example Adorno provides in this context is illuminating. As evidence of

the influence theory has in the world, he tells how surprised he was to find out that academic theoretical

studies such as the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the studies of the authoritarian personality, written

without practical intent, had significant impact in reality : Adorno (1998, p. 277). But this impact, of

course, did not remain theoretical. The reason these studies made an impact (and that Adorno was aware

of such impact) was that their readers did not limit themselves to theoretical insights; they tried to

translate the insights into actions in the world.50 Gur-Ze’ev argues that ‘‘interpretative praxis […] is not only possible, it is a categorical imperative’’:

Gur-Ze’ev (2000, pp. 239–240). The criticism I presented above applies to him as well.51 Adorno (1998, p. 262).

418 I. Snir

123

moving to be clearly visible, one more step is needed. It is important to clarify that the

claim that right action is an impossibility needs to be restricted, since it is subject to

the possibility of radical historic change—the change to a free society, one that will

reconcile the ancient antagonism of nature and culture: ‘‘[I]t is only in the right

society [richtigen Gesellschaft] that chances for the right life will arise.’’52 Adorno

does not think it is possible to say much about this utopian society, but he does seem to

think that, given the utopian reality, the way to good actions will be reopened.53 In a

right reality, the conditions that make morality impossible will no longer be present.

Adorno usually phrases such claims very carefully, in convoluted sentences with a

heavy dose of negation. He writes, for example, that ‘‘no individual is capable of the

morality that is a social demand but would be a reality only in a free society.’’54 That

is, the social claim for the good will be realized only after society is freed.

A closer look, however, reveals that in free society morality will be not only

possible but superfluous. From several phrasings by Adorno—for example, ‘‘the

trouble is that as yet there is no world in which […] men would no longer need to be

evil’’55—we learn that if antagonistic society is the origin of both the need for and the

impossibility of morality, then when morality is possible it will no longer be needed.

Freedom will resolve the conflicts of interest and will calm the destructive impulses

that every person directs towards herself and others today: ‘‘Black shrouds cover the

horizon of a state of freedom that would no longer require either repression or

morality because drives would no longer have to be expressed in destruction.’’56

When freedom becomes a reality morality will no longer be needed because it will

be sublimated and become a moment of life itself. In free society life will again be

‘‘right,’’ since actions taken for the well-being of oneself and others will be

spontaneous. This situation makes moral philosophy unnecessary, and it even turns

moral action itself into something completely different from what it was thought to

be throughout the history of moral philosophy. This does not mean, to be sure, that

moral acts will not be possible; but they will be trivial in light of the reconciled

interrelations between the subject and its surroundings, its fellow-men, and itself.

7The first aporia is now fully visible: On the one hand, moral action is not

possible until social antagonisms are brought to an end, and the social antagonisms

cannot be brought to an end because as long as a society in which humans are

reconciled with nature does not exist, moral action aimed at creating such a society

is not possible. On the other hand, a possibility for moral action exists, but

this possibility will arise only when it is no longer necessary to formulate it.

Moral philosophy, which Adorno insists must persist, cannot be a guide to action

before culture and nature are reconciled; nor can it play this role afterward.

52 Adorno (2003b, p. 396).53 Adorno thinks that for the time being we are unable to conceive what reality will look like after culture

and nature are reconciled; nor can we understand what life in these circumstances might be like: ‘‘We

cannot anticipate the concept of the right human being,’’ he writes, and returns immediately to the way of

negation—‘‘but it would be nothing like the person, that consecrated duplicate of its own self-

preservation’’. See: Adorno (2003b, p. 277).54 Adorno (2003b, p. 299), emphasis mine.55 Adorno (2003b, pp. 218–219).56 Adorno (2003b, p. 285).


123

The combination of these two points necessarily leads to the aporetic conclusion

that ‘‘right life’’ is a precondition for the very same right life.

4 Second aporia: ‘‘the impoverished in spirit march joyously into the infernothat is their paradise’’

The second aporia in Adorno’s moral philosophy stems from the second meaning he

gives to ‘‘wrong life’’—‘‘wrong’’ not only because it is impossible to do good in it

but also because it exists in a reality of oppression, disorientation, and suffering.

Enlightenment, as mentioned, demands that the individual sacrifice an essential part

of herself, namely the singular emotional aspects that do not conform to

instrumental reason’s demands for unification and calculability. To this sacrifice

Enlightenment fails to offer reasonable compensation that might make it worth-

while. Adorno’s critical theory describes the process in which the subject, aiming to

overpower and dominate the object, in fact dominates herself as well and severely

damages her own life experience. Deprived of the meanings and values that religion

and metaphysics try desperately to preserve, life becomes meaningless, helpless,

and miserable.

It is not my intention here to evaluate these claims, to judge their psychological

or sociological value, or to examine whether they suit our experience as readers a

generation or two removed. Instead, I intend to show that an opposite trend can be

extracted from Adorno’s thought itself: The world has so far been painted in dark

colors, and it is now time to shed light on the other side of the dialectic of

Enlightenment (which, after all, is not entirely dark). Brightening this side will also

cast the diagnosis about wrong life in a new light. I shall argue that sensitivity to this

aspect of the dialectic raises questions about the entire critical project taken on by

Adorno and his colleagues at the Frankfurt School, whose critique does not merely

point to logical contradictions within certain patterns of thought but aims to

confront the real suffering arising from the rationalization and instrumentalization

of thought and the social system. The presentation of the second aporia will develop

this element of Adorno’s thought and examine its implications.

In the exuberance of his criticism, which denigrates the domination of nature as

the source of all evil, Adorno does not forget that domination carries with it a

significant blessing for humanity. Not only have people employed it for gaining a

great deal of control over the threats of nature; they have won this battle so

decisively that they are now able to produce an enormous abundance of products

that make their lives much more comfortable. This abundance, needless to say, is

not equally divided within industrialized societies; but Adorno and his colleagues

are well aware that, contrary to Marx’s expectations, the living conditions of the

lower classes have also significantly improved thanks to capitalism and industry:

The proletariat does have more to lose than its chains. Measured against

conditions in England a century ago as they were evident to the authors of the

Communist Manifesto, their standard of living has not deteriorated but

improved. Shorter working hours; better food; housing, and clothing;

420 I. Snir

123

protection for family members and for the worker in his old age; an average

increase in life expectancy – all these things have come to the workers with

the development of the technical forces of production.57

And, in the ‘‘Dedication’’ that opens Minima Moralia, the collection of ‘‘Reflections

from Damaged Life,’’ Adorno admits that the individual has gained ‘‘richness,

differentiation and vigour.’’58 The dialectical process of Enlightenment is at its peak

in this era of late capitalism, precisely because it has reached the point where

abundance abides with oppression, as a package deal or as two sides of the same

coin. As a deal, it is at least worth serious consideration: Are not the abundance and

luxuries offered by modern civilization a fair price to pay for the suppression of

drives? Both Kant and Freud readily ‘‘signed onto’’ such a deal and were willing to

settle for much less than what society in the mid-20th century could offer Adorno

and his contemporaries. Adorno’s decision, in the final analysis, would, of course,

be different—he would denounce the goods amassed by Enlightenment as false,

empty, and even disastrous. But he is sober and honest enough to give serious

consideration to these brighter sides of modernity.

Of special interest in this respect is the fact that one of the Frankfurt School’s

greatest achievements, to which Adorno devoted a significant part of his work, is the

exposure and analysis of the mechanisms with which modern culture hides

oppression from those subjugated to it, thus contributing to its persistence. The

Frankfurters directed much of their attention to the connection between social

domination and the flood of economic and cultural luxuries. They tried to fill the

lacuna created because ‘‘[n]o science ha[d] yet explored the inferno in which were

forged the deformations that later emerge to daylight as cheerfulness, openness,

sociability, successful adaptation to the inevitable, an equable, practical frame of

mind.’’59

Adorno and Horkheimer worked extensively on the phenomenon they called

‘‘Culture Industry,’’ referring to the mass production of popular, entertaining culture

products: ‘‘Film, radio and magazines make up a system which is uniform as a

whole and in every part.’’60 While the primary goal in creating these products, of

course, is to sell them as commodities and make money, the implications of their

ubiquity are enormous. ‘‘The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the

culture industry’’61: it provides its customers with accessible entertainment, which

paints their lives in artificial plastic colors and teaches them to accept existing

reality willingly. At the core of his criticism of the culture industry, Adorno

compares it to a tempting hidden trap, more effective and dangerous than visibly

violent domination: ‘‘The omnipotence of repression and its invisibility are the same

thing.’’62 But for this very reason this criticism might prove a double-edged sword

57 Adorno (2003c, p. 103).58 Adorno (2002, p. 17).59 Adorno (2002, p. 59).60 Adorno (2001, p. 120).61 Adorno (2001, p. 126).62 Adorno (2003c, p. 97).


123

whose blade can be turned against the swordsman. The pleasures handed out by

popular culture to the masses are, perhaps, illusory and false, but the mechanism is

so crushingly effective that oppression is barely felt. From the extensive analyses of

the culture industry, therefore, emerges a picture of late capitalism that is not that

bad after all—a candy-sweet world that, rather than mourning the destruction of

meaningful life, carries people away to a celebration of products, and the real

condition of their lives remains hidden from view.63

Culture industry products, depicted as rich in variety despite the minor

differences they may exhibit,64 have the effect of consumer unification, scornfully

referred to by Adorno as ‘‘the blind conformity of car-owners and radio-listeners.’’65

Conformity damages the subject by eroding its unique personality, which is exactly

why it is so tempting. People seem to think that ‘‘to live in earnest without a self

could be easier, not more difficult.’’66 One enjoys being assimilated, takes ‘‘pleasure

at being, in one’s own weakness, a specimen of the majority’’67—people prefer the

happy pig to the unhappy Socrates.

Assimilation into culture, however, is not prompted by stupidity. Adorno himself

points out that customers are well aware of the manipulations they are subjected to

and choose to cooperate by their own free will: ‘‘People are not only, as the saying

goes, falling over the swindle […] [T]hey desire a deception […] [T]hey sense that

their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to

satisfactions which are none at all.’’68 They have good reason to yield to the mass

deception of popular culture, although Adorno doesn’t find this reason very

compelling. Since they assume that reality is unchangeable in any event, he argues,

they choose to see the glass half full and ignore problems entirely. They try to be

optimistic and look for beauty in everything,69 and they have ‘‘unshaken belief in

the future: things [will] remain as they [are] and even improve.’’70 They cope with

suffering through a ‘‘pathos of composure,’’ with mantras such as, ‘‘That is life—

very hard, but just because of that so wonderful and so healthy.’’71

Furthermore, the culture industry strikes the final blow at the sense of solidarity

among fellow humans, based on that moral impulse whose decline was discussed

earlier. Products such as action movies and even cartoons replace true happiness

with sadistic glee over the misfortunes of ridiculous, battered characters: ‘‘Such a

laughing audience is a parody of humanity. Its members are monads, all dedicated

to the pleasure of being ready for anything at the expense of everyone else. Their

harmony is a caricature of solidarity.’’72 Every weakness is portrayed as anomalous,

63 Compare this discussion to Fromm (1991).64 Adorno (2001, pp. 123–124).65 Adorno (2002, p. 36).66 Adorno (2002, p. 139).67 Adorno (2002, p. 65).68 Quoted in: Bauman (2004, p. 36).69 Adorno (2002, p. 76).70 Adorno (2001, p. 143).71 Adorno (2001, p. 151).72 Adorno (2001, p. 141).

422 I. Snir

123

and as such provokes rejection instead of empathy: ‘‘Anyone who goes cold or

hungry, even if his prospects were once good, is branded. He is an outsider; and,

apart from certain capital crimes, the most mortal of sins is to be an outsider.’’73

In a recent article on Adorno, Zygmunt Bauman describes life in late capitalism

as characterized by constant illusory change. Various changes take place all the

time, but none are aimed at making the world significantly different. They are a

constant flow of cosmetic, meaningless alterations. Faced with this facade of

acceleration, the individual feels she has no option but to try to keep up. This mode

of living, which becomes an illusion of constant dynamics, is, in fact, nothing more

than standstill, stagnation.74 J. M. Bernstein, who draws a similar picture, argues

that this stagnation is the source of what Adorno calls the ‘‘withering of

experience.’’75 Experience, according to Adorno, is not evidenced in every

interaction between consciousness or sensibility and objects. Since novelty is an

inseparable part of the structure of real experience, a world in which nothing ever

changes is a world with no experience at all.76 An experience is therefore something

that does something to the person experiencing it—it changes her and matters to her.

When the range of possible responses varies from apathy to sadism, solidarity no

longer seems to lie within the capacity of people to exhibit.

This description sheds new light on the role of critical theory: It is required to

uncover the fact that ‘‘life has become the ideology of its own absence,’’77 that

‘‘[u]nderlying the prevailing health is death.’’78 That is, critical theory has to open

people’s eyes to the illusory nature of the light that illuminates their lives—a

paradoxical mission, to be sure. Since the blinding mechanisms are practically

everywhere, Adorno thinks of this mission as one requiring a transcendent point of

view, one removed from the whole of existing reality, from which it will be possible

to realize how dark reality actually is. Unaware that things can be different, how can

one’s sense of calm and serenity ever change?

Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it

to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one

day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or

violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of

thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls

imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity,

once squarely faced, delineates the mirror image of its opposite. But it is alsothe utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed,

even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well

know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is,

73 Adorno (2001, p. 150).74 Bauman (2004, pp. 27–30).75 Adorno (2002, p. 55).76 Bernstein (1997, p. 202).77 Adorno (2002, p. 190).78 Adorno (2002, p. 59).


123

if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same

distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape.79

The challenge to critical theory here is surely not merely a cognitive one that can be

met with a simple explanation. The consciousness that is the object of criticism is, at

the same time, its only point of reference; and since consciousness does not realize

that it is miserable, it is probably not miserable at all. We are not dealing here with

theoretical knowledge that the bourgeois subject has to be taught: The problem is

that ‘‘even suffering he has to learn.’’80

Bernstein, well aware that the damage done to human life, according to critical

theory, is not experienced overtly in everyday life, thinks that Adorno looks to art

for the solution: Baudelaire’s poetry, for example, ‘‘provides us with the experience

of a world constituted by the absence of experience.’’81 That is, it opens our eyes

to reality’s emptiness. In a certain sense, Bernstein is undoubtedly right: Adorno’s

aesthetic theory is intended, among other things, to articulate the ways modern art

can jar its audience, expose them to autonomous aesthetic structures, and open their

eyes to the degree of falseness in their own social reality.82 This solution, however,

cannot be but partial: Modern art, as Adorno himself knows, is (for the time being)

accessible to very few. The vast majority of the masses are satisfied with the

products of the culture industry and do not bother to face the complexity of

autonomous works of art. Of course, the subjects are not solely to blame for their

laziness and narrow-mindedness. The social context in which they live limits their

horizons and leads them to settle for pleasant, familiar experiences, without

provoking the curiosity and openness that are a precondition for a true encounter

with a genuine work of art. Therefore, the attempt to rely on art as a lever, one that

lifts people out of the mist concealing the evil of the world, leads to a vicious circle:

Only those who already realize that the world seen through the prism of the culture

industry is superficial and false have the capacity to contemplate works of art and

gain the transcendental viewpoint that the aesthetic dimension can provide.

We must conclude then that, although he never tires of stressing the extent to

which life experience in modern society is false and its satisfactions illusionary,

Adorno would likely admit that most people’s fundamental experience in late

capitalist society is not one of damaged life at all, but of life in a society of

abundance from which almost nothing is missing and ‘‘the impoverished in spirit

march joyously into the inferno that is their paradise.’’83 Objectively, of course,

oppression does not disappear when it is unnoticed; yet, as far as the individual’s

viewpoint and life experience are concerned, it never existed. Although an educated

critic like Adorno might see through social phenomena and understand the true

nature of reality, what is an oppression that bothers almost no one? What power has

a social critic who must work so incredibly hard to convince people that they are not

79 Adorno (2002, p. 247), emphasis mine.80 Adorno (2002, p. 161).81 Bernstein (1997, p. 201), emphasis in the original.82 This interpretation is common to others: Horowitz (2002, p. 220), Hammer (2000, p. 85) and Eagan

(1997, p. 11).83 Adorno (2002, p. 30).

424 I. Snir

123

well? As long as the illusion remains unshattered and people fail to realize what a

high price they pay, one may wonder whether this price has meaning at all. From the

point of view of an average, satiated bourgeois, Adorno has no right to argue that

people’s lives are damaged when they do not feel this way themselves. Isn’t Adorno

being arrogant, a ‘‘conservative mandarin’’84 who laments the alleged decline of

civilization simply because he feels the masses and their entertainments are beneath

him?85 What is at stake, in any case, is not the image of Adorno or his philosophy

but the very validity of moral criticism. The point is not only that the criticism is not

effective (this was the essence of the first aporia) but that it might not be valid at all.

The world, after all, might not be all that bad, and radical criticism might be no

more than intellectual scholasticism that fails to be sensitive to the very people it

targets. The second aporia, therefore, results from the clash between the objective

analysis of the subject’s condition and the subject’s own experience—between the

way people are supposed to feel according to the theory and the way they actually

do feel.

I have presented two aporiae to which Adorno’s moral philosophy leads. It is

now time to return to the new categorical imperative. I will argue that this

imperative, as formulated by Adorno, is characterized by two important features that

it inherits from its Kantian forefather: the status of a given that has no need of proof,

and the form of a moral principle that excludes every exception. These

characteristics, as I shall try to demonstrate, enable us to understand the new

imperative as a response, albeit insufficient, to the two foregoing aporiae. I discuss

them in reverse order, first attempting to present the new imperative as a response to

the second aporia, and then going back to discuss the first.

5 The new categorical imperative as a response to the second aporia

Adorno’s criticism of Kantian moral philosophy paid special attention to Kant’s

position on the possibility of proving the categorical imperative, or better still, on

the impossibility of proving it. In addition to the external data that reason, trying in

vain to be autonomous, requires, Adorno emphasized that Kant’s imperative needs

still one more datum, one that cannot be external according to Kant’s own system

and is therefore an a priori given, revealed to the reflective subject. This datum is

moral law itself. Since Kant identifies moral law with reason and insists that the

categorical imperative is nothing but a consistent use of reason, the validity of moral

law obviously cannot be proven by rational means, for reason cannot lean on

itself.86 According to Kant, however, this is not a problem or deficiency but an

advantage. He refers to the categorical imperative as a ‘‘given,’’ a ‘‘fact of reason.’’

84 Jay thinks that being a ‘‘mandarin’’ is an important characteristic of Adorno’s personality. See: Jay

(1984, pp. 17–18).85 Zygmunt Baumann wonders what would have happened to Adorno’s ‘‘message’’ had it reached

African deserts or Asian shores—would it not have been interpreted as a new insult, or even a new

conspiracy of the Western ‘‘enemy?’’ See: Baumann (2004, p. 44).86 This too is a controversial issue for Kant scholars. For a constructivist attempt to vindicate the

authority Kant grants to reason see O’neill (1989).


123

Every reasonable person can readily grasp it and realize the duty to act accordingly

if only she directs her mind correctly and has the courage to use her own

understanding. This ‘‘given,’’ to be sure, is not achieved through sensual experience.

It imposes itself on every person as clear and self-evident: ‘‘Consciousness of this

fundamental [moral] law may be called a fact of reason because one cannot reason it

out from antecedent data of reason […] it instead forces itself upon us of itself as a

synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or

empirical […].’’87

Adorno dwells on this point because he believes it exposes reason’s necessary

dependence on heteronomous irrational elements. He therefore interprets Kant’s

position as one that regards moral law as rational and irrational at once: ‘‘as rational,

because it is reduced to pure logical reason without content and as not rational

because it must be accepted as given and cannot be further analyzed, because every

attempt at analysis is anathema.’’88 This criticism is not directed against the claim

that moral law is regarded as a given that is in no need of proof, but against the

specific nature of the Kantian imperative. Adorno does not argue against the need to

rely on a self-evident given—recognition of and respect for the given is an

important aspect of his moral thought as well.

Adorno’s categorical imperative, which decrees thinking and acting so that

Auschwitz will not happen again, refuses, like its Kantian counterpart, to provide

proof of its validity and dismisses the very demand for one: ‘‘When we want to find

reasons for it, this imperative is as refractory as the given one of Kant was once

upon a time. Dealing discursively with it would be an outrage […].’’89 And again

recalling Kant, Adorno’s claim that the new categorical imperative repels every

attempt to give reasons for it is not in itself without reasons. The insistence on

reasons is an outrage because of the enormous effect of the Holocaust on historical

experience—an effect that might rescue the moral foundation of critical theory from

the second aporia, from the helplessness caused by the satisfaction of most people

with their lives in late capitalist society and the inability to see the evil embedded in

it. The validity of the new imperative is founded on the assumption that the horrors

of Auschwitz can radically change the way people experience their world—to melt

the cold walls of unconcern that shield the satisfied bourgeois, to open their eyes to

the horrific reality in which they live, and to awaken the impulse of solidarity in

them. This assumption rests on a conviction that Auschwitz makes the need for

historical change a ‘‘given’’ that no reasonable person can deny.

Why, then, does Auschwitz have the power to change the historical experience of

all humanity, even of those who have not witnessed or experienced it directly? To

answer this question we must substantiate the connection between the mass

destruction in the concentration camps and the dialectic of Enlightenment, and on

the other hand, look into the radical nature of the catastrophe, which inserts history

into the domain of morality.

87 Kant (1996a, p. 164).88 Adorno (2003b, p. 261).89 Adorno (2003b, p. 365). Adorno’s sentence continues. It is omitted here in the current context.

426 I. Snir

123

Adorno presented Enlightenment as a dialectical process of rationalization of

thought and society, which results in a hierarchical-antagonistic relationship

between man and nature and causes oppression and suffering. In light of this history,

Auschwitz appears as an event that ‘‘cannot be dismissed by any living person as a

superficial phenomenon, as an aberration of the course of history to be disregarded

when compared to the great dynamic of progress, of Enlightenment, of the supposed

growth of humanitarianism.’’90 Auschwitz is no mere historical accident having to

do only with Germany and its unique path; it is a direct outcome of the dialectics

that guides the historical development of Western civilization.

Although the killing of millions of people cannot be understood as a necessary

consequence of a particular social order or prevailing personality structure, Adorno

draws a clear line from the dialectic of Enlightenment to fascism and anti-Semitism

and from there to Auschwitz. The systematic industrialized mass murder that took

place in the concentration camps is a full realization of the destructive potential of

instrumental rationality: The turning of individuals into reified, fungible units; the lack

of human solidarity; the complete absence of objectively valid moral principles in the

minds of enlightened, educated people. The potential for destruction on this scale was

not totally latent in history prior to Auschwitz; it had many expressions—personal and

not always publicly recognized disasters, as well as larger and more visible disasters,

ranging from wars and violent occupations to daily oppression of the poor by the rich,

of the weak by the strong, of women by men, and so on. The Jewish Holocaust is

therefore another point along a chronology of horrors as long as human civilization is.

At the same time, however, it is an unprecedented escalation: ‘‘quantity recoiling into

quality scores an unspeakable triumph. The administrative murder of millions made

of death a thing one had never yet to fear in just this fashion.’’91

Auschwitz, therefore, has a double status in Adorno’s philosophy of history: It is

both a continuation and a break. Despite its connection to the history of disasters

and to the disaster of history, the unprecedented mass murder at Auschwitz is a

qualitative leap, a whole new phase—it is not only the disaster of the Jewish people,

but a ‘‘Zivilizationsbruch,’’ a break in the entire civilization. Its uniqueness owes not

only to the quantity of victims but to the conspicuous connection to modernity,

industry and technology, administrative rationality, and reason’s indifference to the

individual. It is not a disaster that Enlightenment might have prevented, but one

caused by Enlightenment itself. Martin Jay summarizes Auschwitz’s place in history

as viewed by Adorno: ‘‘Auschwitz functions for him as an historical nodal point of

the kind usually reserved for messianic interventions into history.’’92

This discussion of ‘‘objective’’ history could function as a lever that removes

morality from the second aporia since Auschwitz’s revelatory character finds its

way into people’s subjective minds. Adorno posits that Auschwitz cannot be a

‘‘mere gradual increase in horror, before which one can preserve tranquility of

mind.’’93 The event screams a rhetorical question, the answer to which is obvious:

90 Adorno (2003a, p. 20).91 Adorno (2003b, p. 362).92 Jay (1984, pp. 107–108).93 Adorno (2002, p. 234).


123

‘‘[I]s it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that

the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large,

barbarism?’’94 For Adorno, Auschwitz is not an ordinary link in a long chain of

disasters, one that will remain of interest to historians only and will produce no

more than indifferent shrugs by an occasional reader. The fact that ‘‘in the

concentration camps it was no longer the individual who died but a specimen,’’ he

writes, ‘‘is a fact bound to affect the dying of those who escaped the administrative

measure.’’95

Adorno presents the impact of Auschwitz’s influence as a description, not a

wishful thought. In declarative sentences, he states that ‘‘[a]fter Auschwitz, our

feelings resist any claim of the positivity of existence as sanctimonious, as wronging

the victims; they balk at squeezing any kind of sense, however bleached, out of the

victims’ fate.’’96 This necessary influence makes Auschwitz a constitutive event, one

that provides Adorno with a decisive response to the happy, satisfied bourgeois.

Adorno thinks that every person does actually feel as if he or she were in Auschwitz,

a part of what happened—either as a victim, who suffers daily from a tiny fragment

of the rampant dehumanization there, or as an oppressor, whose daily conformist

behavior contributes to the preservation and concretization of the reality that enabled

the disaster. After Auschwitz, it becomes clearly apparent that a comfortable life

serves the social order that was responsible for the catastrophe. Universal blindness is

replaced by ‘‘a universal guilt context’’97: ‘‘The guilt of a life which purely as a fact

will strangle other life, […] this guilt is irreconcilable with living.’’98 The horror

concealed by the veils of ideology and the culture industry produced a shocked

response to the event that is practically therapeutic; it is an eye-opening revelation

that culture is in fact the opposite of what it seems. ‘‘[T]he unprecedented torture and

humiliation,’’ writes Adorno, ‘‘shed a deathly-livid light on the most distant past.’’99

And the present is lit as well: The Holocaust is the outcome of a civilization that has

not changed much since. The disaster has the power to teach the hedonist bourgeois

that their world is not only that of shopping malls, movie theaters, and discos, but first

and foremost the world of the concentration camps. And once the connection

between existing reality and the large, ‘‘objective’’ catastrophe is exposed, there is no

ignoring the minor, ‘‘subjective’’ catastrophe. The connection removes the veil from

the face of reality and proves to people how damaged their lives actually are.100

94 Adorno (2002, p. 55).95 Adorno (2003b, p. 362).96 Adorno (2003b, p. 361).97 Adorno (2003b, p. 372).98 Adorno (2003b, p. 364).99 Adorno (2002, p. 234).100 This is why Bernstein calls the effect of Auschwitz ‘‘negative theodicy’’: Bernstein (2001, p. 383).

Just as Voltaire saw through the illusion of Leibnizian Theodicy after the Lisbon earthquake, so can

Auschwitz make people see through the illusion of convenient luxurious social existence and recognize

that the price they are paying is unbearable. In Adorno’s phrasing: ‘‘The earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to

cure Voltaire of the theory of Leibniz, and the visible disaster of the first nature was insignificant in

comparison with the second, social one, which defies human imagination as it distills a real hell from

human evil’’: Adorno (2003b, p. 361).

428 I. Snir

123

The effect of Auschwitz on subjective consciousness thus becomes the source for

the rebirth of morality, which takes the form of the new categorical imperative. We

have seen that the fundamental experience in bourgeois reality is not considered real

experience: It is immaterial because it matters to no one and thus destroys the

sensitivity to evil from which morality can emerge. Auschwitz changes this

situation: Its horrors are a radical novelty that blatantly exceeds everything familiar.

To encounter it (even from afar, mediated by representations that are never

adequate) is a rare occurrence of a historical experience that ‘‘lends suggestive force

to the wish for a fresh start in metaphysics […]—the wish to scrape off the delusions

which a culture that had failed was papering over its guilt and over truth.’’101 That

is, the danger that Auschwitz might happen again is the only thing that can matter to

the bourgeois subject, alter it, and make it realize that changing the world is both

possible and necessary.

We are now in a position fully to understand why Adorno claims that the new

categorical imperative requires no reasons: ‘‘Dealing discursively with it would be

an outrage, for the new imperative gives us a bodily sensation of the moral

addendum—bodily, because it is now the practical abhorrence of the unbearable

physical agony to which individuals are exposed even with individuality about to

vanish as a form of mental reflection. It is in the unvarnished materialistic motive

only that morality survives.’’102 The universal validity of the new imperative, then,

originates not from the empty universality of abstract reason but from that of the

concrete body—every person is bound by it because every person carries it in his

body, and every body is capable of feeling pain and suffering. Morality is reborn in

Auschwitz because, for the first time since the triumph of Enlightenment, it has a

motive: suffering. Since the separation from nature is ‘‘always already a cultural

event,’’103 suffering once again becomes a problem for the individual even when it

is not her own suffering, and it has the power to draw her into action based on the

recognition that suffering is wrong and not inevitable.104 The concrete ‘‘practical

abhorrence’’ that was missing in Kant is now the basis upon which morality

stands.105 Moral action must combine authentic feeling with rational reflection.

101 Adorno (2003b, p. 368).102 Adorno (2003b, p. 365).103 The quotation is from Eagan, who sees the motivating role of suffering in Adorno’s moral philosophy

but misses the historical dimension of this suffering. She does not recognize that Enlightenment hinders

the power of suffering to motivate action, and that Auschwitz awakens it once again. See: Eagan (1997,

pp. 9–10).104 Bernstein acknowledges the same point: ‘‘it is the injustice of it [the Holocaust], its exemplification of

injustice, which provides the moral orientation necessary for the transformation of a broken modernity:

the demand that Auschwitz not happen again.’’ Bernstein (2005, p. 305).105 Levin says that the moral imperative is ‘‘embodied’’ in the flesh, imprinted in it by suffering, much

like the effect of Kafka’s machine in ‘‘In the Penal Colony’’ on the bodies of its victims. See: Levin

(2001, p. 3). Levin, however, criticizes Adorno for the categorical imperative he formulates, owing its

existence to Hitler, instead of being ‘‘a categorical imperative inscribed from time immemorial—

inscribed, not by torture, but by the grace of nature’’ (p. 11). In this, Levin misses the deep connection

Adorno draws between history and morality: According to Adorno, body and suffering, as well as reason

and nature, are all historical categories that influence and limit each other.


123

As Bernstein puts it, the imperative has ‘‘the form of rational authority that

conspicuously entwines the logical and material axes of the concepts involved.’’106

Adorno’s categorical imperative, therefore, like Kant’s, has the status of a given

that has no need for justification. But while for Kant the moral law is an a priori

given, available to every person at any time, Adorno’s is historical and contingent,

yet no less obvious. Kant’s imperative is eternal, while Adorno’s is born of history:

History is responsible for converting the human from a creature endowed with a

primordial solidarity impulse into a rational subject that is obtuse to suffering or

even takes pleasure from watching it. History is now responsible for reversing this

conversion.107 At Auschwitz, history opens a path along which morality can find its

place in the world again since only the deep, incurable wound that Auschwitz

inflicted on modern human experience can reawaken awareness of the need for

Morality.108 The new imperative responds to the impasse of the second aporia by

arguing the validity of an obvious given, anchored in the premise that Auschwitz is

so enormous and tangible a disaster that it causes people to grasp the whole of

modern life as a disaster and, out of an urgent need for redress, to summon morality.

6 The new categorical imperative as a response to the first aporia

We have seen that Auschwitz is for Adorno a historical event so powerful that it can

make people realize the evil in existing reality, a reality that is later the soil from

which morality reemerges. But moral understanding is not enough: The first aporia

to which the elaboration of Adorno’s moral philosophy leads—the impasse that

results from the fact that right life is a precondition for right action—seriously

questions the possibility of translating moral understanding into moral action in the

real world. This problem highlights the fact that, in phrasing the ‘‘new categorical

imperative,’’ Adorno departs from his typical mode of expression and specifies the

106 Bernstein (2001, p. 393).107 Zimmermann suggests a different connection between morality and history: Morality, he thinks, is

historical and not a priori, but the history he relies on is that of modern democracies, not the horrors of

Auschwitz. See: Zimmermann (2005).108 Bernstein (2001, pp. 391–395) criticizes Adorno’s claim that Auschwitz alone can provide the

historical experience required for the emergence of the new imperative. He thinks Adorno ascribes a

paradoxical role to Auschwitz: On the one hand, the relation between the historical event and the

individual experiencing it must be particular and unique, and on the other hand, Adorno claims it will

arouse the very same reaction in different people. Bernstein thus blames Adorno for reporting his own

private experiences in the third person, while expecting everyone else to feel the same way. Since

different people react differently to the same events, they might react to Auschwitz in different ways and

fail to recognize the categorical imperative. But other events, even seemingly minor ones (a hungry child

on a street corner) might provoke a reaction much like Adorno’s after Auschwitz and create more

categorical imperatives. Bernstein’s conclusion is that the imperative Adorno formulates is not thecategorical imperative but one of many possible imperatives, one that can, at most, be a model or a

precedent. Although Bernstein is probably right in claiming that different events might provoke different

moral reactions in different people, this does not mean that any of the imperatives thus created has

categorical validity. Each of these imperatives will oblige the person acknowledging it, but not

necessarily others. Adorno’s point is that only an imperative that stems from absolute ‘‘Auschwitzian’’

evil has absolute validity.

430 I. Snir

123

need for action, not only thought. Hitler, as Adorno noted in the previously quoted

passage, imposed an imperative upon unfree mankind ‘‘to arrange their thoughts and

actions [ihr Denken und Handeln so einzurichten] so that Auschwitz will not repeat

itself’’ (my emphasis). I shall argue that, once again, Adorno’s new imperative

attempts—albeit with a limited success—to use Auschwitz as a lever to pull

morality out of aporetic bafflement; and, again, it does so by appropriating

characteristics from Kant’s ‘‘old’’ imperative.

Kant’s categorical imperative, as demonstrated earlier, forbids the agent from

making an exception to the universal law for her own benefit. It is somewhat

surprising, then, to find Kant distinguishing between ‘‘perfect’’ duties, which ‘‘admit

no exception in favor of inclination’’,109 and ‘‘imperfect’’ duties which consequently

do allow such exceptions. Allen Wood explains that ‘‘with respect to wide

[imperfect] duties, there is a ‘‘latitude’’ (Spielraum) concerning not only which

actions we perform in fulfillment of them but even how much we must do […] it is

clear that within this latitude our inclinations are fully entitled to play a role in

determining what we do.’’110 But perfect duties, which are first and foremost

prohibitions, do prescribe actions that are strictly required in order to abide by these

prohibitions. Adorno’s use of the Kantian idiom of the categorical imperative, I

suggest, should be understood as implying a perfect duty that tolerates no

exceptions. It specifically commands the duty to act in such a way that anything

similar to Auschwitz shall not happen again, and this duty is a perfect one, to be

unconditionally pursued, at any cost.111 This is why the new categorical imperative

is a unique moment in Adorno’s thought in which he calls for action in the full sense

of the word. A mere understanding that Auschwitz is wrong cannot be enough; the

prohibition expressed by the categorical imperative must be translated into decisive

action against every occurrence of an evil of radical, ‘‘Auschwitzian,’’ nature.

But how can this be possible? The interpretation seems to contradict Adorno’s

position, as presented in my discussion of the first aporia, namely that moral action

is not possible in existing reality. Does the new categorical imperative simply ignore

the first aporia, rather than attempt to solve it?

Adorno’s position here should be understood as more complex: It expresses full

awareness of the aporia in which it is trapped and a stubborn insistence on acting

despite it, in light of the urgent need for a response to the historical embodiments of

radical evil. Adorno, according to my interpretation, never forgets that an act of

resisting Auschwitz might in the long run strengthen the existing ‘‘wrong’’ reality.

The idea embodied in the new imperative expresses the recognition that there are

evils so great that no option exists but to fight them at all costs, even though the fight

has to respect the limitations imposed by reality. The struggle against a second

Auschwitz will undoubtedly have to involve cooperation with elements of reality

that are morally problematic in order to turn them against the radical evil.

109 Kant (1996b, p. 73 [n]).110 Wood (1999, p. 44).111 Bernstein, I believe, understands the categorical status of Adorno’s imperative in a similar way when

he writes: ‘‘our post—Holocaust solidarity, what there is of it, turns not on an ideal to be realized, but on

the universal recognition of a limit that must not be crossed.’’ Bernstein (2005, p. 321).


123

Nevertheless, says Adorno’s categorical imperative, the elimination of the radical

evil has first priority, which means that it is obligatory to fight it by every possible

means. Will preventing a second Auschwitz, for example, necessarily involve

cooperation with capitalist corporations, thus making them even stronger? So be it!

Overcoming antagonistic reality will remain, for the time being, a utopia, but let

there be no more concentration camps. The first aporia, therefore, is not solved by

the new imperative; but with respect to events comparable to Auschwitz, it simply

loses its relevance. As a result, the normative mists have cleared up somewhat, since

there are things that an absolute duty obliges everyone to do.112

In a 1967 lecture, titled ‘‘Education after Auschwitz,’’ Adorno gives an indication

of what a moral action in the midst of a false reality might be. First, he assigns

education with a mission that clearly reiterates the idea expressed in the new

categorical imperative of Negative Dialectics: ‘‘The premier demand upon all

education is that Auschwitz not happen again. Its priority before any other

requirement is such that I believe I need not and should not justify it.’’113 The

suspension of the first aporia, therefore, is not necessarily temporal, but content-

dependent—it can be a long range action, aimed at preventing the recurrence of

Auschwitz by working on the ‘‘subjective dimension.’’114 Consciousness, Adorno

thinks, is a necessary condition that makes the catastrophe possible, and at the same

time it is the key to combating it: ‘‘If anything can help against coldness as the

condition of disaster, then it is the insight into the conditions that determine it and

the attempt to combat those conditions, especially in the domain of the

individual.’’115 Therefore, ‘‘[o]ne must come to know the mechanisms that render

people capable of such deeds, must reveal these mechanisms to them, and strive, by

awakening a general awareness of those mechanisms, to prevent people from

becoming so again.’’116 The goal of education should be to prevent the recurrence of

Auschwitz by fighting conformity through the development of autonomous self-

reflection and critical thought.117

Educational activity can therefore be understood as both application of the new

imperative and an attempt to awaken awareness to it in the minds of others. The

privileged status of a self-evident ‘‘given,’’ it seems, is not enough for everyone to

recognize the imperative’s validity automatically. Like Kant, who thought that

112 When I presented the first aporia, I argued, contrary to Finlayson, that the normative content

contained in the knowledge that it is wrong to cooperate with existing reality is not enough to extricate

Adorno from the first aporia, since refraining from an action affects reality just like any action. It must

now be clarified that my interpretation does not wholly reject Finlayson’s stance, according to which

moral knowledge can lead to prohibitions on certain actions, but only limits it. Like Finlayson, I think that

knowing what must not be done can prescribe action in the world; but the proper object of this resistance

is not social reality as a whole, or any event within it. Resistance must be directed at particular, radical

objects, of an ‘‘Auschwitzian’’ quality.113 Adorno (2003a, p. 19).114 Adorno (2003a, p. 20).115 Adorno (2003a, p. 31).116 Adorno (2003a, p. 21).117 Adorno (2003a, p. 25).

432 I. Snir

123

egoistic inclinations and lack of ‘‘maturity’’ might prevent the subject from realizing

the validity of the moral law, Adorno is well aware of the social mechanisms that

conceal the imperative from people. Time is a crucial factor in this matter:

Following attempts to underestimate the horror, to lay some of the blame on the

victims, or even deny it, the unalienable impression Auschwitz has made is

gradually diminishing, and these responses threaten to erase it from humanity’s

collective memory.118 Hence, ‘‘[t]o see through the nexus of deception, they

[people] would need to make precisely that painful intellectual effort that the

organization of everyday life, and not least of all a culture industry inflated to the

point of totality, prevents.’’119 This is why it is often necessary to turn peoples’

attention to the imperative and the horror out of which it was born, and to help bring

their immediate sense of shock into their consciousness.

The emphasis on education indicates Adorno’s preference for theory over praxis,

without wholly relinquishing praxis. It is action in the real world—not short-term to

achieve immediate, concrete results, but long-term and preventive, the action of

learning and dialogue among subjects. Such action can, if taken wisely and on an

appropriate scale, significantly reduce the chances of anything like Auschwitz ever

happening again. But is it enough? Adorno himself knows perfectly well that ‘‘[i]f

one wishes to oppose the objective danger objectively, then no mere idea will do,

not even the idea of freedom and humanitarianism.’’120 The journey out of the first

aporia is, therefore, by no means over: Preventive measures are not always

sufficient, and if we are to take seriously the categorical nature of the new

imperative, we must just as seriously confront the need to intervene actively when a

large-scale catastrophe does occur.

The inevitable follow-up question concerns the new imperative’s application:

How, exactly, are we to recognize events ‘‘similar’’ to Auschwitz? Is there a

criterion for determining what events justify decisive action in the world of the

first aporia? Any large-scale disaster that wreaks enormous and unnecessary

suffering—a nuclear bomb, genocide or mass famine—might be an appropriate

object of the new imperative. But are these horrific enough to justify the

cooperation with existing reality that is needed to fight them? For the new

categorical imperative to be applicable, we should be able to discern events that

seem to repeat the horror or at least come close to doing so. Adorno, however,

does not provide us with a criterion by which to determine precisely the threshold

beyond which suffering is intolerable and evil absolute. He seems to expect every

event that is manifestly, entirely evil to be able to function like the beacon of a

dark lighthouse that shines through the moral mists and justifies translating moral

understanding into moral action that is undoubtedly right.121 The cries of the

118 Adorno (2003d, pp. 4–6).119 Adorno (2003d, p. 13).120 Adorno (2003d, p. 17).121 David Toole argues that ‘‘the burnt bodies of Jews ‘wiggling skyward as smoke’ are connected

unavoidably not only to the vaporized bodies of children in the streets of Hiroshima, but also to the

bleeding bodies of the American Indians and to the corpses of hundreds of millions of buffalo, bears and

wolves that have been piled up, in the course of the ‘settlement’ of the American west’’. See: Toole (1993,

p. 228). While the genocide of Native Americans does seem to be a good candidate for the application of


123

horrors will be heard clearly since Auschwitz has already prepared the ground for

it.122

Adorno’s new categorical imperative, in sum, cannot provide critical theory with

a reliable guide in every practical situation. But while ‘‘ordinary,’’ daily situations

remain, from the outset, outside its scope, it does attempt to restrict the first aporia

by saying that in extreme radical cases we can confidently answer the fundamental

moral question, ‘‘What ought we to do?’’ We must refuse to cooperate with events

that threaten to turn into catastrophes of an ‘‘Auschwitzian’’ nature, and take action

against them if needed. The responsibility for determining which actions help

prevent the next Auschwitz, and which actions bring it even closer by collaborating

with the existing order, remains entirely ours.

7 Epilogue

Adorno’s philosophy is one of bafflements and contradictions. One of the main

features of his unique style is the recurrent exploration of contradictions appearing

in different areas of modern life and enlightened thought: Autonomous rationality is

not rational; progress is regress to barbarism; art is autonomous but never detached

from society; morality is immoral. Nearly every sentence Adorno writes is

immediately followed by its negation. The antagonisms he exposes throughout

social reality, and in the consciousness that reflects it, leave nothing untouched, not

even a single reconciled acre. The two aporiae on which this study has focused are

but two of many others that dwell in Adorno’s writings.

Adorno does not try to solve the contradictions. This does not mean he is

comfortable with them. He thinks they are the outcome of an impossible reality, a

labyrinth in which the wanderer, attempting to escape, only becomes more deeply

entangled. The role of the philosopher, as Adorno understands it, is to articulate and

illuminate these contradictions. With that as his goal, he confronts them, searches

for them in ever new places, plays with them, and molds them with his pen to reveal

them for what they are.

Many of Adorno’s claims can no doubt be countered by philosophical arguments

or empirical evidence. They can also simply be rejected for the sense of paralysis

and impotence they produce in readers, who grow tired of deciphering the complex

sentences and realize they are trapped in a dark cobweb of ideology woven over

oppression and suffering. They see that they can do nothing to change this situation

Footnote 121 continued

the new imperative (although, of course, it precedes Auschwitz and cannot benefit from its implications),

it is interesting to ask whether Adorno’s imperative, so frugally applicable, should apply to the mass

extinction of animals. On the connection between Adorno’s moral philosophy and animals, see: Gerhardt

(2006b).122 Bernstein suggests that Auschwitz has in fact attained the status Adorno prescribes it: After listing a

long list of disasters that has happened since Auschwitz, he writes that ‘‘perhaps the instance of the

Holocaust no longer looks like a self-enclosed event in German history, but begins to look like a

precedent, an exemplary instance in which these moments gather round it like elements of a horrific

constellation; perhaps, now, unbearably, the Holocaust is coming to have for us the very socio-historical

and moral significance that Adorno attributed to it.’’: Bernstein (2005, p. 306).

434 I. Snir

123

and that they must feel guilt every time they turn on the television or go to the

movies. The aim of this study, however, was not to criticize Adorno or argue against

him, but to point out that weighted against the countless contradictions is one

determined certainty: The realization that modern reality is no less than acatastrophe, epitomized by Auschwitz. This certainty does not solve the contradic-

tions. The opposite is true—it is both their origin and the permanent evidence of

their existence. Adorno’s thought cannot be understood without consideration of

this foundation, which is the focal point to which his entire philosophy is directed,

even when it deals with art, literature, popular culture or psychology. The tension

within Adorno’s thoughts addressed by this study is, first and foremost, the tension

between the aporiae and the catastrophe that led to them. Auschwitz is both the

reason we cannot ignore the contradictions and the reason we cannot accept

them.123

A systematic attempt to understand Adorno’s moral philosophy cannot escape the

conclusion that moral action in existing reality is impossible. The attempt to take the

new categorical imperative seriously and understand it as an instruction to act must

therefore regard it as a deviation from Adorno’s regular line of thought, and present

it as a desperate attempt to overcome the moral paralysis that results from the

pessimistic implications of critical theory. An attempt to reconcile the imperative

with Adorno’s moral philosophy cannot succeed. In this sense, the new imperative

is woven into the thick fabric of contradictions in Adorno’s philosophy, and it adds

a new dimension to his thought.

The new categorical imperative is clearly not an adequate philosophical solution

to the impasses of Adorno’s moral philosophy. According to Adorno’s own critical

theory, it can be argued, this imperative commands the impossible. More than a

philosophical claim that finds its justification in the large context of a coherent

system, the new categorical imperative is, essentially, a scream—a desperate call

that echoes in the normative vacuum of modernity, warning us that we must not

yield to the conclusions of systematic criticism and let the aporiae of morality

paralyze us.

The force of this scream is necessarily limited. It seems that Adorno (even he)

was overly optimistic about the shocking and shuddering-producing power

attributed to Auschwitz. The memory of the Holocaust, its full meaning, and its

connection to Enlightenment have been almost completely appropriated by

ideological mechanisms, drafted to the service of short-term interests and objectives

that deprive it of the role Adorno ascribes it. Our lack of a criterion to determine

which events to object to, which are of ‘‘Auschwitzian’’ quality, becomes an acute

problem. It opens the door to misuse of the imperative, as evidenced in the Israeli

reality, where the word ‘‘Holocaust’’ is routinely invoked by political parties and

other organizations and groups, sometimes to justify brutal oppression and

domination.

123 The tension that results from a demand that cannot be declined yet cannot be fully answered is also

taken from Kant. See the opening sentence of the preface to the first edition of the Critique of PureReason: ‘‘Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is burdened with

questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as problems by the nature of reason itself, but

which it also cannot answer, since they transcend every capacity of human reason.’’ Kant (1999, p. 99).


123

Nevertheless, I believe that Adorno’s new categorical imperative poses an

extremely important moral challenge that sets the direction for every moral thought

in the second half of the 20th century. While not yet a new moral philosophy, it is a

call for a rethinking of morality, and for formulating new moral philosophies that

take Auschwitz as their starting point.124 With this imperative, Adorno pioneered a

new field of morality—morality that has a close relationship with history, morality

after Auschwitz. I agree with Adorno that the duty to plow this field and cultivate it

belongs to everyone.

Acknowledgments I would like to thank Anat Ascher, Yoni Ascher, Naveh Frumer, Ori Rotlevy and

Moshe Zuckermann for helping and commenting on different versions of this article.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1998. Marginalia to theory and praxis. In Critical models (trans: Pickford, H.W.),

259–278. New York: Columbia University Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 2000. Problems of moral philosophy (trans: Livingstone, R.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 2001. Dialectic of enlightenment (trans: Cumming, J.). New York: Continuum Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 2002. Minima Moralia (trans: Jepchot, E.F.N.). New York: Verso.

Adorno, Theodor. 2003a. Education after Auschwitz. In Can one live after Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann, 19–33. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 2003b. Reflections on class theory. In Can one live after Auschwitz?, ed. Rolf

Tiedemann, 93–110. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Adorno, Theodor. 2003c. Negative dialectics (trans: Ashton, E.B.). New York: Continuum Press.

Adorno, Theoder. 2003d. The meaning of working through the past. In Can one live after Auschwitz?, ed.

Rolf Tiedemann, 3–18. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno—an intellectual in dark times. In Theodor W.Adorno—Philosoph des beschadigten Lebens, ed. Moshe Zuckermann, 25–45. Gottingen: Wallstein

Verlag.

Bernstein, J.M. 1997. Why rescue semblance? Metaphysical experience and the possibility of ethics. In

The semblance of subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic theory, ed. Huhn Zuidervaart, 177–213.

Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Bernstein, J.M. 2001. Adorno: Disenchantment and ethics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bernstein, J.M. 2005. Suffering injustice: Misrecognition as moral injury in critical theory. InternationalJournal of Philosophical Studies 13(3): 303–324.

Bernstein, J.M. 2006. Intact and fragmented bodies: Versions of ethics ‘After Auschwitz’. New GermanCritique 33(1): 31–52.

Brunkhorst, Hauke. 1999. Adorno and critical theory. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.

Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The origin of negative dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, andthe Frankfurt institute. New York: The Free Press.

Dews, Peter. 2002. Uncategorical imperatives: Adorno, Badiou and the ethical turn. Radical Philosophy111: 33–37.

Eagan, Jennifer L. 1997. Philosophers and the holocaust: Mediating public disputes. International Studiesin Philosophy 29(1): 9–17.

Finlayson, James Gordon. 2002. Adorno on the ethical and the ineffable. European Journal of Philosophy10(1): 1–25.

Fromm, Erich. 1991. The fear of freedom. New York: Routledge.

Gerhardt, Christina. 2006a. Introduction: Adorno and ethics. New German Critique 33(1): 1–3.

124 Many philosophers, as different as Arendt, Lyotard, Jonas and Agamben, have indeed attempted to

walk this path, with or without a reading of Adorno. For a comparative discussion see for example:

Bernstein (2006).

436 I. Snir

123

Gerhardt, Christina. 2006b. The ethics of animals in Adorno and Kafka. New German Critique 33(1):

159–178.

Gur-Ze’ev, Ilan. 2000. The Frankfurt school and the history of Pessimism. Jerusalem: Magnes Press. [in

Hebrew].

Habermas, Jurgen. 2005. The entwinement of myth and enlightenment: Max Horkheimer and Theodor

Adorno. In The philosophical discourse of modernity (trans: Lawrence, F.). Cambridge: Polity Press.

Hammer, Espen. 2000. Adorno and extreme evil. Philosophy and Social Criticism 26(4): 75–93.

Horkheimer, Max. 1996. Eclipse of reason. New York: Continuum.

Horkheimer, Max. 1978. Dawn and decline: Notes 1926–1931 and 1950–1969 (trans: Shaw, M.). New

York: Seabury Press.

Horowitz, Asher. 2002. By a hair’s breadth: Critique, transcendence and the ethical in Adorno and

Levinas. Philosophy and Social Criticism 28(2): 213–248.

Jarvis, Simon. 1998. Adorno: A critical introduction. New York: Routledge.

Jay, Martin. 1974. The dialectical imagination. A history of the Frankfurt school and the institute ofsocial research 1923–50. London: Heinemann.

Jay, Martin. 1984. Adorno. London: Fontana.

Kant, Immanuel. 1996a. Critique of practical reason. In The Cambridge edition of the works of ImmanuelKant, vol. 4 (trans.: Gregor, M.J.), 133–272. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1996b. Groundwork of the metaphysics of morals. In The Cambridge edition of theworks of Immanuel Kant, vol. 4 (trans: Gregor, M.J.), 37–108. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 1999. Critique of pure reason (trans: Guyer, P., Wood, A.). Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Kant, Immanuel. 2002. Prolegomena to any future metaphysics that will be able to come forward as

science. In The Cambridge edition to the works of Immanuel Kant, vol. 3 (trans. Hatfield, G.),

29–169. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levin, David Michael. 2001. The embodiment of the categorical imperative: Kafka, Foucault, Benjamin,

Adorno and Levinas. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(4): 1–20.

Lukacs, Gyorgy. 1971. History and class consciousness (trans: Livingstone, R.). Cambridge, Mass: MIT

Press.

Marx, Karl. 1975. Contribution to critique of Hegel’s philosophy of law. Introduction. In Collected works,

vol. 3 (trans: Cohen, J.), 175–187. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

Menke, Christoph. 2004. Genealogy and critique—two forms of ethical questioning of morality. In TheCambridge companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn, 302–327. Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press.

O’neill, Onora. 1989. Constructions of reason: explorations of Kant’s practical philosophy. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1987. Discourse on the origin of inequality. In The basic political writings(trans: Cress, D.A.), 25–109. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishong Company.

Schweppenhauser, Gerhard. 2004. Adorno’s negative moral philosophy. In The Cambridge companion toAdorno, ed. Tom Huhn, 328–353. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Toole, David. 1993. On lingering eyes and talking things: Adorno and Deleuze on Philosophy since

Auschwitz. Philosophy Today 37(3–4): 223–246.

Wood, Allen W. 1999. Kant’s ethical thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Yovel, Yirmiyahu. 1980. Kant and the philosophy of history. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Zimmermann, Rolf. 2005. Philosophie Nach Auschwitz. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag.


123

The 'new categorical imperative' and Adorno's aporetic moral philosophy

Documents

Transcript of The 'new categorical imperative' and Adorno's aporetic moral philosophy