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This volume makes Adorno's lectures on the problems of moral philosophy available for the first time to English-speaking readers. It is one of several volumes of Adorno's unpublished writings which are currently being published in Germany, and which will be published in translation by Polity. The book is organized around an account of Kant's moral theory, and introduces most of the central topics of Adorno's far more difficult work Negative Dialectics. He examines concepts such as the primacy of practical reason, the relation between freedom and experience, and the desubstantialization of moral thought. These and other concepts are discussed in an accessible and entertaining style which is very different from the rest of Adorno's published work. Problems of Moral Philosophy will be an important resource for scholars drawing on Adorno's thought, and its nature as a lecture course makes it a very useful and accessible introduction for students to Adorno's ideas about moral philosophy. It will be of interest to those working in philosophy and in social and political thought.
284 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1963
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About the author
Theodor W. Adorno
608 books1,421 followersTheodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
January 1, 2022
It is often an interesting proposition when lectures and other recordings meant for limited consumption are published for a broader audience. In this case, it is a mixed bag, but it tends towards the disappointing. There are flashes of insight towards practice, the problems of philosophy, and politics. Mostly, these lectures land squarely in the area of grand theory, with much conceptual discussion but not enough payoff for politics and human society.
Mixed in with the exegesis of Kant's moral philosophy, Adorno dashes in here and there a brilliant criticism and refutation of Stalinism. Similarly, he laid bare the idea that the individual should defer gratification for the society, as the payoff never comes. At the same time, Adorno reminds us, as his audience, that he is equally not a fan or an apologist for the late capitalist West under the sway of what he called the culture industry.
However, these points were too few and far between. The argument that C Wright Mills levied against Talcott Parsons in the Sociological Imagination proves all too applicable here too. As Mills pointed out, the cause of grand theory is their choice of a level of thinking so general that they cannot logically get down to observation. Like his contemporary, Parsons, this is Adorno in a nutshell. He never, as a grand theorist, gets down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts. In fact, as a prototypical grand theorist, Adorno has set forth a realm of concepts from which are excluded many structural features of human society, features long and accurately recognized as fundamental to its understanding.
Adorno seems to think—and this is implicit in his logic—that if he elevates and sores up high enough to the level of thought subsuming politics and society, he can then swoop back down and reemerge with clarity and the correct engagement. This is the Hegelian in him. In this, as a grand theorist, he is mistaken. Soaring up to the clouds, he loses touch with all of the detail. The best ways to truly engage with the political is to never disengage with it in the first place.
Mixed in with the exegesis of Kant's moral philosophy, Adorno dashes in here and there a brilliant criticism and refutation of Stalinism. Similarly, he laid bare the idea that the individual should defer gratification for the society, as the payoff never comes. At the same time, Adorno reminds us, as his audience, that he is equally not a fan or an apologist for the late capitalist West under the sway of what he called the culture industry.
However, these points were too few and far between. The argument that C Wright Mills levied against Talcott Parsons in the Sociological Imagination proves all too applicable here too. As Mills pointed out, the cause of grand theory is their choice of a level of thinking so general that they cannot logically get down to observation. Like his contemporary, Parsons, this is Adorno in a nutshell. He never, as a grand theorist, gets down from the higher generalities to problems in their historical and structural contexts. In fact, as a prototypical grand theorist, Adorno has set forth a realm of concepts from which are excluded many structural features of human society, features long and accurately recognized as fundamental to its understanding.
Adorno seems to think—and this is implicit in his logic—that if he elevates and sores up high enough to the level of thought subsuming politics and society, he can then swoop back down and reemerge with clarity and the correct engagement. This is the Hegelian in him. In this, as a grand theorist, he is mistaken. Soaring up to the clouds, he loses touch with all of the detail. The best ways to truly engage with the political is to never disengage with it in the first place.
March 31, 2020
I first read this about 10 years ago, so now going back to Adorno concludes my moral detour:
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960
Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar VII
Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan
Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's the Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
I still find the melancholy science of the totally administered society peerless and lucid. Despite being up to the neck in Kantian morality for months now, and pretty familiar with the direction of Adorno's thoughts on it, re-reading this volume of lectures was hardly a chore. Adorno's writing, like Lacan's Écrits, suffers from a "difficult" stigma; the series of lectures posthumously collected and published by Stanford gives readers a chance to listen to Adorno expound upon admittedly complex and dicey philosophical matters in an approachable, didactic manner, without diluting the critical content.
In this case, we are treated to a sustained interrogation of the Kantian concept of moral law not just in the Critique of Practical Reason (wherein the very same Reason which dissolved into the antinomies of the first Critique is resurrected and exalted as the unassailable trinity of God, immortality, and freedom) but as it appears throughout Kant's writings. The result is seventeen edifying lectures given by someone who sought to take more than 40 years of experience turning Kant over and over and a life at the absolute forefront of modern continental culture and thought and helpfully distill it into something you could use... as in, to think about what you could/should/would/ought do, if you were able, or simply to imagine another time when doing the right thing wouldn't seem so goddamned guiltily impossible. Really, historical progress will only occur when we don't need to belabor problems of moral philosophy. We are a l-o-n-g way from there, and getting farther by almost every measure, to the point where maybe the first step on the moral path is away from the world and back to Adorno. I wouldn't bother with any destination that doesn't involve this detour.
The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959-1960
Eros and Ethics: Reading Jacques Lacan's Seminar VII
Ethics of the Real: Kant, Lacan
Antigone, in Her Unbearable Splendor: New Essays on Jacques Lacan's the Ethics of Psychoanalysis
Imagine There's No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation
I still find the melancholy science of the totally administered society peerless and lucid. Despite being up to the neck in Kantian morality for months now, and pretty familiar with the direction of Adorno's thoughts on it, re-reading this volume of lectures was hardly a chore. Adorno's writing, like Lacan's Écrits, suffers from a "difficult" stigma; the series of lectures posthumously collected and published by Stanford gives readers a chance to listen to Adorno expound upon admittedly complex and dicey philosophical matters in an approachable, didactic manner, without diluting the critical content.
In this case, we are treated to a sustained interrogation of the Kantian concept of moral law not just in the Critique of Practical Reason (wherein the very same Reason which dissolved into the antinomies of the first Critique is resurrected and exalted as the unassailable trinity of God, immortality, and freedom) but as it appears throughout Kant's writings. The result is seventeen edifying lectures given by someone who sought to take more than 40 years of experience turning Kant over and over and a life at the absolute forefront of modern continental culture and thought and helpfully distill it into something you could use... as in, to think about what you could/should/would/ought do, if you were able, or simply to imagine another time when doing the right thing wouldn't seem so goddamned guiltily impossible. Really, historical progress will only occur when we don't need to belabor problems of moral philosophy. We are a l-o-n-g way from there, and getting farther by almost every measure, to the point where maybe the first step on the moral path is away from the world and back to Adorno. I wouldn't bother with any destination that doesn't involve this detour.
February 16, 2026
"On the question of whether moral philosophy is possible today, the only thing I would be able to say is that essentially it would consist in the attempt to make conscious the critique of moral philosophy, the critique of its options and an awareness of its antimonies...
Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest.
I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness—rather than covering it up with sticking plaster—will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good life today would consist in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged...
So what I have in mind is the determinate negation of everything that has been seen through, and thus the ability to focus upon the power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us to a vastly greater degree. Little else remains to us, other than the power to reflect on these matters and to oppose them from the outset, notwithstanding our consciousness of our impotence.
This resistance to what the world has made of us does not at all imply merely an opposition to the external world on the grounds that we would be fully entitled to resist it—all such attempts would merely fortify the principle of 'the way of the world' that is anyway at work in us, and would only benefit the bad.
In addition, we ought to mobilize our own powers of resistance in order to resist those parts of us that are tempted to join in. I would almost go so far as to say that even the apparently harmless visit to the cinema to which we condemn ourselves should really be accompanied by the realization that such visits are actually a betrayal of the insights we have acquired and that they will probably entangle us—admittedly only to an infinitesimal degree, but assuredly with a cumulative effect—in the processes that will transform us into what we are supposed to become and what we are making of ourselves in order to enable us to survive, and to ensure that we conform.
What I mean is that this temptation to join in is something cannot be avoided entirely by anyone who is not a saint. But even a saint's existence is precarious today. We are incessantly urged to join in, and for goodness' sake do not imagine that I am being even the least bit pharisaical in proclaiming that you should refrain from joining in.
Perhaps the situation is that if we start to reflect on what is involved in joining in, and if we are conscious of its consequences, that everything we do—everything that goes on in our minds to contribute to what is wrong—will be just a little different from what it otherwise would have been...
We need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong, and at the same time to a sense of the fallibility of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such self-criticism. I am reluctant to use the term 'humanity' at this juncture since it is one of the expressions that reify and hence falsify crucial issues merely by speaking of them...
There has to be an element of unswerving persistence, of holding fast to what we think we have learnt from experience, and on the other hand, we need an element not just of self-criticism, but of criticism of that unyielding, inexorable something that sets itself up in us. In other words, what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility, and in that respect I would say that the element of self-reflection today has become the true heir to what used to be called moral categories...
If you find yourself in a committee—just assume you belong on a committee, and nowadays all of you will be a member of some committee or other, that is the name of the game—and hear someone saying 'My conscience forbids me to do this or that', you should make up your minds to treat such a person with the greatest possible distrust. Above all, when we ourselves feel tempted to say that we 'are making our stand and can do no other', we too deserve to be distrusted in precisely the same way, because this gesture contains exactly the same positing of self, the same self-assertion as positivity, which really just camouflages the principle of self-preservation, while simultaneously pretending to be the moral with which it also coincides.
On the other hand, resistance also means resistance to heteronomy in its concrete forms. Today this means the countless forms of morality that are imposed from outside. The form positive morality assumes today has escaped from its transparent theoretical underpinning, much as the link with religion has been cut. Moral imperatives used to be embedded in philosophy in a transparent rational way, but this is no longer the case. Because of these developments the forms of morality generally prevailing in society have assumed the evil and repressive complexion that always makes its appearance when concepts have been undermined. Their substance has evaporated, but people still cling to them, turning them into fetishes. I believe that the most drastic instances of this are to be found in the realm of sexual morality...
Such codes are a disaster because they literally recodify the objective spirit, that is, the embodiment of the opaque and for that reason inexorable and repressive norms to which people today are exposed. If the moral does have a proper point of departure today it must be the resolute and wholly uncompromising stand against all manifestations of this spirit that you can find today.
...The positive religions have now largely lost their power over people's minds, but what Nietzsche once said about them, all too innocently, has now become universal and has been extended to include objective spirit, cultural consciousness in general. As the religions have declined, their restrictive and repressive power has simply been transferred to the silent, wordless, groundless form of mind that pervades life in our society. We might say that wherever people strike moral poses nowadays and appeal to an idea of the good, this good, wherever it is not resistance to evil, turns out to be nothing but a cover it. And what I have in mind is not just individuals, but above all everything that is written, publicized, and that echoes through the mass media.
On the one hand, the hatred of evil in the name of the good has turned into a destructive force; on the other, the good, instead of regarding evil as a foil to itself, has become evil in its own right. And that is in effect the shape of ideology everywhere today.
While it is true that [National Socialism] has been decapitated politically speaking, and that is no longer able to attack minorities directly, it can be ready to pounce at any moment, to oppose any deviation and to smash it. Its legacy can be seen above all in the countless forms of anti-intellectualism. One that is by no means amongst the most harmless is the habit of blocking thought by ceaselessly confronting people with demands, without leaving them time to reflect: All right, so what are you going to do about it? What is happening then? Of what use is that to me? Who do you think will be interested in that idea? The elements of Kant's critique of reason that are still alive today probably amount to the critique of all such phenomena.
The transition to such a critique was in fact accomplished by Nietzsche. Nietzsche is uniquely important because he denounced the presence of the bad in the good and thereby also criticized the way in which the bad has assumed concrete form within the positive institutions of society, and above all, in the different ideologies [c.f. Althusser's ISAs]. That in my view far transcends the way in which every possible obscurantist and reactionary trend has based itself on certain propositions of his.
And the critique he provided has been far more subtle and specific than, for example, Marxist theory, which has condemned ideologies en bloc, but has never succeeded in enterning into their inner workings, their lies, as deeply as Nietzsche. The difficulty underlying all of this is of course the difficulty of a private ethics, that is, the behavior of the individual has long since ceased to link up with objective good and evil...
Of all the so-called great philosophers, I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt—more even than to Hegel... [But] I would criticize Nietzsche for having failed to go beyond the abstract negation of bourgeois morality, or, to put it differently, of a morality that has degenerated into ideology, into a mask which concealed a dirty business. I would add that his analysis of the individual moral problems he faced did not lead him to construct a statement of the good life. Instead, having proceeded in a summary fashion, he came up with a positive morality that is really nothing more than the negative mirror-image of the morality he had repudiated.
Even when we have understood what is wrong with a repressive ideology that has been intensified to the point of absurdity, it is not possible nowadays, in the age of the Culture Industry, simply to read off a true morality from it. A positive morality—he would not have called it that—cannot possibly exist in Nietzsche because of the absence of a substantive, objective spirit. In other words, given the state of society and the actual state reached by mind in that society, the norms Nietzsche opposed to it were not available in concrete terms and so had simply to be imposed from outside...
In reality, this very attempt on the part of a lone individual to set up new norms and new commandments based simply on his own subjective whim implies their impotence, their arbitrary and adventitious nature from the very outset. The ideals he has in mind—nobility [Vornehmheit], real freedom, the virtue of generosity, distance—all of these are wonderful values in themselves, but in an unfree society they are not capable of fulfillment, or at best can only be realized on Sunday afternoons, that is, in private life... in reality, these norms are all feudal values that cannot be directly realized in a bourgeois society. They are attempts to recapture lost values, would-be revivals, a Romantic ideal that is completely powerless under the rule of profit.
...[but Nietzsche perceived] that in a society that is based on force and exploitation, a violence that is unrationalized, frank and open and, if you like, 'expiatory violence' is more innocent than one that rationalizes itself as the good. Force only really becomes evil the moment it misunderstands itself as the gladius dei, the sword of God.
If [Nietzsche's] critique had been as consistent as it ought to have been, but isn't—because he too was in thrall to existing social conditions, because he was able to get to the bottom of what people had become, but was not able to get to the bottom of the society that made them what they were—it should have turned its gaze to the conditions that determine human beings and make them and each of us into what we are.
For example, Nietzsche coined the phrase "No herdsman and one herd". He may have succeeded in discovering a formula to describe what the ghastly slogan now calls "mass society", but that is not, as he imagined, the denunciation of the "Ultimate Man". It is a description of a completely functionalized and anonymous form of domination, that nevertheless rules over this herd with incomparably greater brutality than if there were a visible bellwether for them to follow...
I truly believe that [moral relativism] is in great measure a pseudo-problem—to use another much-abused term. For the positive nature of beliefs, of ideologies, that prevail here and now is not relative at all. They confront us at every moment as binding and absolute. And the criticism of these false absolutes—what the young Hegel called "the positive nature of prevailing moral beliefs—is much more urgent than the quest for some absolute values or other, fixed in eternity and hanging from the ceiling... the postulates and values that surface wherever people imagine that they have to overcome relativism, are the products of arbitrary acts, things that are freely posited, that are created and not natural, and thus they necessarily always succumb to the relativism they denounce...
Freedom, Kant thought, is literally and truly an idea. It necessarily presupposes the freedom of all, and cannot even be conceived as an isolated thing, that is, in the absence of social freedom. Existentialist ethics appears to many of you to be advanced. Motivated by its protest against the administered world, it made an absolute of spontaneity and of the human subject insofar as it has not been co-opted. That is the error of this ethics since precisely because this spontaneity lacks reflexivity and its separated from objective reality, objectivity re-enters it, just as Sartre has ended up placing himself as the service of Communist ideology. This means that either this spontaneity will be eliminated, if it is seriously intended, and buried beneath the great ideology, or it lapses into administration.
In short, anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. We might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today. I should like to thank you for your attentiveness and to wish you an enjoyable vacation."
Above all, no one can promise that the reflections that can be entertained in the realm of moral philosophy can be used to establish a canonical plan for the good life because life itself is so deformed and distorted that no one is able to live the good life in it or to fulfil his destiny as a human being. Indeed, I would almost go so far as to say that, given the way the world is organized, even the simplest demand for integrity and decency must necessarily lead almost everyone to protest.
I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness—rather than covering it up with sticking plaster—will it be possible to create the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we should lead our lives today. The only thing that can perhaps be said is that the good life today would consist in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged...
So what I have in mind is the determinate negation of everything that has been seen through, and thus the ability to focus upon the power of resistance to all the things imposed on us, to everything the world has made of us, and intends to make of us to a vastly greater degree. Little else remains to us, other than the power to reflect on these matters and to oppose them from the outset, notwithstanding our consciousness of our impotence.
This resistance to what the world has made of us does not at all imply merely an opposition to the external world on the grounds that we would be fully entitled to resist it—all such attempts would merely fortify the principle of 'the way of the world' that is anyway at work in us, and would only benefit the bad.
In addition, we ought to mobilize our own powers of resistance in order to resist those parts of us that are tempted to join in. I would almost go so far as to say that even the apparently harmless visit to the cinema to which we condemn ourselves should really be accompanied by the realization that such visits are actually a betrayal of the insights we have acquired and that they will probably entangle us—admittedly only to an infinitesimal degree, but assuredly with a cumulative effect—in the processes that will transform us into what we are supposed to become and what we are making of ourselves in order to enable us to survive, and to ensure that we conform.
What I mean is that this temptation to join in is something cannot be avoided entirely by anyone who is not a saint. But even a saint's existence is precarious today. We are incessantly urged to join in, and for goodness' sake do not imagine that I am being even the least bit pharisaical in proclaiming that you should refrain from joining in.
Perhaps the situation is that if we start to reflect on what is involved in joining in, and if we are conscious of its consequences, that everything we do—everything that goes on in our minds to contribute to what is wrong—will be just a little different from what it otherwise would have been...
We need to hold fast to moral norms, to self-criticism, to the question of right and wrong, and at the same time to a sense of the fallibility of the authority that has the confidence to undertake such self-criticism. I am reluctant to use the term 'humanity' at this juncture since it is one of the expressions that reify and hence falsify crucial issues merely by speaking of them...
There has to be an element of unswerving persistence, of holding fast to what we think we have learnt from experience, and on the other hand, we need an element not just of self-criticism, but of criticism of that unyielding, inexorable something that sets itself up in us. In other words, what is needed above all is that consciousness of our own fallibility, and in that respect I would say that the element of self-reflection today has become the true heir to what used to be called moral categories...
If you find yourself in a committee—just assume you belong on a committee, and nowadays all of you will be a member of some committee or other, that is the name of the game—and hear someone saying 'My conscience forbids me to do this or that', you should make up your minds to treat such a person with the greatest possible distrust. Above all, when we ourselves feel tempted to say that we 'are making our stand and can do no other', we too deserve to be distrusted in precisely the same way, because this gesture contains exactly the same positing of self, the same self-assertion as positivity, which really just camouflages the principle of self-preservation, while simultaneously pretending to be the moral with which it also coincides.
On the other hand, resistance also means resistance to heteronomy in its concrete forms. Today this means the countless forms of morality that are imposed from outside. The form positive morality assumes today has escaped from its transparent theoretical underpinning, much as the link with religion has been cut. Moral imperatives used to be embedded in philosophy in a transparent rational way, but this is no longer the case. Because of these developments the forms of morality generally prevailing in society have assumed the evil and repressive complexion that always makes its appearance when concepts have been undermined. Their substance has evaporated, but people still cling to them, turning them into fetishes. I believe that the most drastic instances of this are to be found in the realm of sexual morality...
Such codes are a disaster because they literally recodify the objective spirit, that is, the embodiment of the opaque and for that reason inexorable and repressive norms to which people today are exposed. If the moral does have a proper point of departure today it must be the resolute and wholly uncompromising stand against all manifestations of this spirit that you can find today.
...The positive religions have now largely lost their power over people's minds, but what Nietzsche once said about them, all too innocently, has now become universal and has been extended to include objective spirit, cultural consciousness in general. As the religions have declined, their restrictive and repressive power has simply been transferred to the silent, wordless, groundless form of mind that pervades life in our society. We might say that wherever people strike moral poses nowadays and appeal to an idea of the good, this good, wherever it is not resistance to evil, turns out to be nothing but a cover it. And what I have in mind is not just individuals, but above all everything that is written, publicized, and that echoes through the mass media.
On the one hand, the hatred of evil in the name of the good has turned into a destructive force; on the other, the good, instead of regarding evil as a foil to itself, has become evil in its own right. And that is in effect the shape of ideology everywhere today.
While it is true that [National Socialism] has been decapitated politically speaking, and that is no longer able to attack minorities directly, it can be ready to pounce at any moment, to oppose any deviation and to smash it. Its legacy can be seen above all in the countless forms of anti-intellectualism. One that is by no means amongst the most harmless is the habit of blocking thought by ceaselessly confronting people with demands, without leaving them time to reflect: All right, so what are you going to do about it? What is happening then? Of what use is that to me? Who do you think will be interested in that idea? The elements of Kant's critique of reason that are still alive today probably amount to the critique of all such phenomena.
The transition to such a critique was in fact accomplished by Nietzsche. Nietzsche is uniquely important because he denounced the presence of the bad in the good and thereby also criticized the way in which the bad has assumed concrete form within the positive institutions of society, and above all, in the different ideologies [c.f. Althusser's ISAs]. That in my view far transcends the way in which every possible obscurantist and reactionary trend has based itself on certain propositions of his.
And the critique he provided has been far more subtle and specific than, for example, Marxist theory, which has condemned ideologies en bloc, but has never succeeded in enterning into their inner workings, their lies, as deeply as Nietzsche. The difficulty underlying all of this is of course the difficulty of a private ethics, that is, the behavior of the individual has long since ceased to link up with objective good and evil...
Of all the so-called great philosophers, I owe [Nietzsche] by far the greatest debt—more even than to Hegel... [But] I would criticize Nietzsche for having failed to go beyond the abstract negation of bourgeois morality, or, to put it differently, of a morality that has degenerated into ideology, into a mask which concealed a dirty business. I would add that his analysis of the individual moral problems he faced did not lead him to construct a statement of the good life. Instead, having proceeded in a summary fashion, he came up with a positive morality that is really nothing more than the negative mirror-image of the morality he had repudiated.
Even when we have understood what is wrong with a repressive ideology that has been intensified to the point of absurdity, it is not possible nowadays, in the age of the Culture Industry, simply to read off a true morality from it. A positive morality—he would not have called it that—cannot possibly exist in Nietzsche because of the absence of a substantive, objective spirit. In other words, given the state of society and the actual state reached by mind in that society, the norms Nietzsche opposed to it were not available in concrete terms and so had simply to be imposed from outside...
In reality, this very attempt on the part of a lone individual to set up new norms and new commandments based simply on his own subjective whim implies their impotence, their arbitrary and adventitious nature from the very outset. The ideals he has in mind—nobility [Vornehmheit], real freedom, the virtue of generosity, distance—all of these are wonderful values in themselves, but in an unfree society they are not capable of fulfillment, or at best can only be realized on Sunday afternoons, that is, in private life... in reality, these norms are all feudal values that cannot be directly realized in a bourgeois society. They are attempts to recapture lost values, would-be revivals, a Romantic ideal that is completely powerless under the rule of profit.
...[but Nietzsche perceived] that in a society that is based on force and exploitation, a violence that is unrationalized, frank and open and, if you like, 'expiatory violence' is more innocent than one that rationalizes itself as the good. Force only really becomes evil the moment it misunderstands itself as the gladius dei, the sword of God.
If [Nietzsche's] critique had been as consistent as it ought to have been, but isn't—because he too was in thrall to existing social conditions, because he was able to get to the bottom of what people had become, but was not able to get to the bottom of the society that made them what they were—it should have turned its gaze to the conditions that determine human beings and make them and each of us into what we are.
For example, Nietzsche coined the phrase "No herdsman and one herd". He may have succeeded in discovering a formula to describe what the ghastly slogan now calls "mass society", but that is not, as he imagined, the denunciation of the "Ultimate Man". It is a description of a completely functionalized and anonymous form of domination, that nevertheless rules over this herd with incomparably greater brutality than if there were a visible bellwether for them to follow...
I truly believe that [moral relativism] is in great measure a pseudo-problem—to use another much-abused term. For the positive nature of beliefs, of ideologies, that prevail here and now is not relative at all. They confront us at every moment as binding and absolute. And the criticism of these false absolutes—what the young Hegel called "the positive nature of prevailing moral beliefs—is much more urgent than the quest for some absolute values or other, fixed in eternity and hanging from the ceiling... the postulates and values that surface wherever people imagine that they have to overcome relativism, are the products of arbitrary acts, things that are freely posited, that are created and not natural, and thus they necessarily always succumb to the relativism they denounce...
Freedom, Kant thought, is literally and truly an idea. It necessarily presupposes the freedom of all, and cannot even be conceived as an isolated thing, that is, in the absence of social freedom. Existentialist ethics appears to many of you to be advanced. Motivated by its protest against the administered world, it made an absolute of spontaneity and of the human subject insofar as it has not been co-opted. That is the error of this ethics since precisely because this spontaneity lacks reflexivity and its separated from objective reality, objectivity re-enters it, just as Sartre has ended up placing himself as the service of Communist ideology. This means that either this spontaneity will be eliminated, if it is seriously intended, and buried beneath the great ideology, or it lapses into administration.
In short, anything that we can call morality today merges into the question of the organization of the world. We might even say that the quest for the good life is the quest for the right form of politics, if indeed such a right form of politics lay within the realm of what can be achieved today. I should like to thank you for your attentiveness and to wish you an enjoyable vacation."
January 30, 2023
Adorno's work in which the concept of morality is evaluated by considering it on the axis of society-individual, religion-individual and religion-society, in which Kant's moral philosophy is examined in this approach and the dynamics of the subject is accepted.
For today's people, society has become an element of oppression more than ever in history and is now a sanction mechanism whose norms are accepted as moral rules. Adorno focuses on a moral problem in which even monotheistic religions cannot fully dominate the moral positions of societies today, but remain the source of the guided, perceived moral norms of society. Like general moral norms, Adorno deals with the inadequacy of religious and moral norms, according to which positive religions have lost their validity, the rules of morality have collapsed, and the meaning of life lived has collapsed.
What is the right life, What is the wrong life? And it tells about the ideological reflections of Decency by addressing the tension between concepts and thoughts in a world where right and wrong have lost their objectivity. For example, according to the religious rule, theft is haram. Wrong. However, today, according to social morality, the mistake of the dominant one is accepted within the framework of the moral code. Another example is the topic of interest. This applies to many different situations, such as the tension of right and wrong.
Adono examines this moral immorality conceptually by addressing it in a philosophical language. It is quite a beautiful work. He is a bad thinker from the Frankfurt School, there is no bad book anyway.
For today's people, society has become an element of oppression more than ever in history and is now a sanction mechanism whose norms are accepted as moral rules. Adorno focuses on a moral problem in which even monotheistic religions cannot fully dominate the moral positions of societies today, but remain the source of the guided, perceived moral norms of society. Like general moral norms, Adorno deals with the inadequacy of religious and moral norms, according to which positive religions have lost their validity, the rules of morality have collapsed, and the meaning of life lived has collapsed.
What is the right life, What is the wrong life? And it tells about the ideological reflections of Decency by addressing the tension between concepts and thoughts in a world where right and wrong have lost their objectivity. For example, according to the religious rule, theft is haram. Wrong. However, today, according to social morality, the mistake of the dominant one is accepted within the framework of the moral code. Another example is the topic of interest. This applies to many different situations, such as the tension of right and wrong.
Adono examines this moral immorality conceptually by addressing it in a philosophical language. It is quite a beautiful work. He is a bad thinker from the Frankfurt School, there is no bad book anyway.
October 21, 2018
I thought it was a good critique of Kantian moral philosophy and a thorough understanding of the state of the problems in moral philosophy as a whole.
It is a bunch of lectures so there is more rambling then if the text was written and refined, but it was not too hard to follow. I am glad that I read this after the other philosophers or it would have probably been unintelligible.
It is a bunch of lectures so there is more rambling then if the text was written and refined, but it was not too hard to follow. I am glad that I read this after the other philosophers or it would have probably been unintelligible.
November 8, 2010
While Adorno's lectures don't come free of their own problems, this very fact moves in support of the arguments he makes in favor of critique and the preservation of contradiction in philosophy. This particular set of lectures will be most useful to readers of philosophy well-versed in Kant's ethical works, but still contains plenty of value for the uninitiated. I, for one, enjoyed Adorno's reflexive considerations of the problem of an Ethics of Conviction vs an Ethics of Responsibility, despite my relative ignorance of Kant's ideas (other than how they have filtered with distortions into popular consciousness). Be prepared for a dialectical bias, though, or you will be trying to find resolution where little, if any, exists.
September 23, 2021
I found this book to be most interesting at the very beginning and the very end, especially where Adorno says that slave-morality is the master-morality, in that it represents the values inculcated in the people by their oppressors. This short review will have to do for now, although it pales in comparison to the review I devised for this text when I wrote it in while still in a dream-state early this morning, Thursday, September 23rd. I plan to use this book when planning out my own philosophical writings and hope to incorporate more of Adorno, Brecht and Karl Krauss' writings in my future reading.
November 10, 2024
„Man kann nicht aus der Einsicht in das Falsche der repressiven Ideologie […] dekretorisch das Richtige herauslesen.“
„Wir mögen nicht wissen, was das absolut Gute, was die absolute Norm, ja auch nur, was der Mensch oder das Menschliche und die Humanität sei, aber was das Unmenschliche ist, das wissen wir sehr genau. Und ich würde sagen, daß der Ort der Moralphilosophie heute mehr in der konkreten Denunziation des Unmenschlichen als in der unverbindlichen und abstrakten Situierung etwa des Seins des Menschen zu suchen ist.“
„Wir mögen nicht wissen, was das absolut Gute, was die absolute Norm, ja auch nur, was der Mensch oder das Menschliche und die Humanität sei, aber was das Unmenschliche ist, das wissen wir sehr genau. Und ich würde sagen, daß der Ort der Moralphilosophie heute mehr in der konkreten Denunziation des Unmenschlichen als in der unverbindlichen und abstrakten Situierung etwa des Seins des Menschen zu suchen ist.“
December 22, 2021
A brilliant collection of lectures. An influential read for academic lovers of philosophy, however, it requires an advanced scope of knowledge. I recommend reading some of Neitsche and Kants more popularised texts before delving into Adorno.
Holistically, I do think this text should be critically engaged with, Adorno raises questions that are instrumental to political practices, but some of these critiques and suggestions need to be questioned further.
Holistically, I do think this text should be critically engaged with, Adorno raises questions that are instrumental to political practices, but some of these critiques and suggestions need to be questioned further.
January 3, 2019
Easier and more discursive than others of Adorno's works. Interesting to read in conjunction with Allen Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought for contrast, and Wood's Kant's Ethical Thought for comparison. But this covers a very wide range of topics and issues as well as moral thought. Good for getting started with the broad scope of Adorno's work.
October 8, 2017
Adorno keeps giving nothing except a style which just keeps rambling on and glimpses of anything of value are indeed just glimpses.
June 17, 2020
Beautiful read, but hard to keep track of the arguments and thoughts. Although now and then I found myself in great admiration of the depth of Adorno's insight.
to-keep-reference
February 23, 2016Adorno discute (rechaza por patológico) el "salto moral" que representa el "narcisismo ético" del imperativo categórico kantiano.
Cf. Visión de Paralaje Pág.75
Cf. Visión de Paralaje Pág.75
May 27, 2015
"You don't even live once."
-Kraus
-Kraus
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