Wrong life/ ethical life : reason, ethics and history in Adorno

Abstract

This thesis aims to provide an interpretation and defence of Adorno’s claim that ‘Wrong life cannot be lived rightly’. The central theme of this interpretation is that Adorno’s claim expresses an antinomy between Kantian and Hegelian ethics, interpreting ‘Wrong Life’ as an inversion of Hegelian ‘Ethical Life’. For Hegel, moral subjectivity is historically achieved, made possible within enabling social structures and institutions that give positive content to individual freedom. Adorno accepts central Hegelian insights while also subjecting them to critical scrutiny in light of post-19th century historical events and totalising social formations, characterised by the embeddedness of instrumental reason, which constitutes the ‘Wrong Life’ grounding and reproduced at the level of individual living. Rather than engaging in a persistent dialogue with Hegel’s work, the juxtaposition between ‘Wrong Life’ and ‘Ethical Life’ is transfigured into the broader central argument that any account of moral philosophy must pass through the philosophy of history, which itself must tarry seriously with what history does to the subject. I begin by reconstructing ‘instrumental reason’ in Weber and Horkheimer, two of Adorno’s philosophical interlocutors whose influence can often be taken for granted. Following a rearticulation in the language of Dialectic of Enlightenment, ‘Wrong Life’ is characterised in terms of the embeddedness of instrumental rationality in objective conditions, demonstrated through Auschwitz, the exchange-relationship and Davis’ account of the modern prison. I then interpret Adorno’s claim in Minima Moralia in light of this contextualisation before exploring its return with reference to Kant and Hegel in his later work. Finally, I consider Adorno’s critique of moral philosophy with respect to his concept of the ‘addendum’ and explore his notion of the ‘guilt context’ in terms of his relationship to Nietzschean nihilism and Hegel’s philosophy of history, the last of which Adorno says must both be ‘construed and denied’.