Jefferson S.

Backong

From Rigidity to Receptivity:

Articulating an Ethics of Thinking via Nietzsche and Adorno

Both Nietzsche and Adorno in their writingsinvoked the importance of style as an ethical
gesture stemming from an emphatic receptivity to the role of negative thinking. They both
espoused that our orientation towards what are universally claimed by others as the truth or as
the important matter has remained deeply ingrained in us which now in turn forms our
normative, traditional, or cultural practices. Accordingly, in order for these normative/cultural
practices to be analyze and restructured, one must deconstruct it from the standpoint of, as
what Adorno calls it as the ‘damaged life’. Damaged life is our emphatic experience of human
suffering and this is where we distinguish a good life between the wrong states of things.
Damaged life is a form of captivity. It is in this damaged life that a human nature to dominate all
over things is overwhelmingly manifested in an administered society.
Nietzsche and Adorno’s ethics of thinking is directed towards the ethical orientation of
knowledge and philosophizing. Philosophy as I understand it is the creation of new concepts,
new ideas. It is a new way of looking at the world or having fresh perceptions regarding the
world, regarding knowledge, regarding philosophizing, an openness to what the future might
bring. We have always think or act in the direction that we have been taught to; that the world
is already laid out before us and all we have to do is follow it and it will show us the path and
spills it secrets to us. We have grown so accustomed to this that we tend to forget that learning
and thinking is not about what we already know, rather, it is all about what we do not yet know
and what we can create out of that which we do not yet know, an ethical thinking.