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A JOURNAL OF IDEAS AND CULTURE
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EDITOR
Jean P. Tan, Ateneo de Manila-University, Philippines contents
Volume XVI, Number 3
AssociATE EDITOR
December 2012
Remmon E. Barbaza, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

BoARD oF EDITORIAL ADVISERS

Luis S. David, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines

Founding Editor & Senior Adviser

Peter Beilharz, LaTrobe University, Australia

James Bernauer, Boston College, USA
Agnes Brazal, St. Vincent School ofTheology, Philippines ARTICLES
In Suk Cha, Seoul National University, South Korea
Andrew Cutrofello, Loyola University Chicago, USA
J. Neal C. Garcia, University of the Philippines, Philippines 1 BART VANDENABEELE
Leovino Ma. Garcia, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines Why Share a Language or Tradition?
John T. Giordano, Assumption University, Thailand Gadamer and Davidson in Dispute
Caroline S. Hau, Kyoto University, Japan
Trevor Hogan, LaTrobe University, Australia 22 RoY ALLAN B. ToLENTINO
Patricia Huntington, Arizona State University, USA Abraham's Silence
Rainier R. A. Ibana, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines
Lukas Kaelin, University of Vienna, Austria
James Keenan, Boston College, USA 54 J. PILAPIL JACOBO

Zosimo Lee, University of the Philippines, Philippines Diaphany: A Disseminar on Carapace

Peter Murphy, Monash University, Australia
Marjolein Oele, University of San Francisco, USA
Adriaan Peperzak, Loyola University Chicago, USA 78 PAoLO A. BoLANOS
Michael Reder, Munich School of Philosophy, Germany Philosophy from the Standpoint of Damaged Life:
Benilda Santos, Ateneo de Manila University, Philippines Adorno on the Ethical Character ofThinking

COPY EDITOR
Jacqueline Marie D . Jacinto

©2012 Ateneo de Manila University

fSSN 0118-5942
Philosophy from the Standpoint
of Damaged Life: Adorno
on the Ethical Character of Thinking
Paolo A. Bolaños
University of Santo Tomas
Philippines

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

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

thinking

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

Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 79

T here has been in recent years an earnest attempt to revive the spirit of
the first generation Frankfurt School through the works of the most
dynamic of its members, Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969). This revival has
amassed a significant body of secondary literature which is still currently
growing in number. Nonetheless, little work on Adorno has been done
here in the Philippines, let alone on the critical theory of the Frankfurt
School. This paper is part of a larger project of introducing the philosophic
significance of Frankfurt School critical theory to various academic circles
in the Philippines. In particular, I will attempt to do this by presenting a
reconstruction of Adorno’s “philosophy from the standpoint of damaged
life”—a rhetorical way of rethinking the normative force of the philosophical
enterprise after, or in the face of, the trauma of Auschwitz. My underlying
assumption is that Adorno evinces a kind of ethical standpoint that is
normatively1 informed by the “wrong state of things” in society, and that our
entry point, as intellectuals or philosophers, is our critical outlook on the
language of our discourse—that is to say, the language of philosophy, and
how it profoundly shapes the way we think of and treat the objective world
and our social relationships.
According to Adorno, the experience of Auschwitz has irrevocably
changed philosophy. Auschwitz, as the ultimate expression of the pathologies
of modernity, has damaged life—prompting Adorno to write in Prismen,
“to write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.”2 Adorno extends this critique
of art or poetry to the language of philosophy, for art and philosophy are
our creative ways of making sense of the world we live in. Specifically,
philosophy is a discourse that is characterized by the creation of ideas. Is the
discourse of creating ideas still possible after Auschwitz, or has Auschwitz
shown philosophers complicitous with or their ideas ineffectual in the face of
the destruction of human life? If it is indeed still possible, philosophy from
the standpoint of damaged life would be anything but innocent! I will argue
that far from being a pessimistic stance, Adorno’s position is an emphatic
rethinking of the role of philosophy in a life that is seemingly devoid of
hope—especially the hope of pre-modern metaphysics—and a recasting of
philosophical thinking as a materially constituted ethics that is aware of its
very own reflexivity and aporias. I suggest, in the end, that the revival of
hope could be reinforced by invoking Ernst Bloch’s notion of “anticipatory
consciousness,” a kind of future-oriented thinking which revivifies our

1
The term “normative,” as it is used in this paper, refers to societal conditions, either
emancipatory or oppressive, that affect how we think and live; these are also the very conditions that
effectuate within us, especially in social groups, the instinct to challenge oppressive conditions.
2
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber (Massachusetts: MIT
Press, 1967), 34.
80 Paolo A. Bolaños

utopian energies that condition philosophy’s revaluation and rethinking of

the possibility of a “just life.”

Guilt and the Materiality of Philosophy

If we follow Adorno, our inquiry, albeit vexed, about the role of
philosophy in a post-Auschwitz era is indeed a deeply socio-ethical one. This
theme of the role of philosophy “after Auschwitz” has been taken up by Jay
M. Bernstein and Lambert Zuidervaart, and both commentators offer their
individual readings of the last section of Negative Dialectics, “Meditations
on Metaphysics.” They both highlight Adorno’s attempt to revive, or better
yet revise, the role of metaphysics after an event like Auschwitz. Bernstein
and Zuidervaart, the latter more emphatically, claim that Adorno’s intention
is the reflection of the possibility of recasting the meaning-giving capacity
of metaphysics within the context of social reality, while abandoning its
putative ahistoricality.3 Philosophy, for Adorno, is indeed a profoundly
historical endeavor. What this means, roughly, is that philosophical thinking
could be understood, on the one hand, as a reflective engagement with social,
political, and historical conditions, and, on the other hand, a dialectical
interaction between philosophical presuppositions and social reality. The
facticity of philosophical thinking is perhaps the main presupposition of the
early members of the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, and Marcuse).
What this ultimately implies for the first generation Frankfurt School is the
reorientation of philosophy into the reality of life.
Having mentioned what Bernstein and Zuidervaart outline as the
intention of Adorno in the last section of Negative Dialectics—namely, the
move from metaphysical ahistoricality to a metaphysics oriented in social
reality—it is necessary, then, to qualify what kind of metaphysics Adorno
criticizes. The revision of metaphysics entails, according to Bernstein, an
abandonment of “what was once upon a time understood as providing life
with just a meaning beyond its immanent terms of reference.”4 Rather,
metaphysics should be transformed in order to properly respond to social
reality. This is, however, the role that Adorno ascribes to philosophy as a
whole. Philosophy, therefore, should be materially constituted, a view which
owes itself to a staunch critique of essentialist philosophy or “traditional
metaphysics,” which ironically finds its way in 20th century positivism,
despite the latter’s chide against the former. “Traditional metaphysics,” in

3
See Jay M. Berstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 371–414; and Lambert Zuidervaart, Social Philosophy after Adorno (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 48–76.
4
Bersntein, Adorno, 414.
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 81

this specific sense, could be understood, to follow Max Horkheimer, as the

“integration of all knowable reality into a unified whole; and the attempt
to provide an ultimate and intrinsic foundation for the universal validity of
knowledge.”5 It is in this context that we understand the basic framework of
traditional metaphysics as “essentialist”; and its “positive” identification of
an ultimate and intrinsic foundation renders it positivistic, if by positivism
we mean an attitude of dogmatic assertiveness guaranteed by either the
categories of essentialist ontology (I believe Neo-Scholastic Thomism falls
under this category) or the putative exactness of the scientific method,
as the logical positivists believed. However, to be more precise, Adorno’s
worry regarding this kind of “traditional” or “positivistic” philosophizing
is its socio-politico-historical naïveté. If we were to reference instances of
philosophical traditions that, for Adorno, are socially and politically naïve,
then his critique of logical positivism and the phenomenology of Heidegger
could be cited. In his essay, “Why Still Philosophy?,” Adorno points at
the great divide between two opposing camps in 20th century philosophy
(now referred to as the Analytic and Continental divide): one is inspired
by logical positivism, initiated by the Vienna Circle, which later on became
dominant in the Anglo-Saxon tradition; and the other is stimulated by
the ideas of Martin Heidegger, which became influential in Germany and
France. Adorno argues that both camps are problematic in their flight from
societal concerns. Both traditions seem to postpone apprehending the status
of philosophy under present societal conditions. In other words, philosophy
succumbs to naïveté and thereby fails to criticize itself. Adorno writes: “In
a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social
order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option
remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naivety reproduces itself
incessantly and disastrously.”6
Philosophers participate in this naïveté by washing their hands of
dirt, that is, by deliberately isolating themselves from the historical and
sociological forces that make philosophizing possible in the first place.
Philosophy blindly justifies its distance from the social by invoking its self-
proclaimed appellation from its mythical past; according to Adorno, this
“was passed down from the idea of philosophia perennis—that philosophy
is the vested bearer of eternal truth.”7 Philosophers blindly submit to this
mythical assumption. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the gesture

5
Max Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. (New
York: Continuum, 1989), 11.
6
Theodor W. Adorno, “Why Still Philosophy?,” in Critical Models: Interventions and
Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 12.
7
Ibid., 15.
82 Paolo A. Bolaños

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

8
Theodor W. Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will
(London: Routledge, 2003), 53, 54.
9
Ibid., 5.
10
Ibid., 89.
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 83

The lacuna in logical positivism and fundamental ontology that Adorno

identifies speaks of these traditions’ obliviousness towards the normativity
and materiality of the language of philosophy. Such is the case despite the fact
that both traditions claim to have privileged language above everything else.
The end result of this privileging, however, is the reification of the language
of philosophy as opposed to its self-understanding. Adorno’s critique
ultimately spells the difference between “materialism” and “idealism,” and,
more importantly, the valorization of the former. In his programmatic
collection of essays, Critical Theory, Horkheimer remarks:
“Materialism” . . . does not mean simply a questionable
view of such a reality as such; it stands also for a whole
series of ideas and practical attitudes. . . . it is true that the
measure in which general points of view become decisive
for action depends on the agent’s concrete situation at any
given moment. . . . for the materialist, judgments which
embrace all reality are always questionable and not very
important, because far removed from the kind of activity
which generated them.11
Adorno, speaks of this materiality of philosophy more specifically in Negative
Dialectics, as a “new categorical imperative,”12 which he reiterates in his
Metaphysics: Concept and Problems in the following words:
Metaphysics has been changed in its innermost motifs. I
could, if you like, give this a moral-philosophical twist and
say that Hitler has placed a new imperative on us: that,
quite simply, Auschwitz should not be repeated and that
nothing like it should ever exist again. It is impossible to
found this imperative on logic—it has that in common
with the Kantian imperative. . . . The extra-logical element
to which I am appealing—to make this quite clear and to
rule out irrationalism—is really what is conjured away by
philosophy and rationalism. But what they conjure away
is not irrational moments or values, as is claimed, but the
converse: it is quite simply the moment of aversion to the
inflicting of physical pain on what Brecht once called the
torturable body of any person.13

11
Horkheimer, Critical Theory, 16–20.
12
Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1999),
365.
13
Theodor W. Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2001), 116.
84 Paolo A. Bolaños

Here, Adorno strikes an implicitly Spinozist move—that the “body”

is the fulcrum upon which thinking rests, notwithstanding, of course,
the parallelism, as opposed to the dualism, of mind and body. Adorno
never declared himself to be a Spinozist, but we are reminded of Spinoza’s
observation in the Ethics, “The human mind is capable of perceiving a great
number of things, and is so in proportion as its body is capable of receiving a
great number of impressions,”14 which I take to be comparable with Adorno’s
own remark in Negative Dialectics, “All mental things are modified physical
impulses.”15 Adorno further writes in Metaphysics: Concept and Problems:
If I say to you that the true basis of morality is to be
found in bodily feeling, in identification with unbearble
pain, I am showing you from a different side something
which I earlier tried to indicate in a far more abstract form.
It is that morality, that which can be called moral, i.e.,
the demand for right living, lives on in openly materialist
motifs. The metaphysical principle of the injuction that
“Thou shalt not inflict pain”—and this injuction is a
metaphysical principle pointing beyond mere facticity—
can find its justification only in the recourse to material
reality, to corporeal, physical reality, and not to its opposite
pole, the pure idea.16
With this, Adorno declares that metaphysics “has slipped into material
existence.”17 As philosophers, however, we are not in a “privileged position”
to speak “realistically” of the suffering of others, precisely because the
“metaphysical” language of our discourse is far removed from the materiality
of suffering. Rather, our standpoint, according to Adorno, is that of “guilt.”
To quote him once more:
Guilt reproduces itself in each of us . . . since we cannot
possibly remain fully conscious of this connection at
the very moment of our waking lives. If we . . . knew at
every moment what has and how our own existence is
interwoven with calamity, even if we have done nothing
wrong, simply by having neglected, through fear, to help
other people at a crucial moment, for example—a situation

14
Benedict de Spinoza, proposition XIV in part II of Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York:
Prometheus Books, 1989).
15
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 202.
16
Adorno, Metaphysics, 116–17.
17
Ibid., 117.
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 85

very familiar to me from the time of the Third Reich—if

one were fully aware of all these things at every moment,
one would really be unable to live. One is pushed, as it
were, into forgetfulness, which is already a form of guilt.
By failing to be aware at every moment of what threatens
and what has happened, one also contributes to it; one
resists it too little; and it can be repeated and restrained at
any moment.18
But guilt is, nevertheless, merely an aftereffect. It is by no means a
privileged position of philosophical thought. Moreover, the guilt of philosophy
worsens if, faced with the utter brutality of Nazi atrocities, it recoils to the
safe house of metaphysical thought experiments. The resistance to guilt is
not the resistance to the horror of Auschwitz, but, rather, the exacerbation of
violence—a case of adding insult to injury! Hence, the only proper response
of philosophy/metaphysics to damaged life is an ethical one informed
by guilt. Adorno does not offer us a positive action-specific prescription,
but, rather, he repeats again and again the new imperative wrought by the
experience of Auschwitz: the self-critique of philosophy, specifically of its
atemporal stance, and the reorientation of philosophy towards the materiality
of thinking. In other words, the only way for philosophy to overcome its
imminent death is by reorienting itself in history by, first, a revaluation of its
own language—that is to say, subjecting its presuppositions and aims to self-
critique so that it may avoid the reified language of logical positivism and
the false sacrosanctity of the jargon of fundamental ontology. The painful
experience of Auschwitz forces philosophy to step down from its imagined
ivory tower and subject itself to self-critique. This self-critique should be
an exposition of the somewhat naïve innocence of traditional philosophy,
especially the more metaphysically informed ones. If philosophy intends to
survive after all these, then it has to reckon with its own guilt, replacing its
putative, sanitized, reified, or sacrosanct language with a more dialectically
informed one.
The trauma of Auschwitz renders life seemingly unlivable. The unlivable
ambience—the stench of death, albeit just a memory, precisely as memory
haunts us with guilt or intensifies our guilt—of the post-Auschwitz world
demands a revaluation of our philosophical presuppositions, a reassessment
of our metaphysical biases, by rethinking such presuppositions against
the reality of the suffering of others. Bernstein notes that this is precisely
the normative force of Adorno’s admonition which “already includes a

18
Ibid., 113.
86 Paolo A. Bolaños

highly elaborated specification of the form of reasoning that Adorno thinks

is capable of responding to the exigencies of an event like Auschwitz.”19
Bernstein adds that a response to an event like Auschwitz entails a revision
of the relation between “universal” and “particular,” wherein the particular
becomes the basis of the universal.20 In the case of Auschwitz, or any similar
atrocity, “the sufferings of others are among those particulars that have
remained unacknowledged by universalistic reason.” As such, philosophy’s
feeling of guilt becomes “orientational for ethical reflection.”21
Although conditioned by different social and political circumstances and
although these events pale in comparison with the gravity and systematic
precision of what were done (e.g., systematic profiling, forced labor, human
experimentation, and genocide) in Nazi concentration camps, such as
Auschwitz, I would argue that horrible events like the Mendiola massacre on
January 22, 1987, and the Ampatuan massacre (in Maguindanao, Mindanao)
on November 23, 2009, should strike the same ethical chord within us
Filipino intellectuals—lest we forget!22 Moreover, the Gulag labor camps in
the Soviet Union between 1930 to 1960 and, more recently, the American-
run Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention camp in
Cuba are places of extrajudicial punishments, such as, forced unpaid labor,
torture of varying kinds, sexual assault, and even medical experimentation.23
These places resonate with the dismal state and the thoroughly systematic
organization of Auschwitz.

19
Jay M. Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies: Versions of Ethics ‘after Auschwitz,’’’ New
German Critique 97, 33, no. 1 (2006): 31.
20
See ibid.
21
Bernstein, “Intact and Fragmented Bodies,” 31.
22
In the recent history of the Philippines, the 1987 Mendiola Massacre and the 2009
Maguindanao Massacre are perhaps examples of the “wrong state of things” in the Philippine context.
The Mendiola Massacre or Black Thursday took place in January 22, 1987, along Mendiola Street in
Manila adjacent the Malacañan Palace, where militant farmers who marched to Malacañan to protest
the problematic state of land reform in the country were violently attacked by the government’s anti-
riot forces. Around thirteen protesters were killed and numerous others wounded as government
forces open fired. Meanwhile, the Maguidanao Massacre, believed to have been perpetrated by the
Ampatuan clan and a private army headed by Andal Ampatuan, Sr., happened on November 23,
2009. In a desperate attempt to stop Esmael Mangudadatu from filing his certificate of candidacy for
the mayoral race the following year, the perpetrators attacked, abducted, and mercilessly killed people
who joined his convoy—which included a group of journalists, lawyers, and supporters, including
Mangudadatu’s wife and two sisters. A total of 57 deaths were reported after the carcasses were retrieved
from a manmade mass grave. See “Mendiola Massacre,” GMA News Online, January 22, 2008, http://
www.gmanetwork.com/news/story/77487/news/mendiola-massacre, accessed December 10, 2012;
and “They Own the People: The Ampatuans, State-Backed Militias, and Killings in the Southern
Philippines,” Human Rights Watch, November 16, 2010, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2010/11/17
/they-own-people, accessed December 10, 2012.
23
Henry A. Giroux recounts the events that transpired in Abu Ghraib in 2003 and relates it to the
prospects of education, an inflection of Adorno’s question of the possibility of poetry after Auschwitz.
See “What Might Education Mean After Abu Ghraib: Revisiting Adorno’s Politics of Education,”
Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24, no. 1 (2004).
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 87

An event like Auschwitz interrupts the calmness of metaphysical thinking,

punctures the bubble of reason, and ultimately destroys any epistemic
and moral justifications for thought and action we have hitherto derived
from the silver linings of our philosophical assumptions. The comfortable
bourgeois notion of the “good life” is put into question, and any hope for a
utopia is rendered questionable because it is indifferent to the particularity of
suffering. But, as I will indicate in the last section of the paper, thinking about
utopia becomes possible again once thinking or philosophy is radicalized by
damaged life. The traumatic memory of the past is something that we have
to work through; here Adorno is calling out to philosophers: “The attitude
that everything should be forgotten and forgiven . . . is practiced by those
party supporters who committed the injustice.”24 The death of philosophy
is spelled out in this bourgeois attitude of forgetfulness. The imperative that
philosophy would have to reckon with is the courage “of staring into the
unsayable,” to borrow Giorgio Agamben’s turn of phrase, “even at the risk of
discovering that what evil knows of itself, we can easily find in ourselves.”25
The response of a remote witness, as he is confronted by the abject character of
a Mendiola or Maguindanao Massacre, is either one of ethical significance or
sheer indifference. Unfortunately, philosophical discourse in the Philippines
seems to exhibit the very naïveté of which Adorno accuses logical positivism
and fundamental ontology, as it remains content with giving voice to the
“invisible” (sacred?) essence of the human person, while being indifferent to
the normative force of the wrong state of things in society. The bourgeois
character of philosophical discourse in the Philippines fails to give voice to
the unsayable; the unsayable ironically is the most visible.

Reorienting Our Ethical Sensibility

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

24
Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann
(California: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3.
25
Giorgo Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-
Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 33.
26
See Theodor W. Adorno, part one of Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.
F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 2005).
88 Paolo A. Bolaños

“I believe that only by making this situation a matter of consciousness—

rather than covering it up with sticking plaster—will it be possible to create
the conditions in which we can properly formulate questions about how we
should lead our lives today.”27
To stare at Auschwitz in the face and, more importantly, to be changed
by the horrendous sight is the painful, yet ethical, demand of “justice”
overdue—our bourgeois indifference, then, is the worst kind of injustice. If
philosophy could still promise a utopia amidst “the wrong state of things,”28
it “would consist in resistance to the forms of the bad life that have been
seen through and critically dissected by the most progressive minds. Other
than this negative prescription no guidance can really be envisaged.”29 The
negativity of Adorno’s ethical stance is partly a response to the positive
character of transcendental moral philosophy envisaged most prominently
in Kantianism. It should be noted, however, that Adorno is by no means
throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he criticizes Kant, as he is
more wary of the implications of the Kantian deontological position than
abandoning Kant’s philosophy wholesale. A moral philosophy grounded in
an abstract notion of “duty” as absolute—that is, a priori30—guarantor of
human agency seems to undermine the facticity and contingency of human
conduct. Adorno also maintains that, “the obligation Kant postulates as
absolute, as formally absolute, is not itself unconditioned, as it seems to be
in his work, but contingent.”31 The contingency of duty or obligation means
that it can be substantively conditioned by historical factors. For instance,
the reign of Hitler became catastrophic partly because Hitler himself was able
to cunningly sway the dutiful, law abiding, middle-class citizens of Germany
into embracing the ideals of the Nazi Party. A specific case in point is Adolf
Eichmann’s invocation of Kant’s categorical imperative as justification for
his allegiance to the Nazi party and its ideals during his trial in Israel in
1961. This reveals that one need not be a psychopath in order to proliferate
evil, one could be as “normal” as Eichmann who claimed to have dutifully
followed the orders of his superiors.32 The genius of Hitler’s command was

27
Theodor W. Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2001), 167.
28
See Adorno, Negative Dialectics.
29
Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 167–68.
30
Kant says: “pure practical laws . . . are prescribed to us not in an empirically conditioned but
in an absolute manner, would be products of pure reason. Such are the moral laws; and these alone,
therefore, belong to the practical employment of reason, and allow of a canon.” Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 632.
31
Adorno, Problems of Moral Philosophy, 82–83.
32
Cf. Hannah Arendt, “Duties of a Law-Abiding Citizen,” in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on
the Banality of Evil (New York: The Viking Press, 1964), 135–37.
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 89

that he was able to both activate and empower the nationalistic impulse of
the dutiful Germans, and at the same time deceive their consciousness—
this is, indeed, “reason” crippling reason that results in a kind of collective
schizophrenia. From a philosophical standpoint, the Kantian emphasis on
universal duty manifests indifference to the materiality of experience.
In his Negative Dialectics, Adorno attempts to overcome the Kantian
model by penning descriptive-figurative statements which speak of the
visceral, as opposed to a purely rational and sanitized, ground of the ethical
impulse. Allow me to quote a few passages:
In the concentration camps it was no longer an individual
who died, but a specimen—this is a fact bound to affect
the dying of those who escaped the administrative
measure.33

No man should be tortured; there should be no

concentration camps . . . the humanity of civilization is
inhumane . . . . The lines are true as an impulse, as a reaction
to the news that torture if going on somewhere.34

We criticize morality by criticizing the extension of the

logic of consistency to the conduct of men; this is where
the stringent logic of consistency becomes an organ of
unfreedom.35
In these passages, Adorno presents a materialist ethical response grounded
in the immediacy of concrete instances. This is a deliberate distanciation
from the attempt of Kant to rationalize ethical responses. In other words,
Kant’s notion of “practical reason” remains an inert metaphysical silver
lining if it could not be realized in actual concrete situations. In this sense,
Adorno, one may perhaps conjecture, is closer to a Humean account of
ethical sensibility—that emotion, and not reason, is the basis of ethical
response.36 Adorno, therefore, has an ambivalent relation to the Kantian
procedure, as he speaks about the Kantian “block,” namely, “the chasm of
the alienation of human beings from one another, and the alienation of

33
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 362.
34
Ibid., 285.
35
Ibid., 285–86.
36
We are, of course, reminded here by David Hume’s argument, “that reason alone can never be
a motive to any action of the will,” and that, reason “can never oppose passion in the direction of the
will.” See A Treatise of Human Nature, in Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. by Henry D. Aiken
(New York: Hafner Press, 1948), 23.
90 Paolo A. Bolaños

human beings from the world of things.”37 The chasm is the split between
the Kantian subject and society. The Kantian position could be revised and
reinforced by the reorientation of our ethical sensibility in the real, painful,
experience of injustice. Justice remains an abstract principle if injustice is not
acknowledged.
The experience, however, is dialectical, or to be more precise, the
experience is emphatically negative and gut-wrenching. This is the new
ethical imperative: to experience “damaged life”! In an essay entitled
“Education after Auschwitz,” Adorno bemoans the fact that even education
is in crisis. Because of the wrong state of things, education is unable to revive
our confidence in ideals, such as, love and sympathy with the suffering of
others. Even worse is the tendency of education to unwittingly contribute to
the ebb of critical consciousness. Moreover, Adorno singles out the failure of
Christian education to curb the “coldness” of the bourgeois because it resorts
to transcendent moralizing and indoctrination instead of reaching “into the
societal order that produces and reproduces that coldness.”38 The only way,
Adorno maintains, “is to bring coldness to the consciousness of itself, of the
reasons why it arose.”39

Epilogue: Gesturing towards Anticipatory Consciousness

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

37
Theodor W. Adorno, Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” trans. Rodney Livingstone (California:
Stanford University Press, 2001), 174.
38
Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz?, 31.
39
Ibid.
40
See Ernst Bloch, part two of The Principle of Hope, vol. I, trans. Neville Plaice et al. (Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1995).
Budhi 16.3 (2012): 78–93. 91

future state of affairs.41 Rather, anticipatory consciousness is fundamentally

provisionary as it merely conditions the possibility of thinking the not yet.
Adorno maintains the ambiguity of utopia, as “a togertherness of diversity.”42
Ultimately, what this means for philosophy is its very own self-reflection
amidst the experience of guilt in order for it to reflect on the normative
meaning of the good/just life, where diversity and tolerance are the normative
bases of the good life, however vaguely construed. We may perhaps recall
here an actual agreement between Adorno and Bloch on the substantive, yet
provisionary, character of utopia, that is to say, the possibility of imagining
“the transformation of the totality” (Adorno) and the realization that
“something’s missing” (Bloch) in the current state of affairs of society.43
In recasting philosophy in the light of utopia, Adorno deliberately avoids
relapsing to prescribing a “positivistic” metaphysics. In the face of ultimate
injustice, “our feelings,” writes Adorno, “resist any claim of the positivity
of existence as sanctimonious, as wrongdoing the victims.”44 It is in this
sense that immutable essences of traditional metaphysics can no longer be
construed as “true,” and the momentary, yet visceral, reality of injustice
as mere “appearance.”45 Is is all the more so because, it “appears,” to view
squarely/to recognize/to acknowledge the sight of the tortured body and
the senselessness of death becomes the new ethical imperative, as Adorno
emphatically points out. In relation to this revalued ethical context of
philosophical thinking, of thinking that is informed by the testimony of the
senses, it is difficult to miss the ethico-political force of Walter Benjamin’s
seemingly confounding words in relation to Adorno’s ethical response to
damaged life reconstructed above: “only for the sake of the hopeless ones
have we been given hope.”46 With this, we may rethink—revaluate—the
language of philosophy and activate the profoundly ethical character of
thinking.

41
Compare this to comments made by Gerhard Richter on Bloch’s aesthetics of music, in Thought-
Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (California: Stanford University Press,
2007), 77–78.
42
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 150.
43
See Ernst Bloch, “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W.
Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing,” in The Utopian Function of Art and Literature:
Selected Essays, trans. Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1988).
44
Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 361.
45
Ibid.
46
Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. I (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press,
1996), 356.
92 Paolo A. Bolaños

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