Adorno, Theodor Negative Dialectics 3a Models Freedom

[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

for which it must hope, could not be merely its own, it would have to be that of the
whole. The critique of the individuated leads beyond the category of freedom insofar as
this is created in the image of what is unfreely individuated. The contradiction, that no
freedom of will and thus no morality can be proclaimed for the sphere of the
individuated, while without them not even the life of the species can be preserved, is not
to be settled through the imposition of so-called values. Its heteronomous posited being,
the Nietzschean new commandments, would be the opposite of freedom. It need not
however remain, what it originated from and what it was. Rather what matures in the
innervation of social compulsion in the conscience, along with the resistance against the
social authority, which critically measures this by its own principles, is a potential which
would get rid of compulsion. The critique of the conscience envisions the salvation of
such potential, only not in the psychological realm but in the objectivity of a reconciled
life among the free. If Kantian morality ultimately converges, apparently against its
rigorous claim to autonomy, with the ethics of goods, then what it maintains therein is the
juridical truth of the break, which can be bridged by no conceptual synthesis, between the
social ideal and the subjective one of self-preserving reason. The reproach, that subjective
reason puts on airs as an absolute in the objectivity of moral law, would be subaltern.
Kant expresses, fallibly and distortedly, what ought indeed to be demanded from society.
Such objectivity is not to be translated into the subjective sphere, that of psychology and
that of rationality, but will continue to exist for good and ill separated from it, until the
particular and general interest really and truly concord. The conscience is the mark of
shame of unfree society. The arcanum of his philosophy was necessarily hidden from
Kant: that the subject, in order to be able to constitute objectivity or objectivate itself in
the act, as he entrusted it, must always for its part be something objective. The
transcendental subject, the pure reason which objectively interprets itself, is haunted by
the preponderance of the object, without which, as a moment, even the Kantian
objectivating achievements of the subject would not be. His concept of subjectivity has at
the core apersonal features. Even the personality of the subject, what is immediate to this,
what is nearest, most certain, is something mediated. No ego-consciousness without
society, just as no society is beyond its individuals. The postulates of practical reason,
which transcend the subject, God, freedom, immortality, imply the critique of the
categorical imperative, that of pure subjective reason. Without those postulates it could
not even be thought, however much Kant avers to the contrary; there is nothing good
without hope.
Against Personalism 272-275
The nominalistic tendency entices thought, which may not renounce the protection of
morality in view of the immediate violence breaking out everywhere, to anchor morality
in the person like an indestructible good. Freedom, which would arise solely in the
institution of a free society, is sought there, where the institution of the existing one
denies it, in each individual, who needs it, but does not guarantee it, as they are.
Reflection on society does not occur in ethical personalism any more than that on the
person itself. Once this latter is torn completely from the universal, then it is not capable
of constituting anything universal either; it is then drawn in secret from existing forms of
domination. In the pre-fascist era personalism and the twaddle about bonds were hardly
averse to sharing the platform of irrationality. The person, as something absolute, negates
the universality which is supposed to be read out of it, and yields its threadbare legal title
to caprice. Its charisma is borrowed from the irresistibility of the universal, while it,
losing faith in its legitimacy, withdraws into itself in the privation of thought. Its
principle, the unshakeable unity which makes out its selfness defiantly repeats
domination in the subject. The person is the historically tied knot, which is to be loosened
out of freedom, not perpetuated; the old bane of the universal, ensconced in the
particular. Anything moral which is deduced from it remains as accidental as immediate
existence [Existenz]. Otherwise than in Kant s old-fashioned talk of personality, the
person became a tautology for those, who indeed were left nothing more than the
nonconceptual here-and-now of their existence. The transcendence which many neo-
ontologists hope from the person, exalts solely their consciousness. This latter would
however not be without that universal, which the recourse to the person would like to
exclude as an ethical ground. That is why the concept of the person as well as its variants,
for example the I-you relation, have taken on the oily tone of a theology lacking
credibility. As little as the concept of a right human being can be presumed in advance, so
little would it resemble the person, the sanctified duplicate of its own self-preservation. In
the philosophy of history that concept presupposes the subject objectivated into the
character on the one hand, as assuredly as its disassembly [Zerfall] on the other hand. The
consummated ego-weakness, the transition of the subjects into passive and atomistic,
reflex-based behavior, is at the same time the judgement which the person deserved, in
which the economic principle of appropriation has become anthropological. What could
be thought in human beings as the intelligible character, is not the persona [Personhafte]
in them, but how they distinguish themselves from their existence. In the person this
distinction necessarily appears as what is non-identical. Every human impulse contradicts
the unity of what harbors it; every impulse for the better is not only, in Kantian terms,
reason, but before this also stupidity. Human beings are human only where they do not
act as persons and are not at all posited as such; what is diffuse in nature, in which they
are not persons, resembles the delineation of an intelligible being, that self, which would
be delivered from the ego; contemporary art innervates something of this. The subject is [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

Linki