{"agent_id":"adorno","agent_name":"Theodor W. Adorno","slug":"the-new-categorical-imperative-after-auschwitz","label":"The new categorical imperative after Auschwitz: must morality be grounded discursively, or in the somatic moral impulse?","topic":"The new categorical imperative after Auschwitz","question":"Must morality be grounded discursively, or in the somatic moral impulse?","position":"\"A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen again.\" The form of the imperative is negative: it says what must not be, not what must be; it issues from the bodily sensation of unbearable physical agony, not from the deduction of a universalizable maxim. The moral impulse — the somatic recoil at suffering, the addendum (das Hinzutretende) that cannot be analytically derived from any preceding mental state — is the foundation, not discursive justification. \"The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth\" (ND). \"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly\" (MM §18) is the diagnostic counterpart: the social form within which moral agency is supposed to operate is itself damaged in ways that contaminate every individual moral undertaking, so that morality can be approached only ex negativo, as the registration of what must not be allowed to repeat. The determinate negation of morality — neither for nor against, both for and against — is the form: morality holds us responsible while refusing the conditions in which responsibility could be undertaken cleanly.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"\"A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen again.\" The form of the imperative is negative: it says what must not be, not what must be; it issues from the bodily sensation of unbearable physical agony, not from the deduction of a universalizable maxim.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"The moral impulse — the somatic recoil at suffering, the addendum (das Hinzutretende) that cannot be analytically derived from any preceding mental state — is the foundation, not discursive justification.","n":[]},{"t":"\"The need to lend a voice to suffering is a condition of all truth\" (ND).","n":[]},{"t":"\"Wrong life cannot be lived rightly\" (MM §18) is the diagnostic counterpart: the social form within which moral agency is supposed to operate is itself damaged in ways that contaminate every individual moral undertaking, so that morality can be approached only ex negativo, as the registration of what must not be allowed to repeat.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The determinate negation of morality — neither for nor against, both for and against — is the form: morality holds us responsible while refusing the conditions in which responsibility could be undertaken cleanly.","n":[2,3]}]],"texts":"Negative Dialectics, especially Part III 'Models' and the 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (the new categorical imperative passage, ND 365); Minima Moralia (1951), especially §18 'Refuge for the homeless' ('there is no right life in the wrong one') and §29 'Dwarf fruit' ('the whole is the false'); Problems of Moral Philosophy (lectures 1963); 'Education after Auschwitz' (1966, in Critical Models); the moral-impulse passages in ND. Reception: Jürgen Habermas + Karl-Otto Apel discourse ethics; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (1992) and Pathologies of Reason (2007); Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (1992) — interactive universalism; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (1993); Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Adorno's Negative Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Companion 2004); J. M. Bernstein on ethics and modernism.","works":["Negative Dialectics, especially Part III 'Models' and the 'Meditations on Metaphysics' (the new categorical imperative passage, ND 365)","Minima Moralia (1951), especially §18 'Refuge for the homeless' ('there is no right life in the wrong one') and §29 'Dwarf fruit' ('the whole is the false')","Problems of Moral Philosophy (lectures 1963)","'Education after Auschwitz' (1966, in Critical Models)","the moral-impulse passages in ND"],"reception":"Jürgen Habermas + Karl-Otto Apel discourse ethics; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition (1992) and Pathologies of Reason (2007); Seyla Benhabib, Situating the Self (1992) — interactive universalism; Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (1993); Gerhard Schweppenhäuser, Adorno's Negative Moral Philosophy (Cambridge Companion 2004); J. M. Bernstein on ethics and modernism.","status":"The contested ground in contemporary moral philosophy that runs through Habermas-Apel discourse ethics, Honneth's recognition theory, Benhabib's interactive universalism, and the Bauman-Levinas postmodern-ethics tradition. The discourse ethicists charge that morality requires discursive grounding and that the moral-impulse foundation collapses into irrationalism. Honneth's recognition theory reads the negative-imperative form as the symptom of a defective social ontology that recognition theory remedies. Benhabib's interactive universalism attempts a version of universalism that addresses the concrete other, picking up what Habermas-Apel underspecify. Schweppenhäuser's diagnosis is that Adorno gives \"no theory of universalism but only indications of its immanent dialectic\" — which Schweppenhäuser reads as a feature, not a bug, but the post-Adornian critical theorists have read as the gap their constructive programs fill.","era":"1903-1969","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Lectures on Negative Dialectics","page":"p. 19","canonical":"","quote":"But the idea that we can say of the world as a whole in all seriousness that it has a meaning now that we have experienced Auschwitz, and witnessed a world in which that was possible and that threatens to repeat itself in another guise or a similar one - I remind you of Vietnam - to assert such an idea would seem to me to be a piece of cynical frivolity that is simply indefensible to what we might call the…","label":"Lectures on Negative Dialectics, p. 19"},{"n":2,"work":"Negative Dialectics","page":"p. 365","canonical":"","quote":"The trivial consciousness, as it is theoretically expressed in positivism and unreflected nominalism, may be closer than the sublime consciousness to an *adaequatio rei atque* *cogitationis;* its sneering mockery of truth may be truer than a superior consciousness, unless the formation of a truth concept other than that of *adaequatio* should succeed.","label":"Negative Dialectics, p. 365"},{"n":3,"work":"Metaphysics - Concept and Problems","page":"pp. 121–122","canonical":"","quote":"I would say, therefore, that if metaphysical thinking today is to have any chance, and is not to degenerate into claptrap about a 'new protectedness' [*neue Geborgenheit*] and suchlike nonsense, it will have to cease being apologetic and pointing to something one can hold onto and never lose, and think against itself.","label":"Metaphysics - Concept and Problems, pp. 121–122"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"negative-dialectics-and-non-identity","label":"Negative dialectics and non-identity: can a critique that refuses identity-thinking be coherent without a positive normative ground?"},{"slug":"dialectic-of-enlightenment-and-the-culture-industry","label":"Dialectic of enlightenment and the culture industry: is the structural critique of mass culture totalizing in a way that liquidates audience agency?"},{"slug":"aesthetic-autonomy-and-the-schoenberg-stravinsky-verdict","label":"Aesthetic autonomy and the Schoenberg-Stravinsky verdict: does the immanent technical-historical analysis of Philosophy of New Music survive the post-Cage rehabilitation of the avant-gardes Adorno was skeptical of?"},{"slug":"the-critique-of-heidegger-and-the-jargon-of-authenticity","label":"The critique of Heidegger and the Jargon of Authenticity: is the diagnosis of authenticity-talk as ideology in linguistic form a 1964 polemic, or a structural critique that survives the contemporary rehabilitation of Heidegger?"}]}