Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics

by J. M. Bernstein

• ISBN13: 9780521622301
• ISBN10: 0521622301
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2001-07-23
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Theodor W. Adorno is best known for his contributions to aesthetics and social theory. Critics have always complained about the lack of a practical, political or ethical dimension to Adorno's philosophy. In this highly original contribution to the literature on Adorno, J. M. Bernstein offers the first attempt in any language to provide an account of the ethical theory latent in Adorno's writings. Bernstein relates Adorno's ethics to major trends in contemporary moral philosophy. He analyses the full range of Adorno's major works, with a special focus on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia and Negative Dialectics. In developing his account Bernstein lays particular stress on Adorno's contention that the event of Auschwitz demands a new categorical imperative. This book will be widely acknowledged as the standard work on Adorno's ethics and as such will interest professionals and students of philosophy, political theory, sociology, history of ideas, art history and music.

Table of Contents

Preface	xi
List of Abbreviations	xvii
Introduction	1	(3)
Nihilism, Disenchantment, and the Problem of Externalism	4	(17)
A Grammar of Moral Insight, a Logic of the Concept	21	(15)
Outline of the Argument	36	(4)
``Wrong Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly''	40	(35)
A Refuge for Goodness?	45	(13)
The Death of the Good Life for Man: Ethical Life versus Moral Centralism	58	(17)
Disenchantment: The Skepticism of Enlightened Reason	75	(61)
Disenchantment, Rationalism, and Universalism	77	(6)
The Principle of Immanence	83	(7)
Enlightenment Depends on Myth	90	(8)
The Destruction of Knowledge	98	(13)
Destruction of Aura, Destruction of Experience	111	(10)
The Destruction of Authority	121	(12)
Conclusion	133	(3)
The Instrumentality of Moral Reason	136	(52)
Axial Turn and Saving Urge	137	(7)
Authority and the Fact of Reason	144	(7)
A Short Genealogy of Modern Universalism: How Pure Reason Overtook Empirical Knowing	151	(14)
The Utility of Testing Maxims	165	(11)
Moral Experience: Of Urgency and Obligation	176	(12)
Mastered by Nature: Abstraction, Independence, and the Simple Concept	188	(47)
Bringing Nature Back In	188	(11)
From Instinctual Renunciation to Abstraction	199	(6)
Abstraction and Ends in Themselves	205	(7)
Independence: The Constitutive Subject	212	(6)
Independence: The Simple Concept and Linguistic Determinacy	218	(6)
Dependence: The Guilt Context of the Living	224	(11)
Interlude: Three Versions of Modernity	235	(28)
Modernity and the Philosophy of History	236	(5)
Idealism, Naturalism, and Particularity	241	(9)
The Metacritique of Freedom	250	(13)
Disenchanting Identity: The Complex Concept	263	(67)
Conceptual Content	266	(9)
Communication versus Naming	275	(12)
Non-Predicative Identification: Dependence All the Way Up	287	(14)
``Is Living'' as a Material a Priori Predicate	301	(5)
Reflective Judgement as Intransitive Understanding	306	(14)
The Complex Concept as Moral Insight	320	(5)
The Complex Concept as Authority	325	(5)
Toward an Ethic of Nonidentity	330	(41)
Introduction	330	(3)
Reasoning in Transitions	333	(10)
Negative Dialectic	343	(11)
Reactivating Material Inference	354	(7)
Conclusion: The Indexical Binding of Moral Norms	361	(10)
``After Auschwitz''	371	(44)
Introduction	371	(1)
Auschwitz as Negative Theodicy	371	(1)
``A new categorical imperative....''	372	(24)
Coldness: The Fundamental Principle of Bourgeois Subjectivity	396	(19)
Ethical Modernism	415	(42)
Introduction	415	(5)
Experience as Metaphysics	420	(9)
Metaphysical Ideas: Possibility as Promise	429	(8)
Fugitive Experience, Ethical Modernism	437	(14)
Conclusion	451	(6)
Index	457