Two Adorno Fragments: On Moral Philosophy After the Decline of the Party (ca. late 1940s)

In the critique of the super-ego, as in so many other places, psychoanalysis seeks to translate the motives of philosophical Enlightenment into scientific results.1 For the Enlightenment, the moral norms by which individuals orient their actions and evaluate those of others are borrowed from social customs; the autonomy of the moral law, the being-in-itself [Ansichsein] of good and evil, are idols. Their a priori semblance derives from the overwhelming power of social authority over the individual. The ideal is unmasked as a residuum of past positivity: what was once legitimate, what was once social fact, and which, in the service of perpetuating order, takes on the aspect of the unconditioned. Morality is convention. Nietzsche and psychoanalysis after him wrested this thesis from its previously rationalistic naïveté. For Freud, morality internalizes [verinnerlicht] the authority of social control through the painful identification of the child with the father as the agent of society. The substance of autonomy, the conscience, the judge of brute facticity, is thus itself derived from the factual power-relation between generations and ultimately from the threat of castration. But the contradiction between this insight and the social becomes evident in the fact the subject has no right to pass judgment on society, because in the illusion of this right the subject only mirrors the power of society back onto society itself. Consequently, the actions of the subject are stripped of any measure of independence or responsibility. Whatever the subject might appeal to as an internal law is merely an impenetrable externality, and therefore something relative, which degenerates into ideology as soon as it elevates itself into an absolute demand. Such critique has always been an integral part of the dialectical theory of society. Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life thus preserves morality merely as architectonic, whereas, objectively, it amounts to the nullification of the individual conscience, the demonstration that the “moral” is anything but self-evident, and moreover that the radical installation of the authority of conscience invariably reverses into arbitrariness, contingency, amorality. Instead, precedence is given to the social model of ethical conduct raised to consciousness, “the concept of freedom become the existing world.”2

Marxism as a tradition retains this in its scorn for private ethics, in denouncing the swindle of the individual attempt to remedy a problem not of good will but of the objective totality of the system. To this extent there is indeed an understanding between psychoanalysis and Marxism, which is only denied by both sides now that the latter has fallen into state religion and the former into a kind of hygiene. In the meantime, however, through totalitarian praxis, history has demonstrated that this critique, the radical expression of the intention to freedom, is on the verge of reversing into consummate unfreedom. The abolition of the conscience, a demand inseparable from psychological insight, passes into immediate repression and, as a consequence, into anarchy as the naked right of the stronger. Attempts at mediation, such as elevating whatever can be recognized as a condition for the existence and reproduction of society into a moral norm, fail. But such insight remains a phantasm so long as the identity of particular interests and the interests of the whole has not been established: what society here and now demands, for the sake of its orderly self-preservation, requires sacrifices from the individual it can neither rationally manage within its own drive-economy [Triebökonomie] nor recognize as necessary for itself. It must behave irrationally so long as such objective irrationality endures. Even if the moral authority in question is not, as for the epigones of idealism, the norms of the community, but rather those of a politics aimed at the creation of a better condition, the calculation will not add up—for precisely as a calculation, it perpetuates the calculative handling of human beings that any politics of the kind must end. Instead of moral categories such as self-responsibility, conscience, compassion, loyalty, or friendship, which are mockingly ascribed to the petty-bourgeoisie, party discipline steps forward to take their place. And historically, this has long been just as heteronomous to individual consciousness as any official Staatsethik. But the moral categories do not, by any means, simply disappear in the process. Rather they linger, haunting like shadows, as neutralized as in bourgeois culture, to be conjured up when expedient, when even humanism is brandished as slogan again.

While the German university philosophy supposedly preoccupied with the Being of beings [Sein des Seienden], undefeated on the field of battle, has outlived the acute phase of its kindred fascism, for the American mind, the sole theoretical thought still permissible is the sort that can be put to work.3 It must be translatable “in operational terms,”4 as into production. Just as individual economic acts, whose relationship to the reproduction of the social whole was left to the blind mechanism of the market in liberalism, are subject today to a kind of control, so too must thinking cast off its anarchic conditions of production and, in short order, legitimize itself as practical. But the closer theory comes to the prevailing praxis, whether the satiated one of administered capitalism or the barbaric one of pseudo-socialism, the more distorted their relation becomes. The praxis that comprehensively exercises control over theory becomes identical to the prevailing social trend, which no theory anywhere in the world can transcend. The unity of theory and praxis that arises automatically in capitalism is implemented systematically by the party, the party in which the unity of theory and praxis was once supposed to truly embody itself for the first time. Upon seizing power, the party installed itself as a terroristic apparatus of domination and put the reins on theory. Insofar as theory anywhere seeks to escape the false unity, it is thrown back to the stage of radical contemplation it sought to transcend when it crossed over from contemplative materialism into political change. After the decline of the party, if theory imagines it can escape the alternative between contemplation and pragmatism, waiting for its historical hour to arrive, it forsakes the time-bound context where truth first takes form and misjudges the suddenness of the reality whose miraculous armaments will not indefinitely delay the coming catastrophe. Were theory, resigned, to refashion itself, on the model of art, a form that wants nothing more than to call things as it sees them without reserve, then the subjective happiness of anyone who still possessed the capacity to do so would be belied by the objective despair. Theory has become completely helpless.