Giving an Account of Oneself

Chapter 1: An Account of Oneself

o n e An Account of Oneself The value of thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar. —Adorno, Minima Moralia I would like to begin by considering how it might be possible to pose the question of moral philosophy, a question that has to do with conduct and, hence, with doing, within a contemporary social frame. To pose this question in this way is already to admit to a prior thesis, namely, that moral questions not only emerge in the context of social relations, but that the form these questions take changes according to context, and even that context, in some sense, inheres in the form of the question. In Problems of Moral Philosophy, a set of lectures given in the summer of 1963, Adorno writes, ‘‘We can probably say that moral questions have always arisen when moral norms of behaviour have ceased to be self-evident and unquestioned in the life of a community.’’1 In a way, this claim seems to give an account of the conditions under which moral questions arise, but Adorno further specifies the account. There he offers a brief critique of Max Scheler, who laments the Zersetzung of ethical ideas, by which he means the destruction of a common and collective ethical ethos. 3 4 An Account of Oneself Adorno refuses to mourn this loss, worrying that the collective ethos is invariably a conservative one, which postulates a false unity that attempts to suppress the difficulty and discontinuity existing within any contemporary ethos. It is not that there was once a unity that subsequently has come apart, only that there was once an idealization , indeed, a nationalism, that is no longer credible, and ought not to be. As a result, Adorno cautions against the recourse to ethics as a certain kind of repression and violence. He writes: nothing is more degenerate than the kind of ethics or morality that survives in the shape of collective ideas even after the World Spirit has ceased to inhabit them—to use the Hegelian expression as a kind of shorthand. Once the state of human consciousness and the state of social forces of production have abandoned these collective ideas, these ideas acquire repressive and violent qualities. And what forces philosophy into the kind of reflections that we are expressing here is the element of compulsion which is to be found in traditional customs; it is this violence and evil that brings these customs [Sitten] into conflict with morality [Sittlichkeit]—and not the decline of morals of the kind lamented by the theoreticians of decadence. (PMP, 17) In the first instance, Adorno makes the claim that moral questions arise only when the collective ethos has ceased to hold sway. This implies that moral questions do not have to arise on the basis of a commonly accepted ethos to qualify as such; indeed, there seems to be a tension between ethos and morality, such that a waning of the former is the condition for the waxing of the latter. In the second instance, he makes clear that although the collective ethos is no longer shared—indeed, precisely because the collective ethos, which must now be herded by quotation marks, is not commonly shared—it can impose its claim to commonality only through violent means. In this sense, the collective ethos instrumentalizes violence to maintain the appearance of its collectivity. Moreover, this ethos be- An Account of Oneself 5 comes violence only once it has become an anachronism. What is strange historically—and temporally—about this form of ethical violence is that although the collective ethos has become anachronistic, it has not become past; it insists itself into the present as an anachronism . The ethos refuses to become past, and violence is the way in which it imposes itself upon the present. Indeed, it not only imposes itself upon the present, but also seeks to eclipse the present—and this is precisely one of its violent effects. Adorno uses the term violence in relation to ethics in the context of claims about universality. He offers yet another formulation of the emergence of morality, which is always the emergence of certain kinds of moral inquiry, of moral questioning: ‘‘the social problem of the divergence between the universal interest and the particular interest , the interests of particular individuals, is what goes to make up the problem of morality’’ (PMP, 19). What are...