Autonomy after Auschwitz: Adorno, German Idealism, and Modernity by Martin Shuster (review)

It is something of a cliché, though nevertheless relevant, to ask how the land of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant could give rise to Nazism and the Holocaust. Philosopher Theodor Adorno addresses this when he writes, toward the end of his Negative Dialectics, that Hitler had forced a new categorical imperative on humans “to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself” (quoted in Shuster 72). His answer is that Nazism happened, not despite the Enlightenment, but as an unfortunate consequence. The demythologizing impetus of enlightenment ultimately dissolves subjectivity, nurturing an intolerance that seeks to eliminate the other that does not conform to the identity of the object: “Auschwitz confirmed the philosopheme of pure identity as death” (quoted 38). In his cogent analysis, Martin Shuster argues that Adorno engages Kant and Hegel concerning the fundamental question of autonomy, central to the modern notions of the self, identity, individual freedom, and moral agency and, as such, crucial to modern ethical thinking focused on intention and choice. Seeking to rehabilitate Adorno, whose reputation has waned since his initial impact on Critical Theory, Shuster proposes three tasks: to trace the influence of Kant on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment; to reconstruct and engage with a Kantian response to the dilemma raised by the Dialectic; then to deploy Adorno’s reading of Hegel with Stanley Cavell to propose an alternative notion of autonomy that “succumbs neither to the Charybdis of the dialectic of enlightenment nor the Scylla of the highest good” (70).

The concept of autonomy entered modern thought through Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s declaration that freedom meant obedience to no one but oneself. This informs Kant’s famous definition of enlightenment as our release from “self-incurred tutelage,” as well as Hegel’s positive evocation of “hardheadedness [Eigensinn]” (1)—that is, our unwillingness to acknowledge what cannot be justified by thought. To be a moral agent is to take personal responsibility and think for oneself, independent of external forces or authorities. In an original and perceptive reading of Adorno from Dialectic of Enlightenment to Negative Dialectics, supplemented with his philosophical lectures, Shuster argues that the problem of autonomy is central to Adorno’s thought. In their collaboration on Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer play on an implicit parallel between the binary of subjective myth and demythologizing enlightenment and that of Kantian intuitions and concepts, linking the dialectic of enlightenment with the dialectic of reason. This linkage, they argue, is among the sources contributing to the ills of modernity, both in hostility to the other and in a totalizing conformity. Thus, if my autonomy is characterized by my ability to endorse only those laws and maxims that I could have legislated for myself, but if I must confront an unbridgeable ontological gap between intuitions and concepts, then I am forced into self-reflexive solipsism that seeks to exclude social, political, and historical conditions and eliminate the other that cannot be subsumed under the concepts.

Shuster suggests that Kant was cognizant of the problem and attempted to address the solipsistic circle, especially in the third Critique. The result is a “rational theology” that seeks to posit the inaccessible noumenal world that falls outside our concepts in terms of an inherent good. Thus, rather than the self, circling around and around, trying to objectify everything in terms of itself, I can affirm my autonomy when I willingly choose those judgments that are in harmony with the good itself, even if the metaphysical ground is itself outside my cognition. While endorsing the legitimacy of this response, Shuster notes that it involves a metaphysical commitment that Adorno and most others would find untenable.

Shuster next turns to Adorno’s interrogation of Hegel. While Adorno is critical of Hegel’s philosophy of history, especially the teleological and totalizing vision of World Spirit, Shuster argues that Hegel’s historical grounding of the autonomous agent helps to clarify Adorno’s own account of autonomy. For Adorno moral agency...