Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

by Iris Murdoch

  One may ask, why was all this supposed to be Marxism? Had the Frankfurt School not shredded up Marxism to such a degree that it could only represent a kind of mood or tendency, if it was not a cover for an authoritarian political programme? The reflections of these prophetic neo-Marxists are certainly interesting (more so than those of Sartre in Critique de la Raison dialectique), but diverse, in that some (for instance Lukács, Marcuse) adhered to traditional Marxist concepts and programmes (revolution, class consciousness, the liberating role of the proletariat), whereas others (for instance Horkheimer, Benjamin, Adorno) appeared more like independently minded left-wing critics of western society. The 1989 revolutions were effected largely by courageous people uninterested in theory. But there were (for instance in Czechoslovakia) some intellectual leaders. In the long stifling interim the Frankfurt School provided at least a little fresh air. Adorno himself (as I said earlier) was accused by other Marxists of being an ivory tower intellectual, remote from the daily details (praxis) of the working-class struggle. Indeed he seems at times to be using Marxist formulations as imagery whereby to illuminate the evils of existing societies. He does not claim that any actual society is without them. Marxist thinkers have tried to rewrite the Phenomenology of Mind, and reflection on Marx and Hegel certainly led Adorno to his own post-Hegelian metaphysic which has its interest whether or not it can bear a definite political message. For instance, Adorno’s views may be seen as a prophetic critique of the Idealist aspects of Derrida’s structuralism wherein the subject, as ‘language’, swallows the contingent object or objects, and becomes an object itself. Adorno speaks eloquently of the ̒withering of the subject’ under late capitalism, its loss of spontaneity, awareness, truth, its shrunken consciousness, and contrasts this time with the golden age of bourgeois society which produced the great humanistic art of Beethoven and the great literature of the earlier Romantics. This general contrast is a familiar one, not noted only by Marxists. (Why no great novels now, why no great pictures, why no great music?) It is doubtless true that modern industrial society, with all its vast diversity of entertainments and mass of incoherent information (of which television may serve as image and example), has radically changed people’s lives and mode of being, bringing some benefits and doing much damage. ‘Facts’ proliferate, values fade, religion fades, our sense of truth is shaken. A confidence and a certainty, some might say a baseless optimism, carried for us by religion and art, seems no longer present. Benjamin sees the inability of writers to tell stories as a symptom of the fact that ‘experience has fallen in value’. (Illuminations, essay on Leskov.) Experience, consciousness (where we live) ought to be, it is argued, and increasingly is not, a kind of recollection (anam nesis), a calm lively awareness which joins past present and future. These words, consciousness and experience, are constantly used by Adorno in a metaphysical sense to indicate the deep places of human existence. These are the terms which are banished, these are the concepts which are obliterated, by structuralism. Adorno’s use of the words is neither Hegelian (as in ‘the unhappy consciousness’) nor Marxist (as in ‘class consciousness’) nor of course Freudian or Husserlian. His hostility to the ideas of ‘totality’, and ‘identity’ (of subject and object), separate him from Hegel, he rejects the Marxist picture of the proletariat as the redeeming class, he doubts whether alienation can ever be overcome (probably it belongs to human nature), he has no patience with Husserl’s essences (his book Against Epistemology is largely a refutation of Husserl), or with Freud’s conception of the soul which denies religion, instinct and pleasure (Minima Moralia 37). He expresses a maverick neo-Hegelian neo-Marxist kind of lucid desperation which is absolutely uncynical. He retains an undogmatic theological religious sense, but has no sympathy with Heidegger’s quasi-theological ‘ontology’.

  Adorno chided everybody, and his positive and passionately held view is not easy to formulate. He expounds what may be called a new philosophy of consciousness. His philosophy lives, dangerously but also fruitfully, in proximity to an ascetic puritanical moral rage, an attachment to some items in the structure and vocabulary of Marxism, and a feeling that human suffering is the only important thing and makes nonsense of everything else. His remark that ̒to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism’ has been much quoted. His main philosophical tenet is ‘the primacy of the object’, an idea which is explained in relation to consciousness and experience, involving a fundamental doctrine of truth and of the redeeming role of art. Reading Adorno’s criticisms of Husserl one may be reminded of Katsuki Sekida, and indeed, in Adorno’s work generally, of Buddhist ideas, such as ̒pure cognition’. Not only in Kant and Hegel, but (as Adorno holds) in philosophy generally, the role of the subject has been overstated. The subject is degraded by lack of reverence for the object. This is true also of anti-idealist, positivist, theories which, professing objectivity, import a selection of quasi-scientific or philosophical-technical ideas of the world into the subject thus constituted as authoritarian and all-powerful. A similar charge might be levelled at neo-positivist theories of language. Structuralist thinkers, invoking scientific models, ‘lose’ the subject in the ‘objective network’ of language, but ‘find’ it again as omniscient philosopher and scientific literary critic. This is the scene within which consciousness vanishes. The subject annexes to itself a particular concept of objectivity and so of object; herein the object is lost, and the subject is lost too. This sort of loss may indeed be called alienation. The (partial) cure is a change of consciousness in the direction of a patient truthfulness, a selflessness which is at the same time a self-being. There is no metaphysical sovereign power (such as that which haunts Heidegger), no ultimate identity of subject and object, no philosophical beatific vision. All this thinking takes place in an incomplete partly (largely?) unintelligible contingent world. Emphasis upon this aspect of Adorno’s view takes him out of Marxism. The quality of his concern with human suffering tends, paradoxically, to do this too: to consider suffering is to consider what is individual, private, unintelligible and contingent. The relation of subject and object is dialectical in a negative sense which is observant of contingency; the relation is one of mutual need, but neither can dominate or ‘catch’ the other. The subject needs the object more than the object needs the subject; no subject without object, conceivably object without subject, and this ‘strength’ of the object is an important ingredient in reflection of truth. (This too is a contradiction of Heidegger.) In Idealism truth vanishes together with contingency and the individual mind; structuralist thought tends to be Idealist. The idea of man’s domination of nature, and of the exploitation of nature, tolerated in Marxist thinking too, provides another case and image of the hubris of the subject. Adorno turns to art as to a place where we can see the meaning of respect for the object and of a truthful properly constituted subject-object relation. Art respects nature and all its details. Moreover the change of consciousness here in question is also productive of (very important in Adorno’s view) true happiness, which is denied to people by bad societies, by pleasure-loving late capitalism, and by oppressive truth-denying Marxist states. His ‘redeeming art’ is of course not the cosy kitsch of what he calls the ‘culture industry’, a phrase used also to make a sweeping judgment against much so-called serious or highbrow art; nor is it dogmatic didactic socialist art with a message, either arcane or popular. Adorno wishes to praise and point out as an example a kind of meticulously artful truthful art which exhibits the disintegration of the world and the pain of crippled alienated beings, as in, often mentioned, Kafka and Beckett. (Not Brecht.) Perhaps (it seems) there is not much art which reaches this standard. Adorno also, referring to Benjamin’s observation that history is always written from the victor’s point of view, and that ‘empathy with the victor invariably benefits the present rulers’, is prepared to forgive and cherish innocent ̒cross-grained, opaque, unassimilated material which ... has outwitted the historical dynamic’. This is to ‘bring the intentionless within the realm of c
oncepts’ and ‘think at the same time both dialectically and undialectically’. An example he gives here is remarkable, given Adorno’s stern aesthetic asceticism. ‘In Satie’s pert and puerile piano pieces there are flashes of experience undreamed of by the school of Schoenberg, with all its rigour and all the pathos of musical development behind it. The very grandeur of logical deductions may inadvertently take on a provincial quality.’ (Minima Moralia 98.) This is an interesting concession.

  Adorno is a political thinker who wishes to bring about radical change. He is also a philosopher, with a zest for metaphysics, who is at home in the western philosophical tradition. His difficulty is not altogether unlike that of demythologising Christian theologians who are inspired by religious theological thinking, and by warm intuitions of faith, to go onward beyond the bounds of traditional Christianity. After all, Christianity has always been going ̒beyond its bounds’. They want to keep the title of Christian, not only out of loyalty and in order to retain authority and influence, but because they believe that their insights are true, or the true, understandings of the doctrine. The doctrine and its precious future is in their hands. A difference between the two cases is that, although the church is a visible social institution, religion concerns the individual soul, while Marxism, whatever its Utopian hopes for the development of new individuals, had to retain a pragmatic concern about possible policies. Adorno rejected aspirations of philosophy toward the condition of science, as seen for instance in positivism, structuralism, Husserl. (Even analytical philosophy à l’anglaise, as seen for instance in the work of J. L. Austin, has an air of scientific reductionism.) He, together with many others who wanted to present Marxism as a moral philosophy, profited from the rediscovery of Marx’s early writings, with their Utopian tone and emphasis upon alienation. Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man was the new best-seller of the moral philosophy of Marx. This early moral Marx, more given to philosophical reflection, is to be contrasted with the later more scientific Marx who, less concerned with morals, is struggling to solve the problem of how to create a totally viable and efficient economic system. (This problem, it appears, is still with us.) The scientific aspect of Marxism remained essential, indeed primary. A Marxist, however given to philosophising and moralising, was expected to retain some belief in ‘scientific socialism’, and with this a claim to the generality and objectivity characteristic of science. At this point the demythologising Marxist thinker may feel inclined, or bound, to ‘lose hold’. The analogy with a demythologised religion is of course incomplete. A Marxist who becomes a liberal is making a radical change in his political views. A Christian who loses belief in God and resurrection and immortality, while remaining religious, is not necessarily making a radical change in his value world. The difference between morals and politics is different from the difference between (for instance) Christianity and Buddhism. In practice, differences of religious style, though in a sense superficial, stir such deep emotions that those who lose hold of the traditional dogmatic structures of their religion are often unable to carry the concept further and lose religion altogether.

  Adorno’s deepest criticisms of contemporary society are not specifically Marxist but those of an enlightened and civilised western thinker. He is more evidently a neo-Hegelian than a neo-Marxist. As a neo-Hegelian he is inspired, like many other students of Hegel, by an anti-Hegelian concern for the individual, for the contingent aspects of the world which are lost in the Idealist totality. This concern prompts a corrective analysis of the central Hegelian subject-object relation, in favour of the privileges of the object. This instinct in favour of the contingent, and the ̒rights’ of what is ‘given’, what is attended to or referred to or described, the object of cognition, expresses a major objection which can also be brought against the totalising metaphysic of structuralism. ‘The given’ (contingent, unordered, unconceptualised reality), made inaccessible by Kant except as processed by a rigid subject made in the image of its constituted object, swallowed up by Hegel’s evolving all-powerful subject, degraded by Sartre into unassimilable matter inducing disgust and despair, dissolved by structuralists into the ‘objective’ network of language, and in vulgar dogmatic Marxism ground up by the inevitable historical process with its Utopian culmination, should be restored to the position accorded to it by common-sense and by art, and one might add by western liberal morality and ordinary religious attitudes when these are not deformed by (certain) philosophies. The object, the given, is the magnet of the artist, his inspiration, his joy, also his despair, and that of all of us in our role as artist-thinkers. Such a defence of the object, not only of course by Adorno, but by a variety of thinkers and writers, has as its essential counterpart a defence of the ordinary and traditional conception of truth, threatened by Hegel, Heidegger, historicism, and pseudo-science, not only structuralist but post-Freudian. This ‘ordinary’ truth is also the truth of art, as it emerges when the artist, confronted by the independent other, imagines, that is, thinks. Flourishing in this environment are innumerable concerns and respects for innumerable others which civilisation and morality and religion and enlightened politics have gradually and not without difficulty developed: concern for the contingent individual, as social unit, as human person, as idea, as work of art, as plant, as animal, as planet. The details of our world deserve our respectful and loving attention, as artists have always known. There is an attentive patient delay of judgment, a kind of humble agnosticism, which lets the object be. With this goes a perception of the reality and real nature of suffering and a horror of cruelty. Sufferers, victims of injustice and wanton cruelty, are individuals, with unique individual fates. A Marxism which could refer, in a scientific tone of voice, to ‘the liquidation of the kulaks’ as an incidental necessity in a Utopian programme, is an abominable theory. Sartre’s Nausée expresses the horror of those who can no longer love or attend to or even really see the contingent, and fear it as a threat to their imaginary freedom and self-regarding ‘authenticity’. Perception itself must always be held to be an essential part of cognition, not to be swallowed casually into some posited procession of ideas. Modern industrial mass-productive society impairs our power to perceive, not least by continual television. Adorno asks why we are expected to enjoy realistically presented acts of violence as part of our daily entertainment. On the other hand, turning against certain of our ‘moral guardians’, he attacks a ‘false inwardness’, as of the ‘cantingly emancipated theologian’, who ‘neutralises the element of danger by internalisation’, enjoying a spiritual struggle which, seemingly ‘concerned’, is only concerned with self. (Minima Moralia 87.) Equally self-centred and ‘heroic’ is the ‘authenticity’ and ‘genuineness’ of the existential subject who in seeking personal liberation loses the world of detail and other. Adorno accuses both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on these two latter counts.

  The idea of Utopia is a danger in politics, it hints at a rectification of a primal fault, a perfect unity, it is impatient of contingency. The assertion of contingency, the rights of the object, the rights of the individual, these are connected. The ‘perfect state’ is an illusory unity. Morality enters politics in an unsystematic way and must carry an awareness of the particular non-totality of political situations. A totalitarian state, intolerant of oddity, loses truth. Many kinds of thought, without claiming the eternal, are indifferent to what is local; one cannot properly generalise about the social duties of all serious thinkers. To argue in this way is to use Adorno’s metaphysical ideas against his Marxist ideas. Adorno offers as the centre of his reflection a view of consciousness which is not scientific, either psychologically or sociologically. The Utopianism which leads him to picture a ‘good happiness’ which is infinitely happier than anything we now call by that name, is a moral aspiration, not a prediction about a perfect society. It is a message to the individual. Even the idea of dialectic, rethought by Adorno, may tie his thinking too closely to a Hegelian model. A view not unlike his might be better stated in a less ‘engaged’ t
erminology. Moral existence and moral change connect with, must be explained by use of, the concept of, quality of consciousness. The rescue of the idea of consciousness from its Hegelian and Marxist limitations is an important move. The consciousness in question is that of individuals, not of groups or classes. An emphasis upon consciousness as perception, and awareness of detail, presents it as the property of the individual. A good man is truthful, loving, brave, concerned for others, he has overcome the barriers of egoism, he sees clearly, he perceives details (and so on). If we try to describe him we are led also to reflect upon his states of consciousness, his capacity for recollection, for reflection, for attention, for the deep intuitive syntheses of moral vision. ‘The layer of unpremeditatedness, freedom from intentions, on which alone intentions flourish.’ (Minima Moralia 150.) Such ideas may be placed by philosophy though they cannot be systematised or set up as a clear definition. Philosophy puts things in places and surrounds them with many considerations. The image of a field of force is good here. A passage in Adorno’s essay on ‘Subject and Object’, which presents succinct objections to the views of both Kant and Hegel, also expresses eloquently the quality of a truthful consciousness:

  ‘The subject’s key position in cognition is empirical, not formal; what Kant calls formation is essentially deformation. The preponderant exertion of knowledge is destruction of its usual exertion, that of using violence against the object. Approaching knowledge of the object is the act in which the subject rends the veil it is weaving around the object. It can do this only where, fearlessly passive, it entrusts itself to its own experience. In places where subjective reason scents subjective contingency, the primacy of object is shimmering through – whatever in the object is not a subjective admixture. The subject is the object’s agent, not its constituent; this fact has consequences for the relation of theory and practice.’