A review of Zuidervaart ‘s Social Philosophy after Adorno
Zuidervaart claims “solidarity with Adorno’s negative dialectic in the moment of its collapse” (p. 76) — a paraphrase of Adorno’s own claim at the end of his Negative Dialectics(1966) where he promised solidarity with metaphysics in the moment of its collapse (Solidarität mit der Metaphysik im Augenblick ihres Sturzes).[1] Adorno’s criticism of modern society, the author assumes, is not radical enough. Adorno tries to outbid all other philosophers and social critics with his negative radicalism, but his great negativist gesture of outbidding all radical social criticism is pseudo-radical. Adorno’s Negative Dialectics leaves us with the sad alternative: “All or Nothing” (p. 72f), but this alternative itself leaves us nothing to do to change the world because everything less than all is wrong. Adorno’s apparently most radical construction of the modern world as a totally closed universe of negativity is deeply inconsistent. If the world is ruled by his famous two laws: (1) “The whole is the false” (Das Ganze ist das Unwahre), and (2) “There is no good life in a bad society” (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen),[2] then even a first step to get all (or at least a bit of all) is impossible because in a negative universe all steps are, a priori, steps in the wrong direction. Hence, we can hope to be saved at once, and to get it all, only if this is granted by the grace of a power higher than us. Hence, we need a light on the fallen world that derives not from human enlightenment but from the messianic point of redemption.[3] From such a negative theological perspective, anything that is in the reach of our achievements is nothing else than a catastrophe.[4] Whatever we do, we do it wrong. For Adorno, the only praxis that is not a reproduction and prolongation of the bad society is thinking, and this seems problematic because it is only the praxis of a privileged philosopher. As a single individual, the critical intellectual can reflect his non-identity with the system (see below). Therefore, the negative dialectic of “all or nothing” in the end leads to nothing, and becomes, contrary to Adorno’s intention, an ideological affirmation of the already existing world, or as Adorno usually says, the existing (das Bestehende).[5]
Taken this way, Adorno’s critique of modern society is not too radical but not radical enough (p. 72f). Yet, the richness of Adorno’s criticism of modern society comes only to the fore after its collapse, after its determined negation and deconstruction. One could say with Rorty that Adorno needs a radical reinterpretation, and the Zuidervaart’s book impressively shows how such (already overdue) reinterpretation can work. Zuidervaart suggests for example that we should take Adorno’s sentence that the whole is the false not as a mere cognitive statement and a simple tit-for-tat answer to Hegel, but as one of many world-disclosing perspectives that carries a useful practical truth with it. This truth becomes manifest only in specific situations.