Adorno Theodor W. - Adorno and the Modern Ethos of Freedom

In particular I would like to acknowledge the helpful and stimulating discussions offered by William McDonald throughout the course of this writing. His invaluable friendship made it possible to pursue this project to completion. For their intellectual and personal support, I am very grateful to Kate Lawson, Tony Lynch, and Fred D'Agostino. I would also like to thank Alan Helmridge, who first generated my interest in dialectical critique through selected readings from Hegel's Science of Logic. To my mother and father I am deeply indebted for their patience and understanding.

Earlier claims to be modern, during the fifth, twelve, and seventeenth centuries, were articulated through the renewed ethos of an idealized past - respectively, early Christianity, ancient Greece and Rome. From a philosophical perspective, the emergence of the modern ethos of freedom is marked by a critique of rationalist metaphysics and its theistically grounded claim to moral truth. With the dismissal of any transcendent, heteronomous moral authority, modern philosophy confronts the task of articulating a practical reason adequate to the new ethos of freedom.

Early modern conceptions of the relatien between practical reason and action reveal that relation as profoundly contradictory. Evidence of this may be found in seventeenth-century literature some decades prior to the philosophical writings of Descartes. Shakespeare's 'Hamlet', for example, 'is as much the proto-history of the individual in its subjective reflection as it is the drama of the individual paralyzed into inaction by that reflection'.impulsive drive to action, the outcome of which, at least for the reader, is always fraught with failure. Both Hamlet and Don Quixote thereby demonstrate an early modern awareness of the difficult yet inextricable link between theory and practice. Moreover, when either assumes primacy over the other, that primacy reveals the violence of an indiscriminate power. Against both alternatives, Adorno delineates a third mode of understanding the relation between theory and practice.

A consciousness of theory and praxis must be produced that neither divides the two such that theory becomes powerless and praxis becomes arbitrary, nor refracts theory through the archbourgeois primacy of practical reason proclaimed by Kant and Fichte. Thinking is a doing, theory a form of praxis; already the ideology of the purity of thinking deceives about this. Thinking has a double character: it is immanently determined and rigorous, and yet an inalienably real mode of behaviour in the midst of reality. To the extent that subject, the thinking substance of philosophers, is object, to the extent that it falls within object, subject is already also practical. The irrationality of praxis that continually resurfaces however - its aesthetic archetype are the sudden random actions by which Hamlet carries out his plan and in carrying it out fails - unceasingly animates the illusion of the absolute division between subject and object. Where subject is inveigled into believing that object is something absolutely incommensurable, the communication between the two becomes the prey of blind fate.

Adorno here outlines a dialectical relation of theory and practice where each mediates or determines the other through becoming that other, albeit in a distinctly transfigured fashion. Each is at once the other and yet distinct from it.

Adorno's understanding of this dialectical relation between theory and practice is perhaps best set in relief by elucidating Horkheimer's crucial distinction between traditional and critical theory.nor fully reducible to its own conceptual apparatus. Rather critical theory perceives itself as both a determining and determined aspect of those social relations.