Adorno's Practical Philosophy Living Less Wrongly

Adorno notoriously asserted that there is no 'right' life in our current social world. This assertion has contributed to the widespread perception that his philosophy has no practical import or coherent ethics, and he is often accused of being too negative. Fabian Freyenhagen reconstructs and defends Adorno's practical philosophy in response to these charges. He argues that Adorno's deep pessimism about the contemporary social world is coupled with a strong optimism about human potential, and that this optimism explains his negative views about the social world, and his demand that we resist and change it. He shows that Adorno holds a substantive ethics, albeit one that is minimalist and based on a pluralist conception of the bad - a guide for living less wrongly. His incisive study does much to advance our understanding of Adorno, and is also an important intervention into current debates in moral philosophy.

Introduction; 1. The whole is untrue; 2. No right living; 3. Social determination and negative freedom; 4. Adorno's critique of moral philosophy; 5. A new categorical imperative; 6. An ethics of resistance; 7. Justification, vindication, and explanation; 8. Negativism defended; 9. Adorno's negative Aristotelianism; Appendix: the jolt - Adorno on spontaneous willing.

Fabian Freyenhagen is a Reader in Philosophy at the University of Essex. He is co-editor (with Thom Brooks) of The Legacy of John Rawls (2005) and (with Gordon Finlayson) of Disputing the Political: Habermas and Rawls (2011), and has published in journals such as the Kantian Review, Inquiry, Telos, and Politics, Philosophy and Economics.