[FRA:] "A word for morality" no. 60 Minima Moralia

[David Westling]

This “immediate possibility of superfluity” comes at a price and that price is the imposition of mechanization upon the human spirit in such a way that gains from plenitude are undercut, bringing the individual and society to what Giorgio Agamben has recently called the reduction of life to bare life.  I had a conversation with a Trotskyist many years ago who went so far as to say that “Technological progress _is_ progress.”  This Condorcetian substrate in orthodox Marxism can only lead to a new alienation.  As Engels said of the mechanized factory, "Abandon autonomy all ye who enter here.” The individual is faced with a new hypostasis.  

Ultimately, this whole question of morality is highly elastic.  One can think of the love between mother and child as well as “rapine” as being included in this amoral sensibility.  We are indeed faced with a Scylla and Charybdis, the excesses of rapacious individualism versus the excesses of collectivization through socially legislated morality as hypostasized in religion and bureaucracy.  It seems to me that Adorno is talkling out of both sides of his mouth here, presaging Habermas’ rapproachment with Christianity, thus diluting beyond recognition the original Young Hegelian impulse, which as Feuerbach took it up in his seminal essay, “Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy” of 1839, involved an attempt to rescue philosophy from the obscurity and absurdity of presuppositionless Being, which is after all only another way of speaking of the moral impulse. 

> Hard to tell offhand if this is pro- or anti-Nietzsche.  And while I get a vague sense of Adorno's argument, I am not at all impressed.