James Gordon Finlayson

Adorno on the Ethical and the Ineffable

The thesis is that Adorno has a normative ethics, albeit a minimal and negative ethics of resistance. However Adorno’s ethical theory faces two problems: the problem of the availability of the good and the problem of whether a normative ethics is consistent with philosophical negativism. The author argues that a correct of understanding the role of the ineffable in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics solves both problems: it provides an account of the availability of the good that is consistent with his philosophical negativism. The author counters the prevalent objection that Adorno’s aporetic philosophy, like some negative theology, leads to irrationalism and mysticism. The parallel with negative theology is developed by means of a comparison with Nicholas of Cusa. Drawing on Wittgentstein’s saying/showing distinction and Adrian Moore’s work the author argues that Nicholas and Adorno can be seen to share a philosophically defensible notion of ineffable knowledge.

Bare Life and Politics in Agamben's Reading of Aristotle

Giorgio Agambens critique of Western politics in Homo Sacer and three related books has been highly influential in the humanities and social sciences. The critical social theory set out in these works depends essentially on his reading of Aristotles Politics. His diagnosis of what ails Western politics and his suggested remedy advert to a “biopolitical paradigm,” at the center of which stand a notion of “bare life” and a purported opposition between bios and zoē. Agamben claims that this distinction is found in Aristotles text, in ancient Greek, and in a tradition of political theory and political society stemming from fourth-century Athens to the present. However, a close reading of Aristotle refutes this assertion. There is no such distinction. I show that he bases this view on claims about Aristotle by Arendt and Foucault, which are also unfounded.

What are ‘Universalizable Interests’?

Many of Habermass critical commentators agree that Discourse Ethics fails as a theory of the validity of moral norms and only succeeds as a theory of the democratic legitimacy of socio-political norms. The reason they give is that the moral principle (U) is too restrictive to count as a necessary condition of the validity of norms. Other commentators more sympathetic to his project want to abandon principle (U) and remodel Discourse Ethics without it. Still others want to downplay the role of universalizing moral discourse and to make more of Habermass less demanding, though still somewhat vague, conception of ethical discourse. Against this chorus of critical voices Habermas maintains that his conception of moral discourse and the moral principle (U) are central to Discourse Ethics in general, and to the normative heart of his political theory in particular. The conflict may have arisen in part because the concept of a ‘universalizable interest’ which is central to Habermass understanding of moral discourse and of the moral principle (U) remains opaque even after nearly two decades of critical debate. Actually Habermass concept of interest is pretty obscure too. But the obscurity surrounding the concept of interest is not the source of the confusion. For our present purposes we can simply stipulate that an interest is a reason to want. The notion of reason rests loosely on the notion of a need, and the concepts of need and desire are take left deliberately vague. The source of the current confusion lies in the notion of universalizability that is in play. Once we pay due attention to the conditions of the universalizability of interests contained in Habermass formulation of the moral principle (U), we can distinguish between a weaker and a stronger version of the principle. I argue that only the weaker version is defensible. But I also want to show that Habermas is tempted into defending the stronger version, and to explain why he does so.

Morality and Critical Theory. On the Normative Problem of Frankfurt School Social Criticism

I. The Problem of Normative Foundations: Habermass Original Criticism of Adorno and Horkheimer In The Theory of Communicative Action, Jürgen Habermas writes: From the beginning, critical theory labored over the difficulty of giving an account of its own normative foundations …1 Call this Habermass original objection to the problem of normative foundations. It has been hugely influential both in the interpretation and assessment of Frankfurt School critical theory and in the development of later variants of it. Nowadays it is a truth almost universally acknowledged that any critical social theory in possession of normative…

The theory of ideology and the ideology of theory: Habermas Contra Adorno

An evaluation and qualified defense of Habermass critique of Adornos conceptions of ideology and ideology criticism.

Where the right gets in: on Rawls’s criticism of Habermas's conception of legitimacy

Many commentators have failed to identify the important issues at the heart of the debate between Habermas and Rawls. This is partly because they give undue attention to differences between their respective devices of representation, the original position and principle (U), neither of which are germane to the actual dispute. The dispute is at bottom about how best to conceive of democratic legitimacy. Rawls indicates where the dividing issues lie when he objects that Habermas’s account of democratic legitimacy is comprehensive and his is confined to the political. But his argument is vitiated by a threefold ambiguity in what he means by “comprehensive doctrine.” Tidying up this ambiguity helps reveal that the dispute turns on the way in which morality relates to political legitimacy. Although Habermas calls his conception of legitimate law “morally freestanding”, and as such distinguishes it from Kantian and Natural Law accounts of legitimacy, it is not as freestanding from morality as he likes to present it. Habermas’s mature theory contains conflicting claims about relation between morality and democratic legitimacy. So there is at least one important sense in which Rawlss charge of comprehensiveness is made to stick againstHabermas’s conception of democratic legitimacy, and remains unanswered.

On not being silent in the darkness: Adorno's singular apophaticism

Adornos late work has often been compared to negative theology, yet there is little serious discussion of this comparison in the secondary literature. In most of the existing discussions virtually nothing is said about negative theology, as if it is obvious what it is and what the parallels with Adornos ideas are. The truth is that negative theology is not self-evident, and neither are the parallels with Adorno at all obvious. To find out what they are would require a detailed account of both. In this article I shall make a start in this direction

No proviso: Habermas on Rawls, religion and public reason

In this article, I argue that a common view of Habermas’s theory of public reason, which takes it to be similar to Rawls’s ‘proviso’, is mistaken. I explain why that mistake arises, and show that those who have made it have thus overlooked the distinctiveness of Habermas’s theory and approach. Consequently, I argue, they tend to wrongly infer that objections directed at Rawls’s ‘proviso’ apply also to Habermas’s ‘institutional translation proviso’. Ironically, Habermas’s attempt to rebut those objections leads him to advance a peculiar, and ultimately indefensible, thesis about the cognitive requirements of democratic citizenship for secular citizens. I argue that the underlying problem that Habermas takes the peculiar thesis to solve is not that the public reason requirements of the secular state are unfair towards religious citizens, or biased towards secular views of the world, but that the nature of religious arguments, and of scientism, as Habermas understands these, prevents citizens who adhere to them from participating in discourse. I end by suggesting a simpler, less controversial solution to that problem.

A critical notice of Adorno and Existence

Adorno and Existence is an elegantly written and eminently readable book, and a signally valuable contribution to the study of the development of Adorno’s thought.2 It is also a wonderfully concise book that treats in short compass a wealth of material concerning Adorno’s lifelong preoccupation with existentialism and phenomenology. It is both helpful and timely, in that it deals with aspects of Adorno’s work that have been neglected by mainstream scholars who tend to focus in the main on his major published works Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Negative Dialectics and the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. The reasons for this are that the Kierkegaard book is judged a difficult early work, and that his engagement with Husserl and Heidegger is dismissed by Adorno scholars and experts on phenomenology alike as ill informed and uninteresting. Gordon sets out to counter this widespread view. He tasks himself with showing that Adorno’s engagement with existentialism, phenomenology and fundamental ontology is a crucial sounding board for the development of his own ideas. Furthermore, he aims to provide an interpretation that ‘elucidates Adorno’s argument in such a way as to lend those arguments renewed force’ (10). In the final chapter Gordon offers an intriguing interpretation of a cruel, but true, remark that Adorno’s brightest student, Hans-Jürgen Krahl, allegedly shouted into his grave, and subsequently wrote in his bitter ‘obituary’ of Adorno in the Frankfurter Rundschau in 1969: ‘It seems that Adorno, who practiced an irresistible critique of the ideological existence of the bourgeois individual, was himself caught in its ruins’ (198).3 Gordon percipiently reinterprets this remark as a pregnant philosophical insight:

The Habermas-Rawls Dispute Redivivus

This article re-examines the Habermas-Rawls debate. It contends that what is at issue in this dispute has largely been missed. The standard view that principle (U) and the original position form a useful point of comparison between their respective theories and that the dispute between them can be fruitfully understood on this basis is rejected. I show how this view has arisen and why it is wrong. The real issue between them lies in their respective accounts of the justification of political norms, and in their competing conceptions of legitimacy. I show how these two concepts connect. I distinguish between methodological disputes arising from the differences in approach that each takes to the questions of political legitimacy and political justification, and substantive issues about whether, and if so how moral (and ethical) reasons are germane to the justification of political norms.