In Zum Ende (‘Finale’), the closing aphorism of Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno claims that ‘The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair [Verzweiflung] is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption’ (MM: 247).Footnote 1 As Rüdiger Bittner emphasizes in his paper ‘Kritik, und wie es besser wäre’, this statement is in no small way the consequence of Adorno’s commitment—emphasized throughout Minima Moralia Footnote 2 —to the idea that everything in existence is, at present, a manifestation of ‘the wrong’ or ‘the false’ (Bittner Reference Bittner2009: 144). This includes our own standards for thought; hence Adorno goes on to claim in ‘Finale’ that: ‘Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: everything else is mere reconstruction and remains a piece of technology’ (MM: 247, translation amended). Short of assuming the standpoint of redemption, all philosophy will end up doing is ‘reconstructing’ some chunk of the bad world in which we presently exist.
Bittner, for his part, thinks that Adorno’s commitment to this idea that everything in the world as it is presently constituted is wrong or bad—what I will henceforth be calling Adorno’s ‘Wrong Life Claim’ (WLC)—is indicative of the fact that Adornian critical theory has as its task something manifestly impossible: the critique of everything in existence, at once and as a whole. Bittner therefore recommends that this task be abandoned in favour of merely incremental critique (Bittner Reference Bittner2009: 148). But this fails to take into account the fact that—from the perspective of the WLC at least—there is precisely a need right now for us to undertake critical theory in the fullest sense. If everything is bad, then we need to be able to call the whole edifice of reality into question. Once we have taken the WLC seriously, we cannot simply ignore the need for this endeavour, no matter how impossible it might seem. Taking the WLC seriously ought, then, to motivate us to find ways of making critical theory possible. The relatively large amount of work done recently on the ‘normative foundations’ of Adornian critical theory suggests that I am not the only scholar who sees things this way.Footnote 3
But then, even before we start talking about grounding normativity, the critical theorist is saddled with a prior and perhaps much more sweeping problem: namely that the WLC hardly seems to be something that most people are going to be able to take seriously at all. In Minima Moralia, the WLC in large part manifests itself in the form of wild claims such as ‘giving someone a gift involves treating them as an object’ (MM: 42); ‘the healthy resemble corpses’ (MM: 59); or ‘slippers are monuments to the hatred of bending down’ (MM: 110). In short Adorno’s method is typically to take something that we thought was either good or innocuous, and explain why it is really bad or wrong. Now, to thinkers of a certain temperament, this is all fine (or, it is not fine that things should be like this; but that Adorno should think they are like this is fine): these thinkers will be happy to go along with Adorno, they will find that his meaning resonates with them intuitively, they will be sucked in and become Adornians. I should know: it happened to me. But this is not, in my experience, how most other people respond to Adorno: more typically, people react against Adorno’s WLC on the grounds that he couldn’t possibly be able to justify it. Their reasoning usually goes: Sure, Adorno has recognized (perhaps rightly) that some aspects of our current world are wrong. But how does that then warrant the claim that everything is bad?
This, then, is a paper about trying to justify the WLC. In short I will be arguing that, understood in the way that I have introduced it above—where everything in existence literally exhibits the value or quality of being wrong or bad—the WLC cannot be justified: Adornian critical theorists might well think they have good reasons for taking it seriously, but they cannot in any way compel the rest of the philosophical population to share these reasons. But all is not lost: because not only is this not the only way that we can take the WLC; it is also not the best way we have of being able to understand it. On my reading, we can formulate a better understanding of the WLC by focusing on that word ‘despair’ (Verzweiflung) that appears in the first line of ‘Finale’ as quoted above. In my view Adorno’s invocation of ‘despair’ at this key point in Minima Moralia ought to point us to the influence, on Adorno, of Søren Kierkegaard, whose The Sickness Unto Death is constituted in large part by a discussion of the concept of despair. Understanding Adornian wrongness along the lines of Kierkegaardian despair can allow us to formulate a more readily justifiable version of the WLC—or so, at any rate, I will argue.
I. Justifying the Wrong Life Claim
At no point in Minima Moralia does Adorno state the WLC directly: it is, rather, manifested in the sentiment behind a number of the work’s most famous lines. For instance, in Aphorism 29, Adorno states that ‘Das Ganze ist das Unwahre’: ‘The whole is the false’ (MM: 50). And in Aphorism 18, we get the assertion that ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’: ‘There is no right life in the wrong’ (MM: 39, translation amended).
The line from Aphorism 29 is just a straightforward inversion of Hegel’s assertion in the Phenomenology of Spirit that ‘The True is the Whole’ (PhG: 11). This line is thus expressive of the inverted form of Hegelian holism which Adorno appears to affirm in Minima Moralia. In its standard, non-inverted form, Hegelian holism consists in the claim that it is only by being placed within a universal context that particulars have actuality: individual things need to be understood in relation to the universal in order to have concrete existence. This point goes for persons as well as things: only within a given social whole can individuals be realized as such—in large part because they need to be ‘recognized’ as what they are by others, if they are to have the self-certainty they require to sustain their individual existence (see ‘Lordship and Bondage’ from PhG). Ultimately, the ideal form of this social whole will be a ‘completed’ totality in which the interests of all individuals are harmoniously aligned with those of the universal—this is what, in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel will call ‘the state’ (PhR: 228ff).
Adorno goes along with this thought to the extent that he believes that individuals as such are not separable from the social context in which they were raised. Part of the reason for this is that Adorno accepts the Hegelian thought that particulars cannot make sense without being placed in the context of the universal; all things are thus, at least in this sense, linked to everything else. But whereas in Hegel being placed within a completed totality gives persons and things their truth, for Adorno this somehow falsifies them (MM: 16–17).
I say ‘somehow’, because there are a number of possibilities as to how we might best read Adorno on this point here. On one reading, the thought would be the (in fact basically Kierkegaardian one)Footnote 4 that any completed totality would falsify whatever was within it, since what it is to be real is not to be at the end of a finished process but rather to be in a process of becoming. The second reading—subscribing to which would allow us to read Adorno as more of a Hegelian than not—is that the present social world comprises the wrong sort of totality, but that the ‘right’ one would be (qua totality) just fine.Footnote 5 Alternatively of course, the answer could be somewhere in between these two extremes: the ‘right’ totality would precisely be one which allowed things to be appropriately attuned to each other, such that they could participate together in a process of becoming.Footnote 6
Either way, it is clear that for Adorno society does form a sort of totality, and that this totality is (at least at present) a bad one. Adorno’s present is of course not identical with our own, which might seem to complicate matters—but, without wanting to bulldoze over the historical specificity of Adorno’s writings (as they are about his exile in America during WWII, thus set against the backdrop of the war in Europe, the Holocaust, etc.), I would argue that at heart Minima Moralia is a critique of capitalist society, and thus insofar as we still exist under the rule of the iron dictatorship of the market, Adorno’s ‘presently-existing conditions’ remain relevantly similar enough to our own for us to be allowed to elide them.
At any rate, all of this is evidenced by Adorno’s remarks, in the ‘Dedication’ to Minima Moralia, to the effect that society is a ‘totalitarian unison’ where private life is ‘dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production’. His point being: society constitutes a whole in which everything is part of the industrial-capitalist marketplace and its laws of exchange. So if it is this social whole that gives us our concept, then we are in truth nothing other than a component of the capitalist machine. This might mean that we are realized as (exploited) workers, but not as human individuals.Footnote 7 Capitalism is the wrong life and the bourgeois era has historically produced not the liberty, equality and fraternity it promised at its outset but fascism, the Holocaust and nuclear weapons.
It is towards this thought that Adorno is gesturing with his claim that ‘There is no right life in the wrong’. Adorno uses this line to sign off aphorism 18 of Minima Moralia, Asyl für Obdachlose (‘Refuge for Homeless’); a critical examination of the concept of wohnen (‘dwelling’, or just ‘being at home’). By way of opening the aphorism, Adorno suggests that, in capitalist society, the notion of ‘dwelling’ has become, strictly speaking, impossible (MM: 38). In part, Adorno claims, this is because housing nowadays is so lacking: he then proceeds to explain this at length, going through all the available options as to where we might live, and criticising them in terms of both their function and their architecture. But towards the end of the aphorism this claim develops into that which is encapsulated in its conclusion: given a context of overwhelming social wrongness, it is not just impossible to ‘be at home’ (in the proper sense) anywhere at all; it is impossible for us to ‘live’ (in the proper sense) full stop. ‘Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen’.
And again, Adorno’s reasons for claiming this are holist ones. In bourgeois society, the idea of one’s ‘home’ indicates a private sphere: one’s home is, then, one’s private property (well, if one is renting it is strictly speaking not one’s property, but one does have some sort of personal right to occupy it exclusively for a limited period of time). But this means that, even in one’s own private life (which largely takes place in the home), one is always already compromised by the net of interlocking property relations that characterizes the aforementioned ‘totalitarian unison’ of capitalist society. Even inadvertently, one enters into and helps perpetuate the objective tendency of society towards the bad (MM: 39). As Adorno illustrates this thought elsewhere, using a different example:
The chance conversation in the train, when, to avoid dispute, one consents to a few statements that one knows ultimately to implicate murder, is already a betrayal; no thought is immune against communication ... (MM: 25)
This image occurs in Aphorism 5, which opens with the maxim: ‘There is nothing innocuous left,’ a thought itself illustrated with the image of a lovely, blooming tree, which according to Adorno must inevitably become ‘an excuse for an existence outrageously unlovely’ (MM: 25). Wrongness is thus, for Adorno, inherent in everything about our social world, because it inheres in the forces that structure our social world. Everything, then, is either wrong, or it is somehow infected by wrongness. This includes ourselves and our thought too: in Negative Dialectics, Adorno calls us the ‘citizens of the wrong world’, and claims we would be unable to recognize (or even ‘tolerate’) the right one, were we to be plucked from our present existence and placed directly within it (ND: 352).Footnote 8
So, the thought here must be that: if Adorno’s inverted Hegelian Holism makes sense (which I think it does)Footnote 9 , then the WLC can be argued for coherently; to this extent, it can be justified. More specifically, the WLC appears to follow from the combination of Hegelian holism with an experience of (present, socially-derived) wrongness which motivates its inversion; experiences, for instance, of wretchedly bad housing conditions, or forcibly polite conversations with open racists on trains. So, just so long as they do in fact have experience of present social wrongness—and let’s face it, who doesn’t?—Hegelian holists must, it seems, affirm the WLC.
But here’s the problem: they don’t. At any rate, Hegel himself doesn’t. Hegel (of course) affirms Hegelian holism, and he also displays clear awareness (for instance, in the Philosophy of Right) of societally-induced wrongness immanent to his social world.Footnote 10 And yet, Hegel does not draw from these two things in combination the conclusion that everything either is or must be infected by the wrong: rather, present instances of social wrongness are simply painful but necessary steps in the gradual, rational unfolding of the world-spirit. To this extent, then, their objective tendency is not towards the wrong but rather the right. This thought is at the core of Hegel’s famous Doppelsatz from the Philosophy of Right: ‘What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational’ (PhR: 14)—for Hegel, in order to understand something philosophically, we basically have to accept that there are (good) reasons for it having developed as it is. Hence Adornians are left with the question as to why we shouldn’t simply make this optimistic inference, as opposed to Adorno’s pessimistic one?
Well, it might just be that the ‘optimistic’ holist does not have—as it were—the right sort of experience of social wrongness. Perhaps the optimist has some vague notion that capitalism could satisfy human needs better than it currently does, that some people are going cold and hungry when they shouldn’t be, but then he or she does not make the leap to the thought that everything is bad because in their experience, most people are basically sensible and rational and our leaders probably have our best interests at heart, so everything will, most likely, turn out for the best. The pessimistic holist, by contrast, has experiences (of whatever sort) that suggest that the opposite is the case, which is why they affirm the WLC.
But the problem with this line of thought is that it doesn’t seem that experience alone can justify the most extreme claims contained within the WLC. For instance, is it really true that the experience of the Adornian warrants in some way the claim that everything, down to the slippers on our feet, are in some sense compromised by badness? (MM: 110). It seems possible that there could be experiences that warrant claims like this, but I’m not sure that I—or any other Adornian—have actually had them. And yet, we affirm the WLC (or think we do). In truth then it seems like we need something more than experiences of social wrongness; in order to affirm the WLC we require a specific sort of affective orientation towards the experiences we have had, such that we can extrapolate from it to the more general claim. Adorno certainly has something like this thought in Minima Moralia. As he puts it:
We can tell whether we are happy by the sound of the wind. It warns the unhappy man of the fragility of his house, hounding him from shallow sleep and violent dreams. To the happy man it is the song of his protectedness: its furious howling concedes that it has power over him no longer. (MM: 49)
If we are oriented ‘unhappily’ towards reality, then our experience will seem to warrant the thought that everything is wrong; if we are oriented ‘happily’ towards it, we will see that everything is likely to turn out for the best.
The ‘unhappy’ stance is of course just that of the critical theorist; indeed, it could be argued that the assumption of this unhappy stance is precisely necessary if critical theory is to get off the ground at all—I have already hinted at this thought in the Introduction above. The reason for this is that critical theory, at least as defined by the first generation of the Frankfurt School, has as its task the transformative, emancipatory critique of society as a whole.Footnote 11 The two sides of this task go together: the form of social and epistemological holism that Adorno and Horkheimer both affirm entails that everything must be critiqued, if we are to stand a real chance of being liberated from anything at all. This means that we can never defer to any standards for critique drawn immanently from our social world as it presently stands: otherwise we might end up inadvertently justifying and reinforcing some aspect of the existence we have already (as the motivating force for our critique) deemed to be bad: hence, ultimately, Adorno is led to talk about evaluating things relative to the ‘standpoint of redemption’. This fear is not an idle one: just think of how completely ineffective most political and social theory has proven, even that which pretends it is most radical.Footnote 12 Perhaps the reason for this is that the theorist is themselves just a damaged product of the wrong form of life who cannot see past their malformed prejudices?
This, then, is a quite plausible reason why critical theorists might adopt the WLC: the claim that everything is wrong is actually a quite sensible methodological assumption, if you are motivated to pursue the transformative critique of society as a whole. The WLC is thus nothing other than a particularly vivid way of expressing the stance that the critical theorist must adopt towards their society and culture.
But then surely the problem is that when we started out on this part of the discussion, we were talking about adopting an ‘unhappy stance’ towards our society as it presently exists as a way of justifying the WLC; but now it seems that it has become conflated with the WLC. So how are we justifying adopting the unhappy stance? Since there is no necessary experiential route into it, it seems all we are left with is the thought that it seems to be axiomatic for doing critical theory properly. This justification, then, exhibits a problematic circularity: the unhappy stance and thus the WLC are justified as an axiom for critical theory... if we are already interested in pursuing critical theory.
Of course, if we are to treat the WLC simply as an axiom of critical theory and nothing more, then it must be admitted that critical theorists have good reason to hold it: insofar as they are, even arbitrarily, engaged in this particular project, they must hold the WLC. But the problem is then that critical theorists are left unable to justify their project to anyone else—at any rate, if they practice it in the Adornian mode that I am focusing on in this paper. If critical theory really is, as we’ve said, supposed to be the emancipatory critique of society as a whole, something that is supposed to aim at making everyone’s lives better, then it would seem pretty weird if it was, despite this, a project that no one other than critical theorists could accept. (Adornian) critical theorists would end up like Jehovah’s Witnesses, ineffectually pamphleteering for everyone else’s salvation, which they cannot force the unsaved to take an interest in. Adornian critical theory will remain what it primarily manifests itself as today: namely a sort of ethics for belligerent weirdos, occupying an at best niche and precariously employed position in the academy. Of course, maybe the reason why it manifests itself as that is really just because that is all it amounts to: so us loser Adornians ought to drop the pretence. But first let’s try another tack.
II. Kierkegaard on despair
As stated in the Introduction, my strategy here requires invoking Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘despair’. Kierkegaard undertakes a comprehensive analysis of the concept of despair (Danish: Fortvivlelse) in the first half of his late work, The Sickness Unto Death (1849). According to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous author, Anti-Climacus, despair is the titular sickness unto death. This is because for human beings—who have the possibility of eternal life through God—no bodily sickness can truly be ‘unto death’: only a spiritual sickness can, and despair is, as Anti-Climacus tells us, precisely ‘a sickness of spirit, of the self’ (SUD: 43).
In brief, despair involves somehow not really being properly aligned with oneself. As Anti-Climacus will eventually put it: ‘not to be oneself is exactly despair’ (SUD: 60). Over the course of Anti-Climacus’s extensive unpacking of the concept, it becomes clear that ‘not being oneself’ in this context means at least three things: firstly, not being aligned with oneself as the distinctive individual that one is (so, not being oneself in the most literal sense of the term) (SUD: 64); secondly, not being aligned with oneself qua human being (SUD: 75); thirdly, not being aligned with oneself as one is ‘before God’ (SUD: 113). But ultimately, for Anti-Climacus, these three things are necessarily related, since what it is to be distinctively oneself just is to be how one is before God, and what it is to be a human being is to have the possibility of existing before God (SUD: 62).
Now, for Anti-Climacus, being in despair is not all that ‘gloomy’ a thing, even if the word makes it sound as if it is: this is because, dialectically speaking, despair is advantageous (SUD: 52). No-one can be properly aligned with themselves ‘in immediacy’ (SUD: 83); it is only via a process of reflection triggered by despair that one can ever get out of it and truly ‘be themselves’:
The possibility of this sickness [despair] is man’s advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit. The possibility of this sickness is the Christian’s advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian’s blessedness. (SUD: 44–45)
Just because it is wholly dialectical, despair is that sickness of which it is true that it is the greatest bad fortune never to have had it; it is truly providential to get it, even though it is the most dangerous of all sickness if one does not want to be cured of it. (SUD: 56)
So, how does one get cured of despair? Well, one ultimately has to become oneself before God: so one has to become a true Christian, which means having faith in God (SUD: 115). This answer should not surprise us, since The Sickness Unto Death is at all points an explicitly Christian, edifying work: ultimately, despair’s cure is faith because despair is itself, according to Anti-Climacus, ‘sin’—arguing this is the point of the second half of the book. Our possibility of despair is thus a product of our ‘fallenness’ as rational and free but finite beings.
It is for this reason that Anti-Climacus is able to describe a social world in which everyone fails to be a true Christian and is thus in despair:
... there is no one and has never been anyone outside Christendom who isn’t in despair; and no one in Christendom who is not a true Christian; and so far as he is not wholly that, then he is still to some extent in despair. (SUD: 52)
And this even goes for the people who do not know they are despairing:
The common view of despair ... goes no further than the appearances, and it is therefore a superficial view, that is, no view. It assumes that every man knows best himself whether or not he is in despair. So that whoever says he is in despair is assumed to be so, but also whoever thinks he is not is assumed not to be. As a result, despair becomes a rather rare phenomenon, instead of being quite common ... the very fact of not being in despair, of not being conscious of being in despair, is itself a form of despair. (SUD: 52–53)
The Sickness Unto Death’s portrayal of a society wholly in despair is in many ways typical of Kierkegaard’s concern—in his later work, starting with the politically incendiary ‘Two Ages’ review of 1846—to offer a radical critique of Christianity as it was practised in the bourgeois world of his day (see for instance ‘The Moment’, the series of pamphlets that Kierkegaard wrote directly attacking the Danish state church). Hence, despite the fact that despair is apparently, for Anti-Climacus, existentially universal (it infects the entire human race), the example given of a subject in despair is almost always a socially and historically specific one: that of a shallow and hypocritical bourgeois man,Footnote 13 ‘ground as smooth as a pebble, as exchangeable as a coin of the realm’ (SUD: 64); ‘to all appearances a human being ... They use their abilities, amass wealth, carry out world enterprises, make prudent calculations, etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves. In a spiritual sense they have no self’ (SUD: 65).
In one image, it is claimed that insofar as they ‘are spirit’, it is as if these bourgeois men occupy a great house (Anti-Climacus here describes a typical nineteenth-century townhouse, with basement, ground floor and first floor), but they do not wish to use it: ‘... in their own house they prefer to live in the basement’ (SUD: 73–74). The petty bourgeois ‘lacks any spiritual characteristic and is absorbed in the probable’, thus they cannot grasp the (utterly improbable) possibility of eternal life in God (SUD: 72). ‘Petty bourgeois vulgarity placates itself in the commonplace, in despair as much when things go well as they go badly’ (SUD: 72).
Indeed, it is clear that to the extent that it discourages awareness of one’s own despair (and the consequences of this), bourgeois society is (for Kierkegaard, and Anti-Climacus) responsible for the spiritual sickness of its members. Although there are, Anti-Climacus claims, certain people who just ‘have so profound a nature that they are bound to become conscious of themselves as spirit’, or else ‘who have been helped by painful experience and difficult decisions to become conscious of themselves as spirit’ (SUD: 57), this awareness is for the most part discouraged by a social world which is fundamentally mundane (SUD: 71).
Moreover, even if one does become aware that one is in despair, the institutional framework of bourgeois society makes it all the more difficult to transcend it. For instance, at one point Anti-Climacus describes a man who, becoming dissatisfied with his life as one grows tired of a place of residence, ‘which may come to disgust him because of the smoke or any other reason’ (SUD: 86), realizes he is in despair. But, because he exists in a society that is only concerned with banal, ‘earthly’ things, this does not end up constituting a dialectical awareness of himself as spirit: rather, the realisation motivates a decision to become a different kind of earthly human being. And, as this person grows more and more successful in the world, so he gradually forgets his despair:
In the course of the years he comes to think of it as well-nigh ridiculous, especially when in the congenial company of other capable and dynamic men with a sense and aptitude for real life. Charming! As it says in the novels, he has now been happily married for several years, a forceful and enterprising man, father and citizen, even perhaps an important man. (SUD: 87)
A contrasting case is provided by the example of a man whose despair has what Anti-Climacus describes as an ‘active’ element, which results in his ‘defiance’ against the social whole, and indeed all existence as such:
It usually begins like this: A self which in despair wants to be himself, suffers some kind of pain which cannot be removed or separated from his concrete self. He then heaps upon this torment all his passion, which then becomes a demonic rage. If it should now happen that God in heaven and all the angels were to offer to help him to be rid of this torment—no, he does not want that, now it is too late. Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of this agony, but he was kept waiting, and now all that’s past; he prefers to rage against everything and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged ... (SUD: 103)
As Anti-Climacus points out, this despair is not that experienced by ‘earthly’ men but it is rather that of poets or artists (the best examples I can think of here are all anachronisms, which perhaps indicates Kierkegaard’s prescience as a psychologist: the early Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Munch and, of course, Nietzsche).Footnote 14 Here again, we have an example of a person whom society has malformed, and who as a result is unable to transcend their despair: their dissatisfaction with everything around them precisely means that they cannot bring themselves to have faith in God, the eternal: these people ‘will hear nothing about what comfort eternity has in store for [them]’, because ‘the comfort would be his undoing’ (SUD: 105): having their pain removed from them would result in the loss of their identity.Footnote 15
Of course, for Kierkegaard I think it is also pretty clear that salvation is ultimately a possibility for individuals in the barest, most existential sense, rather than something that is wholly contingent upon how society is. So perhaps one could miraculously work one’s own way out of the social fabric and become a true Christian before God without the radical transformation of presently-existing conditions. But certainly there is a sense throughout The Sickness Unto Death that this would be a lot more difficult under capitalism than it would be in a more ideally Christian social framework.
In short: for Kierkegaard, despair is a kind of spiritual misalignment, endemic across the bourgeois social world. Everything that is ‘spirit’ is in despair, for Kierkegaard, to the extent that it is not aligned with itself, which (for him) means being not aligned with itself before God.
III. Despair and the Wrong Life Claim
How can this definition of ‘despair’ help us solve a problem in Adorno? Well, it is certainly worth noting that Kierkegaard was a huge influence on Adorno’s early philosophical development.Footnote 16 Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift—and first published book—took the form of a critical study of Kierkegaard (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic). I don’t want to lean at all heavily on the study here; to call it gnomic would be an understatement, and I am simply not enough of an expert on Kierkegaard to be able to unpick where Kierkegaard himself actually is in any of Adorno’s constantly equivocating pronouncements about his thought. Nevertheless, although the concept of despair is not the focus of the book, it is glossed with something like approval, and the book certainly does stand as evidence that Adorno had read and engaged philosophically with The Sickness Unto Death prior to writing Minima Moralia: the former is the most-cited text in the whole of Adorno’s Kiekegaard book.
Now, in German translation, Kierkegaard’s Fortvivlelse—the English ‘despair’—becomes Verzweiflung, the word that Adorno uses in ‘Finale’ to characterize reality at present. On the reading I want to pursue here, Adorno’s use of Verzweiflung is pointed. Adorno, who knew his Kierkegaard inside-out, used Verzweiflung to indicate something like the Kierkegaardian notion of despair that I have outlined in section II. And this fact, in turn, can help us form a better—because more readily justifiable—understanding of the WLC.
Let’s distinguish two different readings of the WLC. The first, which we’ve been (tacitly) pursuing up until now, I will call the value-reading of the WLC. On this reading, the WLC entails that everything (in our present social world) exhibits ‘wrongness’ in the sense that it has the value or quality of ‘being wrong’. Everything is either wrong just in-itself, or it is infected by wrongness—in precisely the sense that I can be infected by a virus, and thus exhibit the symptoms of a disease. The wrongness of the slipper, thus, is somehow present in the object of the slipper itself; the wrongness of the social whole is inherent in ‘the social fabric’ (however we want to cash this metaphor out). This is, I take it, the most intuitive, surface-level way in which we can read the WLC.
The second reading, which we can formulate via Kierkegaard, I will call the despair-reading. On this reading, everything in our social world would count as ‘wrong’ not because it exhibited the value or quality of being, literally, ‘wrong’, but rather that it exhibits wrongness insofar as it is in despair; that is, because it is distorted, because it fails to be aligned with its concept. So for instance, slippers are not wrong because slippers, either as such or in-themselves, are bad; slippers (right now) are wrong because they fail to do what slippers ought to do, in the fullest sense of what it is to be a slipper. Likewise for ‘society’: on the despair-reading reading society would count as ‘wrong’, not because it is literally, objectively evil; but rather because it is somehow distorted, not itself. Society, for instance, ought to provide for the possibility of general human flourishing, but our society (as we know) does not. It is thus not ‘society’ in the true sense of the word.
I’m going to claim that we should adopt the despair-reading over the value-reading of the WLC. In the first place this is because the despair-reading can make better sense, compared to the value-reading, of what Adorno actually says in Minima Moralia. Certainly, it makes sense when applied to ‘Finale’, where after using that word ‘despair’ Adorno goes on to state, quite literally, that the our present social world must be understood by the theorist as ‘indigent and distorted’ (MM: 247). But take also for instance aphorism 36, which is entitled ‘The Health Unto Death’.Footnote 17 In this aphorism, Adorno is essentially concerned to make the claim that our present conceptions of health are distorted, to the extent that they in fact constitute a sort of social sickness: those whom we take to be healthy are ‘exuberant’, ‘vital’ people who present as normal, happy, and in short as fit for work: they go along with the prevailing social tendency (MM: 59). But these traits precisely make people ‘unhealthy’, insofar as they prevent them from living a ‘fully’ human life: for in order to be a ‘healthy’ person as our society presently defines it, one requires an essentially uncritical orientation towards reality; as Anti-Climacus would put it, this means that our prevailing notion of health requires the denial of one’s own nature as spirit.
The very people who burst with proofs of exuberant vitality could easily be taken for prepared corpses, from whom the news of their not-quite-successful decease has been withheld for reasons of population policy. (MM: 59)Footnote 18
Of course, the idea that ‘health is really sickness’ could perhaps fit with the value-reading of the WLC as well: it would just mean that health was a bad thing. But consider the line with which Adorno signs off the aphorism:
And how comfortless is the thought that the sickness of the normal does not necessarily imply as its opposite the health of the sick, but that the latter usually only present, in a different way, the same disastrous pattern. (MM: 60)
Assuming the value-reading, this statement would imply both that ‘health is bad’ and that ‘sickness is bad’. Now of course, on some level I think Adorno is indeed saying this, but then the question is: to what effect is he saying it? It’s certainly not because he thinks that health as such would always be bad for you. In fact, if this was what he was saying, then I’m not sure how it could constitute a critique of the notion of health: both health and sickness are equally bad, so we should neither be healthy nor sick ... what then? We’ve got nowhere to go from there, we’re just stuck in the realm of incoherent naysaying that Adorno’s critics always suspected he inhabits. But now consider that what Adorno is really saying is—on the despair-reading—that the ‘healthy’ today really exhibit sickness, because our present notion of health is distorted; because we just don’t know what health is, we lack a coherent conception of healthiness. So then we can hold on to the thought that we should be healthy instead of sick ... it’s just that we need a proper understanding of what ‘health’ is first, if we are ever going to get well at all.
Another example of how the despair-reading of Adorno’s WLC can work might be provided by aphorism 18, which we’ve already discussed in some detail in section I. Here, Adorno wants to claim that being at home anywhere is now impossible. But why? Does he really mean that we can literally never feel that we are at home anywhere? (‘Dwelling has become impossible’.) This might be what the value-reading of the WLC is forced to say—taking the impossibility to be literal—but then that must be just another opportunity that non-Adornians would take to reject it. I feel at home all the time in my comfortable house, they might say. Maybe he didn’t, maybe you don’t, and perhaps Adorno still has a good general critique of housing: but the claim is too modally strong to be admitted as legitimate.
But what if Adorno is really saying that we can never feel at home, not because we don’t ever ‘feel’ at home, but rather because we just don’t really know what it is to live in a home, in the fullest sense of what a ‘home’ might be? What Adorno would then be saying is not that your first-personal reports of feeling cosy in your semi-detached house represent feelings that you couldn’t possibly have: you both can and do have them! Rather, he is saying that, on closer (critical) inspection, these feelings are indicative of something other than what you think they are. This is because you are not feeling cosy in a ‘home’, you are feeling cosy in a piece of private property that (ultimately) does not belong to you, it is possessed by an overwhelming social tendency that is blindly indifferent to your security or happiness. And this is why dwelling is impossible, not because you can’t feel that you’re dwelling somewhere.
Seeing how everything in society is in ‘despair’ allows us to assume a critical standpoint on our social whole. In this way, the despair claim is able to accomplish precisely what the WLC (however we read it) is required to do: it needs to function as a methodological assumption expressive of the perspective that the critical theorist must assume towards her social world. This is just what we’ve seen above, where the idea that our concepts at present are ‘distorted’ allows us to get a critical purchase on them: we can get a critique of our present notions of health or housing by seeing that they are misshapen. This is, incidentally, just what Adorno recommends in ‘Finale’: we must fashion ‘perspectives ... that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be ... indigent and distorted’ (MM: 247).
That despair can afford us this should not be a surprising result: after all in The Sickness Unto Death, becoming aware that one is in despair really is just a sort of being raised to critical awareness of oneself and one’s situation.Footnote 19 The emphasis in Kierkegaard is of course more spiritual, theological and existential than it is in Adorno, but all this depends on what the object is on which one’s critique focuses. For Kierkegaard it is the theological self, the self before God; for Adorno, it is society and its products (with ourselves understood as just another of those products).
So the despair-reading can preserve what is most important about the value-reading of the WLC, whilst also fitting (arguably) better with Adorno’s texts. But is it, crucially, any more justifiable? I think yes—at least, that is, if we’re talking to someone who is already a Hegelian holist. Now, it is certainly true that the despair-reading maintains the inverted form of Hegelian holism that we identified in section I: everything is in despair, we must think, because it is distorted by some overwhelming social tendency (say, capitalism). But then the problem that the value-reading faced was that there didn’t seem to be any way it could motivate holding inverted holism (on which everything would be wrong, because of some tendency towards wrongness), over the standard, optimistic form of Hegelian holism (where everything is getting steadily better and better). Even if we have concrete experiences of socially-derived wrongness—which of course might well motivate inverted holism—we still ended up needing some additional justification as to why we ought to adopt an ‘unhappy stance’ towards that experience.
How then might the despair-reading fare any better? Well, imagine that both the convinced Adornian, and the convinced Hegelian, share an experience of socially-derived wrongness. Say they’re housemates, in a pretty shoddy flat, and they are both spending two-thirds of their income on rent as a result of a deeply unfair rental agreement, to which they were forced to agree as a result of conditions in the housing market, and so have no alternative but to remain in. The Adornian, of course, is pessimistic about what this experience of renting a house indicates about our social world and its historical tendencies: it’s all terrible, and it’s getting worse! It was bad enough to begin with, and now we’ve got rats and I think the boiler’s broken! The Hegelian, by contrast, is much more optimistic—the house sucks, that’s for sure, but at least it’s not a mud hut, and surely these problems with the rental market will resolve themselves in the near future, after all it’s a big issue in the upcoming mayoral election. But one thing that the Hegelian holist cannot claim, if there is any evidence of socially-derived wrongness at all, is that we currently exist in a completed totality, the utopia where everything has finally, rationally unfolded. There is still concrete irrationality existent in our world, and this is causing people to suffer—they know this first-personally. To this extent then, society has yet to meet its own concept.
But this is all that the despair-reading needs! The despair-reading does not need to get the Hegelian to come round to the idea that our social world exhibits radical wrongness as such, only that the world is radically wrong insofar as it is distorted: and this is something that an experience of suffering—immanent to our social world—can get us without our having assumed a pessimistic stance towards said experience in advance. Emphasising the despair-reading can thus bring the traditional holist round to the WLC—effectively by, point-for-point, agreeing with them. Unless the Hegelian really is a Pollyanna-ish optimist, then they must admit that our world exhibits widespread distortion ... and once they have done that, they have already accepted the despair-reading of the WLC.
Of course, this still does not get us a complete justification of the WLC, because this move will—as I’ve emphasized—really only work if one also already accepts Hegelian holism; and, as I’ve stipulated above, I will not be offering any independent justification of this holism here. But at any rate, the way things stand with the WLC now is: if you are a Hegelian holist, you have no reason (under presently-existing conditions, where people really do suffer, and things really are—at least sometimes—bad) not to accept that it is plausible. At the very least, then, this investigation has afforded Adornians an answer—that they did not have before—to a significant minority of the philosophical population.
IV. But is it still despair?
How close is what we’ve been talking about in the previous section to Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, exactly? Perhaps, one objection would go, we’ve had to distort the concept of despair itself, so much so that it is unrecognisable. And perhaps our so distorting it is also going to result in other, unforeseen difficulties...
Well, in order to adapt the concept of despair to Adornian critical theory, we’ve certainly had to do two things, so let’s make it clear what they are. Firstly, we’ve had to socialize it. Whereas in The Sickness Unto Death, despair is explicitly defined as something that only human beings can be in, because only they have a ‘spiritual’ nature, if the concept is to work for Adorno then clearly it needs to be something that the whole social world can exhibit.Footnote 20 But this is not inconceivable. For Adorno, social products also have a spiritual nature: of course, they are not ‘spirit’ in the sense of Geist (i.e., minded), but they are of course a product of Geist. Contained within every object is what Adorno calls a ‘sedimented history’ (ND: 163), resultant from the long, ongoing process of the interaction between human thought and action with the nature from which it is emergent; this is what Adorno defines elsewhere as ‘natural-history’.Footnote 21 Thus, the despair exhibited by the purely ‘human’ world is certainly something that also infects the world of ‘objective’ things: at the very least, to the extent that they are grasped through the concepts and categories of our social world.Footnote 22
Of course, the world of things does not have a ‘spiritual’ nature in at least one sense that is very important for Kierkegaard: that is, it does not have a spiritual nature in the sense that it has a self that can exist (in all its radical individuality) before God. This brings us on to the second thing that we need to do to the concept of despair: namely, we need to secularize it. Kierkegaard’s concept is oriented within a specifically Christian context where the cure for despair, is (as we’ve seen) to assume the right relationship towards God. Even for critical theorists who are also theists (and I certainly wouldn’t want to claim that the two things were completely incompatible), this can’t work: we don’t just need the right relationship to God, we also need a material transformation of society and culture.Footnote 23 Of course, we do have a minimal definition of despair, which we’ve already been using, which does not contain any reference to God: this is just the idea of something being in despair just insofar as it is not aligned with itself. But then the question is: how could we tell that something was undistorted, without God? In Kierkegaard, the whole aim is to be yourself before God, and only then will you be truly yourself, not in despair. This makes a sort of sense, because it provides us with a standard—albeit, perhaps, a mystical one—for critique to aim for. But can the picture be filled out without any reference to the divine? Without God, what would it be, for spiritual things to truly be themselves?
Well, one strategy here might be to say: actually, Adorno does continue to have God in the picture. Maybe his God is not an explicitly Christian one, particularly in the sense of being anyone’s ‘personal saviour’. But what, in ‘Finale’, does Adorno say is the antidote to despair? Nothing but ‘the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption ... as it will appear one day in the messianic light’ (MM: 247). This then sounds as if Adorno holds a socialized—but not entirely secularized—version of Kierkegaardian despair. For this Adorno, then, we can access an idea of what it would be for things to be undistorted by reference to how they will one day appear after the Messiah comes and redeems everything. At any rate, this is the only evaluative standard that Bittner thinks Adorno can coherently access (Bittner Reference Bittner2009: 147).
But if this is the case, we can hardly claim to have formulated a more readily justifiable version of the WLC via the concept of despair. Indeed, Bittner uses precisely this point to demonstrate the utter implausibility of Adornian critical theory. So perhaps here we really do need to do a violence to the textual evidence; or maybe we should take the easy way out and dismiss what Adorno is saying as a metaphor. But what then? We would still be left with the need for some other standard for critique. This then throws us right back into questions about the ‘normative foundations’ of Adorno’s critical theory. Only if we can solve this problem can we really claim that Adorno’s critical theory is plausible in the fullest sense.Footnote 24
Conclusion
This paper has argued that we can formulate a more plausible version of Adorno’s WLC via the Kierkegaardian notion of despair. The despair-reading of the WLC is, I have claimed, more readily justifiable than the alternative, the value-reading. This is a win for Adornians, because at the very least the despair-reading allows us to talk with (traditional) Hegelians on shared terms. I have not, however, offered either (a) a fully justifiable version of the WLC, or (b) a fully plausible account of Adornian critical theory. But this account will, I hope, help us take a step towards obtaining these two things. In addition to this, I hope that this paper has been able to contribute to an understanding of the influence of Kierkegaard on Adorno’s thought, as well as of the closeness of the sort of claims that Kierkegaard is making in The Sickness Unto Death to the claims of Adornian critical theory.
