Given Adorno's emphasis on the particular as
important in addition to the total, it is surprising that, to this point, we
have only seen him examine universal concepts (such as “the particular” and
“the total”) with little reference and direct relevance to the material world.
Granted, the material world is lurking behind Adorno's claims, but even our
interpretations of the passage that includes the phrase, “to write poetry after
Auschwitz is barbaric,” were all conceptual;
they might draw from the material world, but do not, in turn, give back
to it by altering human behavior in it. Although no such practical element is
obvious in CCS, it does appear in others of Adorno's texts, the most
obvious example of which is his claim in ND that “A new categorical
imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their
thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing
similar will happen” (ND 365). He
repeats the claim in “Education After Auschwitz”: “The premier demand upon all
education is that Auschwitz not happen again”
(“Education After Auschwitz” 19). In this section, I will argue that Adorno's
new categorical imperative follows the themes that we have already seen in
Adorno's thought, but because of its practical twist, it deals with the issues
in a more personal way. My argument here follows Bernstein's argument on this
topic in Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics fairly closely.
Both
of these claims come at the beginnings of sections (the latter quotation is the
first sentence “Education After Auschwitz”), and Adorno follows both by arguing
that a justification of these claims is not only unnecessary but wrong (“an
outrage” in ND [365], “monstrous” in “Education After Auschwitz” [19]).
Thus, both texts employ a jarring effect similar to that of Adorno’s claim in
CCS that writing poetry after Auschwitz is
barbaric. Bernstein argues that this jarring nature, and the claim that
justification is outrageous is a result of the physical basis for the new
categorical imperative. For Bernstein, Adorno's imperative is based on physical
abhorrence to Auschwitz (Bernstein 386). When
we hear about Auschwitz, if we understand what happened and its implications,
we cannot help but feel that it should not have been and should not be,
and this abhorrence then alters the way that we understand everything else
(391). Thus, it makes sense that, upon seeing in Auschwitz
a totalizing objectification, Adorno finds examples of it all around him. His
thought is dominated by an awareness of doom that Auschwitz did happen,
that it should not happen again, but that the forces that allowed it to
happen are still in place (a thought related to the interpretation that
Adorno’s claim means that poetry cannot succeed at its function), and that
(therefore) any individual (or communal) attempt is feeble (a thought related
to the interpretation that Adorno’s claim means that poetry is
self-contradictory), but still necessary (a thought related to the
interpretation that Adorno’s claim emphasizes the particular over the total).
Yet,
Bernstein claims that this response, because it is physical in nature, is also
based on an individual experience of Auschwitz
(392). Hence, Adorno's tone in the middle of the section preceding his
categorical imperative in ND becomes more personal. Bernstein sees
Adorno's personal experience in this section so clearly that he claims that
“Adorno writes of himself in the third person although the sense of the passage
is irremediably first-person” (392). In this section, Adorno talks about “the
drastic guilt of him who was spared,” through which “he will be plagued by
dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the
ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of
the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier” (ND 363). We can see already a vast difference between the tone here
and that of any of the passages in CCS. The terms are more personal (“guilt”
and “dreams”), and we find an individual subject outside of his profession
(“him who was spared” as opposed to “the cultural critic”). This experience,
then, is personal, practical, and based in feeling, such that the understanding
of Auschwitz that results from it is also personal, practical, and based in
feeling, though we could not see it in CCS. Such an attitude is exemplified in
Adorno's move from the question of whether writing poetry is possible to the
question of whether living is possible after Auschwitz
in his later writing (362-3). The question of whether one can live, as a
personal question that determines our understanding of Auschwitz,
is a prerequisite to the question of whether one can write poetry.
Before we
understand Auschwitz's disruption to our culture, we have to understand
Auschwitz's disruption to our selves and thus to our understanding of what Auschwitz is and what culture is. This last point becomes
especially interesting in ND because Adorno attributes the possibility
of poetry there to its ability to give voice to suffering, just as we saw him
do in “Commitment” above (p. 30-1). If suffering is also the basis of the
impossibility of living after Auschwitz, then
the possibility of poetry is based in the impossibility of
living. Just as culture's relationship with society makes it impossible,
culture's relationship with individual experience makes it possible or even necessary
(as in “Liquidation of the Self”).
Bernstein
goes too far, though, when he claims that the first and third person in this
passage melt together (Bernstein 392). Although the experience of Auschwitz is
personal, at the same time it is not a unique experience to Adorno, and Adorno
expects all of those who were spared and who understand the implications of
being spared (that they live in a society that committed such atrocities and
could commit them again) to have responded similarly. Otherwise, Adorno's text
would employ the first person and would not talk about the “categorical
imperative,” a Kantian term for an imperative that results a priori from
how we respond to our world.[1]
Anyone, therefore, who feels physical repugnance for Auschwitz
has placed the categorical imperative upon themselves.
Thus, when (based on his
conclusion that Adorno is speaking from a strictly personal experience)
Bernstein claims that any event could have caused the same imperative
(393, 395), he is logically correct, since there is nothing logically
impossible about our feeling physical abhorrence for a fly buzzing around, but
– at the same time – for Adorno, Auschwitz is an experience that cannot be
equated with the buzzing of a fly. The physical abhorrence to Auschwitz is, in
other words, both particular (insofar as it is a personal response) and total
(insofar as it is a response that anyone who understands the implications of
Auschwitz should feel), and the totality is informed by the particularity
because our understanding of the implications of Auschwitz
are based on Adorno's personal response to it.
[1] For Kant, the categorical imperative results
from the concept of “the law.” That a law demands that we follow it under any
circumstances forces us to accept that we should act in a particular way. (See
Kant's The Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals.) For Adorno, then,
it would make sense that the categorical imperative results from our physical
repugnance to Auschwitz. That we have felt
physical repugnance forces us to accept that we should act in a particular way.
