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October 7, 2009
Art is the promise of happiness says Adorno in Aesthetic Theory.
In The Work of Art and the Promise of Happiness in Adorno in World Picture 3 James Gordon Finlayson unpacks this pithy aphorisms. He says that in the lectures post-humously published as Problems of Moral Philosophy Adorno suggests that, under current conditions, Sittlichkeit, or the morality of custom, rather than Moralität, the morality of principle, presents the immediate danger. The former, with its pressure towards group adaptation and conformity, is far less likely to be a source of possible resistance and criticism and more likely to harden into totalitarianism than the latter. Finlayson then adds:
The peculiar difficulty Adorno faces, given his diagnosis of social conditions, is to reliably locate and make This is the problem that lies behind one of his most memorable and most difficult aphorisms: “Es gibt keinen richten Leben im falschen.” What makes this sentence is so difficult to interpret, also makes it difficult to translate. Literally it means that there is no right living in the false life. A good, idiomatic translation of this crucial sentence into English would be something like: “The false life cannot be rightly lived.”available to critical theory something like happiness or the good life.
He says that Adorno's pithy sentence suggests two very different ideas about happiness understood in terms of the good life.
The first idea is that happiness can be found only in fragments of reality that bear no significant relation to the structure of social reality. The second idea is that there is literally no happiness in the world, and that nothing within the world can help us to picture happiness, or even so much as to form an idea of it. I call this second idea austere negativism. Austere negativism is consistent with Adorno’s thought in Negative Dialectics that philosophy’s true interest lies in what is non-conceptual and non-identical to thinking. Finlayson adds:
There can be no doubt that Adorno endorses now one, now the other of these discrepant conceptions of negativism—incomplete and austere negativism. There can be no doubt also that Adorno does not much mind about discrepancy, or—which comes to the same thing—care much for consistency, the preoccupation with which he believes to be a major fault of contemporary forms of philosophy. He far is more concerned with the depth of insight his thought affords.
The standard view of Adorno's aphorism that art is the promise of happiness makes good sense of Adorno’s claim that art provides a foil against which the social world can be criticized, and an ideal worthy of imitation.
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