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JOSE ´ MANUEL BARRETO *

ETHICS OF EMOTIONS AS ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS:

A JURISPRUDENCE OF SYMPATHY IN ADORNO,

HORKHEIMER AND RORTY

ABSTRACT. This article considers in a different light the relationship between legaltheory and ethics by means of an interpretation of the thought of Adorno and

Horkheimer, and of the writings of Richard Rorty, as two moments of a marginal

stream of ethics of passions that runs beneath the history of rationalist Western

philosophy. It departs from the critique of Modernity as a dialectic of barbarism and

civilisation, and from a genealogy of Auschwitz that finds its antecedents in Kantian

morality. It also characterises modern culture as one of apathy and bourgeois stoi-

cism, and establishes a link between the cold modern ethos and the dynamics of Nazi

hardness. The article turns then to a consideration of some of the responses to the

comprehensive crisis of Modernity: the imperative Auschwitz never again, Adornos

general enlightenment and Horkheimers ethics of sympathy. Finally it reflects upon

Rortys proposal of sentimental education as an effective strategy to foster a human

rights culture in Postmodernity, with the aim of bridging the tradition of moral

sentiments and contemporary struggles for human rights.

KEY WORDS: Adorno, Auschwitz, crisis of modernity, Horkheimer, human

rights, Kant, moral sentiments, Rorty, sentimental education, sympathy

On this occasion, indeed our last philosophical encounter, Herbert [Marcuse] told

me: Look, I know wherein our most basic value judgments are rooted: in compas-

sion, in our sense for the suffering of others.

Habermas

In the current context of the dominant rationalist philosophical and

legal culture the relationship between morality and emotions, or

between human rights and feelings, cannot be seen. As legal or moral

rules, political ideals or ethical values, human rights have been

Law and Critique (2006) 17: 73–106

Springer 2006DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-0003-y

* I am very grateful to Costas Douzinas, Sonia Romero, Shaun Haselhurst,

David-Alexander Smith, Jose ´ Bellido and the two anonymous referees for their

comments, and to Alexander Garcı ´a-Du ¨ ttman for his suggestions. This text is ded-

icated to Paul Gready.

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generally understood as one of the characteristic expressions of the

Age of Reason. We still live under the aura or the shadow of modern

rationalism. For Kant a sharp contradiction suffices between duty

and emotions as for him only acts exclusively driven by duty are

moral. Whatever the circumstances, if an action is motivated by

sentiments it does not have moral value. This set of assumptions,

which is one of the cornerstones of Kants moral philosophy, comes

back to Platos admonition that feelings, alongside poets, tragedy and

poetry, should be exiled from the realm of thinking, ethics, arts and

from the city itself, as affections would be proper only to women,

children and men with womanish or immature characters.None the less, emotions have always challenged practical reason.

This article explores the history of the Western philosophical tradi-

tion in the quest for a stream of ethics of emotions that is currently

almost invisible, but nevertheless runs throughout Ancient, Modern

and Postmodern thinking. Alongside the history of philosophy, a

theory of moral sentiments has been present in Greek Tragedy,

Aristotle and Hellenistic ethics, Hume and Smith, Rousseau, German

Romanticism and Mill. Contemporary resort to an ethics of passions –

as in the cases of Adorno, Horkheimer, Rorty, and more recently

Nussbaum,1 Baier2 and Ward3 – is a reaction to Kantian morality,

which is seen as hampered by a solipsist rationalism that lacks anaccount of the participation of sentiments in moral life. In this spirit,

this article attempts to contribute to bring the tradition of moral

sentiments into the realm of legal theory, particularly into the arena

of the theory of human rights, in order to foster the development of a

jurisprudence of sentiments,4 and to advance the idea of an ethics of

emotions as ethics of human rights. As Mill said in relation to

Bentham, law and the fight for emancipation should not be left to

reason and rationalist thinkers alone, as this entails the dangers of the

impoverishment of the human experience.5 From the starting point of

1 M. Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and

Philosophy (Cambridge: CUP, 1986), and The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Prac-tice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princenton: PUP, 1994).

2 A. Baier, Moral Prejudices (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press,

1996).3 I. Ward, Justice, Humanity and the New World Order (Burlington: Aldershot,

2003).4 I. Ward, The Echo of a Sentimental Jurisprudence, Law and Critique 13 (2002),

106–125.5 J.S. Mill, Bentham, in J.S. Mill and J. Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Es-

says (London: Penguin, 1987).

JOSE ´ MANUEL BARRETO

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this suspicion, this article argues that emotions are to play a role in

contemporary theory and the defence of human rights, a call with

which Chantal Mouffe agrees when she says that the prime task of

democratic politics is not (...) to eliminate passions or to relegate

them to the private sphere in order to establish a rational consensus

in the public sphere. It is to mobilise those passions toward demo-

cratic designs.6 Thus, this article will examine the possibilities for

conceiving of an ethics of human rights offered by the converging

theses advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer on the one hand, and by

those developed by Rorty on the other hand. Although Critical

Theory and Pragmatism make a difficult partnership, if the writingsof both schools are revisited without certain prejudices, a common

trait can be detected. It is the contention of this article that an ethics

of emotions can be found in the thinkers of the School of Frankfurt

(Section 1) and that, once this perspective is attained, such an ethics

can be taken to the realm of human rights with the help of the critique

of rationalism provided by Rortys Neopragmatism (Section 2).

1. CRITICAL THEORY AND ETHICS

To propose the idea of a theory of morality, and particularly of an

ethics of sentiments, inhabiting the works of Horkheimer andAdorno could be met with disbelief. Nowadays the Frankfurt

Schools theory of morality is usually identified with Habermas ethics

of discourse and communicative reason, a still Kantian exit to the

crisis of the solipsism of Kantian subjectivism. However, there was

also an ethics of emotions in the works of the founders of Critical

Theory, which remains today an abandoned site, a risky no-go area

indeed. Perhaps such an ethics was never in the centre of the writings

of the members of the first generation of the Frankfurt School, whose

Marxist lineage would not be a promising context to look for a moral

theory or a theory of moral sentiments. A branch of ethics grew up

anyway, although remaining in the shade of the critique of the

conditions of life in highly developed capitalist societies, the critiqueof ideology and Modern reason, the studies on the authoritarian

personality, and the non-dogmatic appropriation of Marx, Freud and

Hegel. Thus, when Critical Theory, particularly the writings of

Marcuse and Adorno, acquired notoriety with the political turmoil of

6 C. Mouffe, Which Ethics for Democracy?, in M. Garber, et al., eds, The Turn to

Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 92.

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the 1960s, it was regarded mainly as social philosophy and social

psychology.7 Currently Critical Theory is basically associated with

the philosophy of aesthetics of Adorno, the heterodox cultural crit-

icism of Benjamin and the theory of communicative action and

deliberative democracy of Habermas. Horkheimers contribution to

critical theory has been neglected in contemporary debate, and the

moral theory already present in his writings and those of Adorno

since the early 1930s has been forgotten or consciously ignored.8

Thus, the present exploration of Adorno and Horkheimers ethics

encompasses an analysis of its antecedents in the crisis of modernity

and in the critique of the modern moral philosophy (Section 1.1), aswell as in the sociology of capitalist culture and in the history of Nazi

education (Section 1.2). An examination of the categorical imperative

derived from Auschwitz will follow, accompanied by a thematisation

of the ways to fulfil it, particularly those of Adornos general

enlightenment (Section 1.3) and Horkheimers ethics of sympathy

(Section 1.4).

1.1. Auschwitz and the Critique of Modern Morality

Husserls motto, according to which the impulse for philosophy does

not come from the world of the ideas but from the life world, has in

the first generation of the Frankfurt School an outstanding example.The history of Critical Theory and the thinking of Adorno and

Horkheimer were born and developed in a tight relationship with the

history of the 20th century. Since its inception, Critical Theory was

confronted by a number of historical challenges like those of the

weakening of the proletariat as a revolutionary class in the West; the

petrification of Marxism in bureaucratic and totalitarian Commu-

nism first in Russia; and then the surge of Fascism, the Second World

War and the Holocaust. For Garcı ´a-Du ¨ ttman, it was the horror and

the trauma of the Holocaust, the unbearable force of the experience

of an event of such overwhelming brutality that pushed Adorno to

mark history with a single name,

Auschwitz

, and to think and definehistory as a whole in relation to this event.9 Auschwitz would be a

7 D. Held, Introduction to Critical Theory. Horkheimer to Habermas (Cambridge:

Polity Press, 1980), 40.8 J. McCole, S. Benhabib, and W. Bonß, Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy

and Social Science, in S. Benhabib, et al., eds, On Max Horkheimer. New Perspec-

tives (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1993), 10.9 A. Garcı ´a-Du ¨ ttmann, The Memory of Thought (London and New York: Con-

tinuum, 2002), 1.


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grounding hallmark, an event that signals a break in universal history

and establishes a time that is before and a time that comes after, an

event that defines the epoch. Adorno and Horkheimers ethics are not

the result of a mere speculative intellectual exercise. It is not just an

answer to the call for developing a theory of practical reason, or the

product of a quest for an exit to a theoretical impasse. Their moral

theory was born out of the experience of the barbarism of the 20th

century, particularly of Auschwitz – that is, of the crisis of Modern

civilisation as a whole – and constitutes a response to the imperative

of avoiding its repetition.

Being the horizon of understanding of any thinking not liable tobeing called trivial,10 the name Auschwitz implies a judgement, a

denunciation in absolute terms. Such a condemnation entails a defi-

nition of the facts, the administrative murder of millions by the

Nazis, and its labelling as a crime, that of genocide, a crime against

the human species itself, not only under criminal law, but also before

the court of moral history. The nature and consequences of this event

defies human imagination, and operates as a kind of converter able

to bring to the realm of history what could be thought of belonging

only to eschatology, as a real hell.11 Such is the horror this event

commands that it puts into question the history and the civilisation

from which it emerged. Auschwitz took place precisely in the

heart

of Europe, which had already reached an advanced state of ratio-

nalisation and accomplishment of the project of the Enlightenment.

The extreme anti-moral character of Auschwitz and the full deploy-

ment of the destructiveness of the Enlightenment imply that civili-

sation has collapsed and is enduring a regression to barbarism.12

Auschwitz means that the culture of Modernity produced the

opposite to that which it sought, and therefore it has submerged into

a total failure, into a crisis.13

The crisis of Modernity is not an accident within the smooth

display of its history. For Adorno and Horkheimer neither is it the

consequence of an external cause like those of the mythology of

Nazis Arian supremacy and nationalism.14

Both understand the

10 T. Adorno, Education After Auschwitz, in T. Adorno, Critical Models.

Interventions and Catchwords (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 191.11 T. Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1973), 361–362.12 T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso,

1997), xi, and xvi–xvii.13 Supra n. 11, at 366.14 Supra n. 12, at xiii.


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process through which the Enlightenment led to Auschwitz as a

process of self-destruction, that is as a process developed in an

immanent fashion, as the consequence of the cohabitation within the

Enlightenment of its liberating forces and its own destructive powers.

The identification of the concept of modernity with a dialectic

between civilisation and savagery, reason and tyranny15 does not

have its antecedents only in the dark or black thinkers like Scho-

penhauer and Nietzsche, whose radical pessimism and total critique

of culture – as Habermas maintains – would cast over their views the

shadow of hopeless and self-defeating Nihilism.16 The insight of an

original complicity in cultural Enlightenment of the opposite princi-ples leading to the collapse of Modernity has also credentials in the

bright thinkers of modernity, inside and outside the Frankfurt

School. In the first place, Held comments, it would be the conse-

quence of translating into the realm of the philosophy of history the

Hegelian basic premise according to which every social phenomenon

expresses the contradiction that it is both itself and at one and the

same time something other than itself – a unity of opposites .17 More

specifically, Adorno and Horkheimer draw from the assessment made

by Hegel in the chapter on Absolute Freedom and Terror of the

Phenomenology of Spirit, according to which there is a relationship

between the ethics of utility of the Enlightenment and terror, whichHegel finds in the French Revolution.18 Being a clear insight into the

socio-psychological roots of what happened in Auschwitz, Freuds

view that civilisation itself produces anti-civilisation is also taken by

Adorno as an explanation about how the dynamics of the formation

of culture through the process of socialisation could lead to a

destructive character. This is the case particularly in societies already

in the middle of the increasing pressure posed by the requirements

of administered societies.19 Finally, in his Theses on the Philosophy

of History, Benjamin had already stated that every document of

15 C. Rocco, Between Modernity and Postmodernity: Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment Against the Grain, Political Theory 22/1 (1994), 79.

16 J. Habermas, The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Re-Reading

Dialectic of Enlightenment, New German Critique 26 (1982), 13. This article was

later published as The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment: Max Horkheimer

and Theodor Adorno, in J. Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987). The quotes in this article are to the original piece.17 Supra n. 7, at 151.18 Ibid .19 Supra n. 10, at 191–192.


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civilisation is also a document of barbarism. Benjamin here pointed

to the fact that the treasures of culture have behind their marvellous

sight the horror of their origin and the way they have been trans-

mitted, being both processes closely tied to the fashion in which

power conquers and rules over the losers and their remnants.20

Adorno and Horkheimer develop the idea of a dialectic of

Modernity as a dynamics of civilisation and catastrophe in their

Dialectic of Enlightenment. Their joint work has been seen as a

critique of the three main parts of the Kantian system, that is the

critique of pure reason, the critique of practical reason and the

critique of aesthetical judgement. This critique of the critique wouldbe developed respectively in the chapter on the Concept of Enlight-

enment, in the Excursus on Juliette or Enlightenment and Morality,

and in the chapter on the Culture Industry or Enlightenment as Mass

Deception.21 The critical enterprise attempted in the Dialectic of

Enlightenment points to the mythic character of the supposedly

disenchanted Modernity as Adorno and Horkheimer understand that

enlightenment reverts to mythology.22 Second, the critique focuses

on the instrumental character of modern reason, that is, on the

methodological attainment of a definitively given and practical end

by the use of an increasingly precise calculation of means – a thesis

adopted from Weber

s assessment of the process of rationalisation inModernity.23 The corrosive character of purposive reason typical of

the sphere of science not only leads to the domination of nature but

also extends to the field of morality (as instrumentalisation of the life-

world, the domination of the inner nature or instincts, and the con-

trol of human beings) and to the realm of aesthetics – emptying art of

its utopian force.24

The examination of modern reason in the field of morality has its

own specificity, pointing not only to the problem of its instrumen-

tality, but also to the specific impasse of the coldness of reason. The

20 W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 247–248. Adorno also

alludes to Brechts metaphor regarding culture, whose mansion is built of dogshit.

See Adorno, supra n. 11, at 366.21 Supra n. 15, at 91–92, n. 2.22 Supra n. 12, at xvi. See Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment.23 M. Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford Uni-

versity Press, 1972), 293–294.24 Supra n. 16, at 14–17.


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Excursus on Juliette displays a critique of modern morality by

making a history of its philosophical roots in Kants philosophy of

practical reason and in the moral thought of Sade. The two are

usually thought to be at odds in moral matters, but Adorno and

Horkheimer postulate an underlying complicity. For them, Kants

morality is founded on two precepts or commandments: The duty

of self-control, a positive precept that poses reason in control of

emotions, and the duty of apathy, a negative requirement not to

allow emotions to rule us. Both duties, substantially the same, for-

mally avoid any possibility of reason melting into emotion,

responding to the fear that leads Kant through his reflection, that of the individual falling under the impetus of his own feelings, and being

taken or guided by them. The ostracism of emotions from the Kan-

tian moral landscape leads to the conclusion according to which

Stoicism is the bourgeois philosophy.25 For Adorno and Horkhei-

mer, the restraint of the emotions is also present in Sade, as he also

condemns and expels emotions from the ethical realm and praises

apathy. Sensibility – the condition allowing emotions to appear – is

incompatible with the content, the method and the dictum of

philosophy as is conceived by Sade. He mirrors the formal maxims of

Kants virtue – the virtue of self-control and the virtue of apathy –

when he puts forward his own harvest of moral imperatives: the first,to overcome compassion, and the second, to do everything without

any feeling.26

Sharing their Stoicist view of morality, Kant and Sade have

contempt for a particular emotion, that of compassion or sympathy,

which is attacked as inadequate and disreputable by his own nature

or origin. For Kant compassion is only proper for those who are soft-

hearted and for women, and should not be allowed to intervene, not

even in the sight of the pain of those persons closest to us: The

principle of apathy, that is, that the prudent man at no time be in a

state of emotion, not even in that of sympathy with the woes of his

best friend, is an entirely correct and sublime moral precept .27 For

25 Supra n. 12, at 95–96.26 Quoted in Adorno and Horkheimer, supra n. 12, at 101 and 103.27 I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale: Southern

Illinois University Press, 1978), 158.


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Sade compassion is a weakness – the creation of the wrecked, of fear

and misfortune – and it is a vice, as long as it conveys a possibility for

counteracting or at least interfering with the precepts of natures law,

with the drive to rape, to violate and to kill. 28

The commonalities between Kant and Sade do not end here. The

Sadean anti-heros are not criminals taken by lust and mere instincts.

On the contrary, they are cold-blooded intellectuals alienated from

pleasure and sentiments. They perform sexual activities as rationally

planned and regimented exercises, reducing sex to a mechanical act.29

If Sadean sexuality is an activity subjected to rational planning, an-

other link between sadism and Kantian morality surfaces. Juliette,the Sadean character, who as a good philosopher remains cool and

reflective,30 incarnates modern reason, the form of reason that

assumes itself as understanding without tutors, without the guidance

of anything other than reason itself. Sharing with Kant this

assumption, Sade develops Kantian morality to its more extreme

possibilities, making probable the unthinkable: that rational morality

in the form of cold reason or apathy is a path to absolute amorality,

to the reification of the individual – both the master and the slave,

both the victim and the abuser – in the unlimited violence of sadistic

sexuality. If Sade accomplishes the possibilities already present in

Kant, if Sade is just the embodiment of Kant

s principles, thenAdorno and Horkheimers phrase Kant is Sade31 is possible.

The unthinkability of the phrase Kant is Sade derives from

equating what is understood within the culture of the Enlightenment

as two terms that stand morally at odds in a non-resoluble contra-

diction, as two names that repel each other. In its scandalous and

stark fashion the meaning of the phrase Kant is Sade remains far

from being evident. To establish an identity between the two terms of

this statement, or to establish what they convey in a transparent

identity, would not be faithful to the complexity of the relation

Kant–Sade, or Sade–Kant, where the very order of their names has

28 Quoted in Adorno and Horkheimer, supra n. 12, at 97, 101–102.29 Supra n. 12, at 86–88.30 Ibid ., at 104.31 Ibid ., at 102.


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different connotations.32 Although incompatible with the interpre-

tation of Kantian morality as a seed of totalitarianism – in which

the question of the form assumed by reason is highlighted – the

standard reading of this relation – where the emphasis is put in the

content of the precepts of reason – is also defensible. In his appeal

to the dignity of every human being as a way of ensuring respect

for all members of the human species, Kant is the leader of

Modernity against those who, like Sade, proclaim tyranny and

humiliation as the telos of the conduct.33 The Kantian imperative

that compels the individual to treat others not only as means but at

the same time as ends, explicitly contradicts the logic of the Sadeananti-hero, who reduces the other to the condition of a tool for the

sake of his/her own whims. While the cruelty of the Sadean scenes

are the incarnation in the very body of the abused of the logic of

instrumental reason, the categorical imperative stands in its form

and content in stark contradiction. Formally, because it is worded

in the language and the syntax of means and ends in order to

break the primacy of the ends, and to ensure the adequate

acknowledgement and care for the means. Substantially, because

after admitting that in society we relate to each other in order to

attain our own ends, the rule requires us to ensure that the interests

of the other are also satisfied in all cases. Adorno and Horkheimer

32 The spectre of possible relationships between Kant and Sade are not exhausted

in those of the total opposition, and that of Sade as radical accomplishment of

Kants morality. Another possibility is that developed from a Lacanian reading of

this odd couple, as in the case of Zizek s Kant with Sade. While Adorno and

Horkheimers Kant is Sade is a motto coined to denounce aberration, the trans-

mutation of Modernity into its opposite, Zizeks interpretation is a salute to a

possibility that is regarded as ethical, as the core of Lacanian ethics. From this

perspective, Kant is seen as the actualisation of Sade in the possibility of assuming

erotic drive as ethical itself, and taking up as superego s imperative the dictum of

Enjoy, in what amounts to an identification of the pleasure principle with universal

duty. This identification operates in the reverse direction: Sade is Kant. From this

perspective, Lacanian ethics acquires the universality and the force of the irresistible

Kantian rule, where the superego becomes the topos or the agent of the Sadean

slogan Enjoy, invested with the form of the categorical imperative. S. Zizek, Kant

with (or against) Sade, in E. Wright and E. Wright, eds, The Zizek Reader (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1999), 285–301. Above all, it is not clear if the phrase Sade is Kant

elevates Sade to a moral thinker, or if it creates further suspicions on Kants

imperative.33 Among others, Zizek, ibid ., at 297.


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are aware of this and state that Fascism operates in contradis-

tinction to the categorical imperative.34

The phrase Kant is Sade also invites a re-description of sadism

and of rationalism itself. If it is true that a rational trait runs through

the Sadean act, the common definition of sadism as that of the

gaining of sexual gratification by inflicting pain to other people

would be misleading. In this connotation the search for the pleasure

of the one who commands appears as the teleology of the sexual

activity. However, the accomplishment of regulated sex excludes the

possibility of spontaneous enjoyment and the release of emotions, as

in the mechanical sexual exercise of sadist cruelty the aim is notpleasure but the following of its intellectualised procedure. In this

sense, the sadist is not the one who attains pleasure by cruelty, but the

one who, by remaining cold, can follow a plan aimed at causing

suffering to the object-slave. But a more important conclusion can be

drawn from the marriage of Kant to the anti-moral Sade. After its

trading with Sadean motifs, is rationalism to emerge uncontaminated

and intact? Is a modification of the concept of the Enlightenment here

plausible as a consequence of the application of the prism of inter-

pretations suggested by the analysis of Adorno and Horkheimer? Is

only Sade the full expression or unexpected heir of Kant as Adorno

and Horkheimer maintain? Or it may also be that Kant is thecompletion of a Sadean anti-utopia? As a vast territory suffocated

by the fog of emotional indifference and the deprecation of sympathy –

which results in violence not being interfered or tamed by feelings –

modern morality can be seen as the form of reason that allows cruelty

to advance unchecked and to rule over the individual. As a conse-

quence it could be said that modern rationalism is not the emanci-

pation of the individual from all tutors, but the submission of the

individual to the masters of aggression and cruelty.

1.2. Bourgeois Coldness and Nazi Hardness

Adorno and Horkheimer

s thesis is not only that modern moralphilosophy created the cannon of totalitarianism,35 i.e. that the

writings of Kant prefigured or announced the advance of Facism, the

war and the Holocaust or, in other words, that the Enlightenment is

totalitarian.36 In the original spirit of the interdisciplinary analysis of

34 Supra, n. 12, at 86.35 Ibid .36 Ibid ., at 6.


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society characteristic of the Frankfurt School, when morality is

approached as an historical phenomenon by considering the

bourgeois ethical life, the analysis of the morality of the Enlighten-

ment is compounded by a sociology of Modernity.37 The apathetic

individual, or paraphrasing Musil, the man without sentiments,

would not be only the ideal of Kantian morality, but also the typical

member of modern societies, of that whose identity was formed under

the conditions of Modernity, in the space–time of the modern ethos.

Protestantism promoted the spread of that cold rationality which is

so characteristic of the modern individual says Horkheimer in The

End of Reason,38

taking up the analysis of modern culture made byWeber in his studies on how the Protestant morality contributed to

shape the ethos of capitalist societies.39

According to Weber, the teachings of the Reformation would not

have detached the faithful from the world but, on the contrary, the

ethics embedded in Protestantism would be functional to the

dynamics of capitalism. Weber discusses this thesis by tracing a link

between the ethos or practical ethics of capitalist societies, particu-

larly those of Northern Europe, and the asceticism of Protestantism.

Webers analysis mainly consists of a study about the asceticism

present in some of the branches of Protestantism, and about how it

becomes a

worldly asceticism

in the capitalist ethos, making ascet-icism the spirit of capitalism, or the bourgeois style of life. It is not

that Christian doctrines trouble or endanger economic gain and

accumulation, but on the contrary, that capitalism and certain types

of religious beliefs are allies. In order to show how the religious

teachings of the ascetic forms of Protestantism have an important

influence in the development of the ethos of capitalism, Weber

describes some of the key aspects of a worldly and rational ethics

permeating the principles of Calvinism, Pietism, Methodism and the

Baptist sects. First of all, the notion of the calling, the life-task set by

God, according to which the only way of living in accordance with

the will of God is not that of renunciation to life, but one orientated

to the fulfilment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by

37 H. Schnadelbach, Max Horkheimer and the Moral Philosophy of German

Idealism, in Benhabib, supra n. 8, at 297.38 M. Horkheimer, The End of Reason, in A. Arato et. al., eds, The Essential

Frankfurt School Reader (New York: Continuum, 1994), 33–34.39 M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Unwin

University Books, 1971).


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his position in the world.40 According to this precept, virtue is to be

gained in the day to day and not in a world beyond life, making

Protestantism a worldly religion. Those who follow the Protestant

maxims will seek to glorify god with their professional activity,

making labour not merely an economic means but an spiritual

end41 and a moral duty, with which the capitalist dynamics acquires

a very strong drive. A second crucial aspect of this asceticism would

be the imperative of a conscious self-denial of worldly pleasure,

whose urgent task is the destruction of spontaneous, impulsive

enjoyment, to bring order into the conduct.42 It would have con-

tributed to the nurturing of a culture in which the avoidance of usingwealth for pleasure is a common feature,43 which, in turn, is at the

basis of the phenomena of saving and of accumulation, two of the

pillars of capitalist economy.

Within this atmosphere of self-restraint is by no means the least

important point that the faithful seek to obey God by leading an

exemplary family life and by the strictness of his conduct in every

area of life.44 In Calvinism the ascetic principle of self-control is

paramount and its aims are to enable a man to maintain and act

upon his constant motives against emotions, and to transform this

practice into a personality,45 accomplishing the inner rationalisation

of the personality

.

46

The asceticism of some branches of Protes-tantism, now turned into stoicism by the duty of controlling the

emotions, is rational because it shares the characteristics of modern

rationality. Stoic Protestantism is in this sense a method or a set of

procedures applied to personal conduct as a whole, where rigorous

self-control is continuous and systematic. It also implies the adoption

of the strategy of self-examination, a knowledge of the self that

ensures life is guided in the end by constant thought and a capacity

that relies on the dynamics of self-reflection – the very same realm of

rational subjectivism. Protestant stoicism is finally rational because

40 Ibid ., at 80.41 R.H. Tawney, foreword to Weber, supra n. 39, at 3.42 Supra n. 39, at 119.43 K. Morrison, Marx, Durkheim, Weber. Formations of Modern Social Thought

(London: Sage, 1995), 245.44 J. Freund, The Sociology of Max Weber (London: Penguin, 1970), 197.45 Supra n. 39, at 119.46 R. Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality. An Essay on the Social and Moral

Thought of Max Weber (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 29.


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its shares the anti-emotional character of the ethos of rationalism. 47 If

Protestant asceticism, as Weber defined it, is a systematic method of

rational conduct with the purpose of overcoming the status naturae,

to free man from the power of irrational impulses, it is evident that it

is close to Kants duty of apathy as a condition for an autonomous

morality.48

The stoicism of modern moral philosophy and the coldness of the

modern ethos found by the philosophical and sociological analyses of

the antecedents of Auschwitz are matched by hardness as the ideal of

education under the Nazi regime. For Adorno and Horkheimer the

consideration of the history of Fascism, and particularly of the waythe German people were educated, showed how the iron discipline

adopted by the totalitarian regime and the hardness assumed as the

ideal of traditional education, interacted to reinforce each other:

the Nazi education instilled hardness through discipline,49 while at

the same time it instilled discipline through hardness.50 For Adorno

such an education guaranteed the formation of what was considered

the type of personality required by the nature and the challenges of

the regime. This hardness avoids the troubles and restraints that

come from inside those who harbour or express moral sentiments.

The psychological dynamics underlying this situation awards to the

one who is hard the rationale to be ruthless with others, takingrevenge for the pain that has been suffered. The ideal of hardness on

which moral education was based and the efforts orientated to the

formation of the psychology of the masses under Nazism are not

expressions of virility or manhood but of masochism and sadism.

Hardness means here absolute indifference toward pain as such and

47 Ibid ., at 25.48 This prompts the question of the historic origins of Kantian morality in the

Protestant culture, particularly considering his Pietistic family and upbringing. For

Weber, in comparison with Calvinism, Pietism proclaimed an even stricter control of

conduct and its version of Protestantism constitutes an intensification of the Re-

formed asceticism. A project close to MacIntyres one of tracing the relation between

philosophical ethics and the history of the moralities embodied in the life of the

societies inhabited by the philosophers, the hypothesis of Kantian morality as a

formalised or philosophical version of the religious precepts of one of the extreme

branches of ascetic Protestantism could be plausible, but goes beyond the purpose

and the scope of this article. Cfr. Weber, supra n. 39, at 129 and 131, and A.

MacIntyre, The Claims of After Virtue, in K. Knight, The MacIntyre Reader

(Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 69.49 Supra n. 12, at 86.50 Supra n. 10, at 198.


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the maximum degree of endurance. Thus, hardness has a genea-

logical link to the authoritarian character, as this type is distinguished

by the inability to have any immediate experiences at all, by a certain

lack of emotion.51 The surge and culmination of Fascism accom-

plished in history the anti-utopia laying in philosophical apathy and

capitalist coldness, by the transformation of the discredit of sympa-

thy and moral emotions in the liberation of a powerful stream of

political intolerance, in the effective application of the martial law

and in the consummation of the program of extermination in

Auschwitz.52

1.3. The Imperative Born out of Auschwitz and Adornos General

Enlightenment

The conditions for thinking after the critique of reason made by the

first generation of the Frankfurt School are extremely harsh consid-

ering the extent to which barbarism is said to grow inside the process

of civilisation itself. However, Adorno and Horkheimers critique is

not self-defeating, does not transform philosophy into an aporia with

no exit and neither abandons it as a waste of history. This claim must

be made when the heirs of Critical Theory condemn the Dialectic of

Enlightenment as a retardant of progress and as a creature of the

nihilism inhabiting the thought of their intellectual fathers.53

It is inthis sense that Habermas has attempted to locate Adorno and

Horkheimer within the tradition of the black writers of the bour-

geoisie, tracing their linage to the likes of Sade and Nietzsche, whom

Habermas accuses of thinking in a destructive way. For Habermas

the critique of reason developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment as

a pre-history of its self-destruction entails necessarily the conclusion

that the liberating powers of the Enlightenment have ceased.

Nevertheless, regarding the supposed nihilism of the founders of

the Frankfurt School it is possible to point to a confusion between

destructive thinking and Critical Theory, between the Enlighten-

ment

and

enlightenment

, and between the target and the sources of the Dialectic of Enlightenment. A radical self-critique of reason like

that developed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment does not need to be

understood as a destruction of reason and of any possibility of

thinking. On the contrary, self-awareness of the failures of reason is

51 Ibid .52 Ibid ., 197–198.53 Supra n. 16, at 13.


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the ethos and the sine qua non of the emergence of Critical Theory as

such. Perhaps the characteristic trait of Critical Theory has not been

adequately taken into account by the late Habermas and, in this

sense, it could be suggested that the constructive drive of commu-

nicative ethics could benefit more from it. Probably there is also an

identification of the concept of the Enlightenment, a particular

historical example of a process of enlightening, with any other pos-

sibility of enlightenment of a different or a more complex nature.

The idea of a distinct enlightenment is present in Adornos proposals

of a general enlightenment as an alternative response to the

Enlightenment, and of the enlightenment of the Enlightenment (seebelow). In a similar sense Scott Lash has pointed out that a distinc-

tion can be traced between the Enlightenment characterised by

Kantian pure reason, and other enlightenment residing even within

Kants thought, but linked more to aesthetics and reflective judge-

ment.54

As for the mixture of antecedents and objects of critique, it is

evident that while Sade is one of the focuses of the critique of

modernity, he is by no means the precursor of Adorno and

Horkheimers point of view. As for the relation to Nietzsche, it could

be said that despite taking on board Nietzsches leitmotiv against

reason, there is not a nihilistic agenda behind the

Dialectic of Enlightenment aimed to destroy totally the possibilities of reason.

On the contrary, they make a number of ad hoc remarks in the

opposite sense, which are put aside by this kind of misinterpretation.

This is evident as Adorno and Horkheimer adopt as point of

departure the conviction that the possibility of emancipation is

inevitably bound to modern reason. They also define as the last

objective of the whole enterprise of their comprehensive critique of

reason to prepare the way to a positive notion of Enlightenment, to

a true humanism,55 or to what Adorno later called general

enlightenment.56 So it is not paradoxical that, despite their com-

prehensive critique, they continue to rely on reason when they ad-

vance the labour of the conceptualisation of the crisis of modernityprecisely in the Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The radical critique of reason results in the case of Adorno in a

programme for our times, which is enunciated in the form of an

54 S. Lash, Another Modernity. A Different Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),

2–4.55 Supra n. 12, at xiii, xvi, ix–x.56 Supra n. 10, at 194.


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imperative, termed a Kantian imperative by Adorno himself: to

avoid the repetition of Auschwitz, or never again Auschwitz.57

While appealing to the modern tradition, to Kant in particular, it

pushes culture away from the Enlightenment, warning civilisation

about the possibilities and the past dreadful consequences of

modernity. This motto, which is posed to current generations and

those to come, establishes as the first priority the need to convey

every effort of the civilisation towards the aim of avoiding a return to

a nightmare of the nature of Auschwitz. For Adorno, the privilege

this imperative has over any other is so evident that it does not

require any justification. A justification should not be attempted, as itwould be just a monstrosity in the face of the monstrosity it conveys.

The historical task of attempting to avoid the return of Auschwitz

should be pursued even if everything plots against it, that is, despite

the structure of society and the psychology of its members who

allowed it to happen continuing to be the same.58

The imperative of avoiding the repetition of Auschwitz offers an

aim, a teleology, a duty, but it does not provide an indication about

what needs to be done, which requires further elaboration. Such a

quest is advanced by Adornos reflection on the means to prevent the

recurrence of Auschwitz.59 Adorno recasts the theme of the con-

struction of a paideia, a bildung or a culture – the question of theeducation of the epoch, which is part of the project of the Enlight-

enment – as a response to the crisis of reason and Modernity. He puts

forward the idea of a general enlightenment, which is an enhanced

and revised version of the Enlightenment, and it is the consequence of

the experience of its catastrophe in history and of its philosophical

critique provided by the uncovering of its inner dialectic.60 Such a

radical transformation is the necessary and minimum result of the

enlightenment of enlightenment, if the lessons derived from the

history of a century that involves millions of dead and tortured

people were not to be in vain. Thus historic consciousness abandons

the spontaneous pride and naı ¨ve enthusiasm that allowed Kant to

salute the ethical impulse in the French Revolution, while remainingsilent about its atrocities. No less important is the need to restate the

radical critique of modernity today when Auschwitz and the crisis of

modernity appear to have vanished in contemporary scholarship and

57 Ibid ., at 191, and n. 11, at 365.58 Ibid ., n. 10, at 191–192.59 Ibid ., at 192.60 Ibid ., at 194.


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public debate in the middle of the fog thrown by the prosperity of the

West, and by the proliferation of transcendental philosophy and

abstract legal theory – even within the circles of critical legal theory –

oblivious of history and life,61 and reluctant to take into consider-

ation what happens beyond the margins of the First World.

By general enlightenment Adorno understands a complex of

different elements or paths that supplement each other. First of all,

Kantian autonomy is again restated as a tool for emancipation. Set in

a different historical context, Adorno is not thinking only of coun-

teracting the obfuscating guides installed by the tradition, against

which was spelled Kants leitmotiv think without tutors orsapere aude. For Adorno, reflection as the basic condition for self-

determination basically means a power for not cooperating, for

resistance; a power for not surrendering ethical principles and soli-

darity with the victims in front of the force and delusions of the

collective, and before the raison d etat, the needs of the war, the

security of the regime or the terror of the state. Self-determined

beings are at odds with a blind identification with the collective and

the state, and constitute the first resource against the principle of

Auschwitz.62

What Adorno calls a turn to the subject is another possibility for

conspiring against the repetition of Auschwitz. In order to avoid therecurrence of Auschwitz the socio-political (objective) conditions that

allowed it to happen need to be altered. At the same time, however,

the subjective dimension, the psychology of people who do such

things, of the executioners, also needs to be contested.63 Taking up

the conclusion reached in the Dialectic of Enlightenment according

to which coldness is a condition for disaster, and defining the

authoritarian character as that which is incapable of true immediate

human experiences – in other words, that in which lack of emotion,

unresponsiveness or coldness are pervasive – the attempt to sabotage

the recurrence of Auschwitz requires for Adorno the clarification and

modification of the conditions under which coldness or the

authoritarian character emerge.64

Exploring some possibilities formaking conscious the general subjective mechanisms without which

Auschwitz would hardly have been possible, Adorno believes that

61 A. Gearey, We Fearless Ones: Nietzsche and Critical Legal Studies, Law and

Critique 11/2 (2000), 167–184.62 Supra n. 10, at 195 and 197.63 Ibid ., at 192–193.64 Ibid ., at 199.


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the insight into such mechanisms needs to be the content of a qual-

ified project of enlightenment aimed at creating or advancing a

general awareness of those mechanisms, and at ensuring that the

cultural consciousness became permeated with the certitude of the

destructive capacity of those subjective conditions. If this can be

achieved those tendencies could be weakened, ameliorating the

possibilities of people relapsing into collective cruelty.65

This process of critical enlightenment needs to be supplemented

by other strategies. As the cultural process aimed at bringing cold-

ness to the consciousness of itself, of the reasons why it arose is to be

confronted by the defence mechanisms that block the attainment of such awareness, there also exists the need of attaining clarity about

the nature of such mechanisms and their functioning, and of working

through them.66 The new non-naı ¨ve enlightenment also needs to be

supported by an education toward self-critical reflection, which

would attempt to build in contemporary societies a vigilant attitude

about the barbarism they are able to perform, towards any symptom

pointing to a re-enactment of the vocation to violence and destruc-

tion. The capacity for critical self-reflection would work as a peren-

nial check for any political project attempted under the principles of

reason.67 In addition, art and literature also have a role to play in

bringing

the motifs of the horror

to the consciousness of the epoch.In this regard, Adorno praises Sartre for his ability to engage himself

with the motives of the horror by representing in his novels and

plays the most terrifying things, by illuminating the motives for

violence lying repressed in the collective unconscious of societies

formed under the conditions of modernity. The danger of a relapse of

civilisation into Auschwitz recedes when there is some progress in the

cultural effort to make relatively conscious the motives that led to

the horror.68 In a similar sense, Zizek finds in Kusturickas Under-

ground the unveiling of the horror that could have led the Serb army

to the atrocities committed in Bosnia. The screening in the cinema of

the motives of the butchery would work as a therapeutic release of the

dirty waters, the fantasies and symptoms constituting their jouissance, the libidinal economy that allowed the executioners of

postmodern Fascism to be so effective.69

65 Ibid ., at 202–203.66 Ibid ., at 202.67 Ibid ., at 193.68 Ibid ., at 194–195.69 S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 62–65.


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In sum, general enlightenment is not characterised just by the

imperative for autonomy, but also by being an attempt at building a

culture of critical self-awareness about the capacity for destruction

and a culture able to foster the expression of the unconscious motives

behind the slaughter. As a whole, such complex or general enlight-

enment could foster an intellectual, cultural and social climate in

which the repetition of Auschwitz would not be possible.70 Enlight-

enment would not be in this way the full illumination of the Earth by

the lights of reason as was thought in the 18th century by the

Encyclopaedists, but rather the task performed by a lighthouse kee-

per in the middle of the night: to warn societies about the rocks andabysms in which they can crash, collapse and sink.

Adornos insight as to the possibilities of combating a recurrence

of Auschwitz does not end with his proposal for a critical enlight-

enment. If speculation on some of his statements is allowed, it could

be said that an invitation to eradicate coldness, and to contribute to

the formation of a culture of sensitivity and sympathy implicitly

inhabits his writings. Let us consider the following passages where

coldness and indifference are seen not only as preconditions of the

Holocaust but as the sine qua non:

The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as

indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted. (...)The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psy-

chological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred

in the midst of more or less civilised innocent people. (...) If coldness were not a

fundamental trait of anthropology, that is, the constitution of people as they in fact

exist in our society, if people were not profoundly indifferent toward whatever

happens to everyone else except for a few to whom they are closely bound and, if

possible, by tangible interests, then Auschwitz would not have been possible.71

Adorno considers first the historical consequence, the Holocaust, and

then traces its origins, finding that such an event was only possible

due to the central role played by apathy and indifference as socio-

logical and historical facts of modern culture. What is more, the lack

of sympathy – here understood as a capacity to identify with others – is regarded as the key aspect of the modern social psychology leading

to the smooth functioning of the cattle trains and gas chambers of

Auschwitz. Had these aspects of the character of modern individuals

not been present, or had they been diminished or faded, Auschwitz

70 Supra n. 10, at 194–195.71 Ibid ., at 201.


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would not have occurred and, this is our addendum, would not occur

again. A reflection developed having in mind a past circumstance can

be taken in its integrity to face the future keeping all the validity it has

in its original orientation, if the social and cultural conditions to

which it refers are still present. If this is the case with the conditions

that gave origin to Auschwitz, the logical and substantive conclusion

we can reach is that Adorno is tacitly suggesting to us to strive to

reduce coldness and to foster sympathy, as an adequate strategy to

avoid the reincarnation in future societies of the principles-ghosts of

Auschwitz. The same idea can be derived from a kind of logical

inversion of the above statements, by assuming that it would beworth seeking the opposite of what he believes is the source of evil: if

the general coldness and apathy of the members of modern societies

was pivotal for Auschwitz to happen, therefore, conversely, in a

culture of sensitivity and sympathy, such an event would not be

possible. Adornos idea of a psychological constitution of people in

which indifference to the pain of others is not present or has been

diminished has its antecedents already in the Dialectic of Enlight-

enment, where bourgeois coldness is diagnosed as the antithesis of

compassion.72 This idea is taken up again in the late Negative

Dialectics where, in the middle of the development of his critique of

Metaphysics, Adorno characterises modern culture and individualsas cold, and insists on this as being the condition sine qua non for

Auschwitz to happen. It is in this sense that he accuses coldness of

being the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which

there could have been no Auschwitz.73 Thus, Adornos reflection

about the cultural strategies to fulfil the imperative to avoid Ausch-

witz is supplemented when his proposal for a general enlightenment

is coupled with the quest for advancing a culture of emotions and

sympathy, which is also central to Horkheimers ethics.

1.4. Horkheimers Ethics of Sympathy

The unveiling of the dialectic of the Enlightenment is accompanied inHorkheimers case by the development of an ethics of sympathy

72 Supra, n. 12, at 103.73 Supra, n. 11, at 363. The idea of the involvement of emotions in morality is

also present in Adornos thinking in another sense. When in Negative Dialectics

he is dealing with the metacritique of Kantian practical reason, he finds in an

impulse before the ego, which is not mediated by reason or philosophy, the source

from which freedom grows. Supra, n. 11, at 221–223. (I am indebted to Alexander

Garcı ´a-Du ¨ ttman for this reference).


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backed by a materialist critique of idealism. Such an ethics was

tackled before and after the experience of World War II, in texts like

Materialism and Morality,74Materialism and Metaphysics,75

The

End of Reason,76 and Eclipse of Reason.77 In this regard, what is

said of Levinas can be also said of Horkheimers engagement with

suffering and sympathy: that it is the result of both the presentiment

of Auschwitz and the attempt to respond to it.78 Hokheimers

world-view was constituted basically by a search for a new kind of

thought able to circumvent the trap of an Enlightenment entwined

with barbarism. Horkheimers ethics of sympathy is an attempt to

re-centre emotions in the realm of ethics.79

A pre-feeling morality,a morality in which passions are condemned to remain in the

margins or are banned as enemies of moral conduct, is for Hork-

heimer a situation to be superseded by being supplemented. This

task requires reducing the role reason plays in the constitution of

ethics and rehabilitating emotions by making them fully relevant for

morality. Again, to restore the place of feelings within the ambit of

ethics does not require us to abandon or to deny a role to reason in

the constitution of ethics, as the idea of a pre-reason ethics – an

ethics in which reason has no part – is also discounted.80 Following

Schopenhauer, Horkheimer understands sympathy not as mere

emotion but as an emotion mediated by knowledge,

81

not only inthe process of its constitution but also in its application, and

depending on an interpretation of the human condition.82 As for

Horkheimer morality cannot survive when reason and emotion are

74 M. Horkheimer, Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Writings

(Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1993).75 M. Horkheimer, Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Seabury Press,

1972).76 A. Arato and E. Gebhardt, eds, The Essential Frankfurt School Reader (Oxford:

Blackwell, 1978).77 M. Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason (New York: Continuum, 1947).78 H. Caygill, Levinas andthe Political (London and New York:Routledge, 2002),5.79 T. McCarthy, The Idea of a Critical Theory and its Relation to Philosophy, in

Benhabib supra n. 8, at 145.80 H. Schnadelbach, Max Horkheimer and the Moral Philosophy of German

Idealism, in Benhabib, supra n. 8, at 292–293.81 Ibid ., at 294.82 G. Lohmann, The Failure of Self-Realisation: An Interpretation of Horkhei-

mers Eclipse of Reason, in Benhabib, supra n. 8, at 404.


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separated, his view remains equidistant from rationalism and pure

emotivism.83

Horkheimers ethics is the consequence of a difficult marriage

between Schopenhauers pathos and Materialism,84 in which the

latter offers the teleology and the historicist landscape where the

reflection is developed, and the former provides its content. His

materialist critique of any idealist grounding of ethics as metaphysical

is joined by his rehabilitation of emotions, as for him a purely

rational ethics is just the consequence of idealism – of a perspective

from which empirical facts are not considered.85 For Horkheimer, a

materialist perspective requires the adoption of, as a point of departure for ethics, a consideration of the historical circumstances in

which human beings live and, therefore, the assumption of fragility,

finitude, contingency and suffering as basic characteristics of the

human condition.86 In this context, Materialism acquires a peculiar

content as it does not mean only or primarily a theory of society but

also a vision of human life, rooted in finitude, open to suffering.87 An

ethics based on these premises cannot be but an individualistic,

utilitarian ethics... of solidarity of all life in the face of universal

suffering.88

Thinking of morality from a materialist point of view also means,

for Horkheimer, the dismissal of any foundationalism or metaphys-ical grounding of ethics, particularly that of Kant, because such an

attempt would be characteristically idealist, ideological and illusory.

For him, after Schopenhauer, a materialistic morality cannot be

rationalistic in any substantive sense; that is, although offering

justifications, it cannot rely on the possibility of justifying everything

through an ultimate grounding or a unique principle beyond

history.89 In this regard, for McCarthy, Horkheimers ethics entails

an aughebung of Kantian morality. Whilst the grounding of morality

in a priori concepts of pure reason is here put aside, in an

83

Supra n. 80, at 293 and 295.84 J. McCole, et al., Max Horkheimer: Between Philosophy and Social Science, in

Benhabib, supra n. 8, at 5 and 9.85 Supra n. 80, at 292.86 A. Schmitt, Max Horkheimers Intellectual Physiognomy, in Benhabib, supra

n. 8, at 29.87 Supra n. 84, at 13.88 H. Brunkhorst, Dialectical Positivism of Happiness: Horkheimers Materialist

Deconstruction of Philosophy, in Benhabib, supra n. 8, at 69.89 Supra n. 80, at 290–292.


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anti-foundationalist and sentimental fashion Horkheimer advances

an ethics forged around the ungrounded feeling of compassion for

suffering humankind.90 In addition, drawing from Schopenhauer,

Horkheimer sees in the egoistic sense of self-preservation the force

driving Kantian morality. The denunciation of self-preservation

and the defence of anti-foundationalism mix in a further attack on

rational or Kantian morality: morality would lose its ethical

character precisely by the labour of its rationalisation via rational

justification, which would be prompted by the logic of self-pres-

ervation, making morality in the final analysis an exemplar of

instrumental reason.91

All the motifs of Horkheimers critique of idealism and rational-

ism converge in the formulation of an ethics of emotions. At the

centre of this ethics is the moral sentiment of compassion or sym-

pathy (mitleid in the original text) that aims, first of all, at the alle-

viation of suffering and turns into solidarity. The possibility of

morality appears precisely with the existence of a capacity for

compassion, when moral sentiments guide human beings, as the

phenomenon of moral action depends on a psychic disposition

informed by relevant sensibility.92 Sympathy would be the conse-

quence of the experience of being witness to the suffering of others, 93

and would imply recognition of oneself in the suffering of the other.

94

But for Horkheimer, in the end, who are those who suffer? The

answer to this question requires a consideration of his personal

circumstances and his Marxist background. Born to a wealthy family,

his consciousness was marked by the thought that his happiness

rested on the suffering of others.95 For Horkheimer those who suffer

are the workers living in misery96 and those overwhelmed by poverty –

the wretched of the earth97 – who constitute the greatest part of

humanity.98 In this context, sympathy would cross the realm of

90

Supra n. 79, at 146 and 151 n. 43.91 Supra n. 80, at 289–291.92 Ibid ., at 292–293.93 Supra n. 82, at 400.94 Supra n. 80, at 294.95 J.J. Sa ´ nchez, Compasio ´ n, Polı ´tica y Memoria. El Sentimiento Moral en Max

Horkheimer, Isegorı́ a 25 (2001), 224.96 Supra n. 82, at 401.97 Supra n. 79, at 146.98 Supra n. 88, at 69.


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ethics into that of politics infecting those under its power with a

commitment to abolish suffering, and with the impulse for solidarity –

being sympathy a spur to the struggle for the abolition of misery.99

The sphere where this alternative ethics operates is a hybrid terrain:

Horkheimers ethics can be seen as political ethics, which replaces

rationalistic private morality with solidarity.100 It is in this sense

that Horkheimers ethics of sympathy is an alternative or even a

necessary step forward in the history of Western ethics: The time

has come for an ethics of compassion because this form of media-

tion is the only one ‘‘that was left after the formalisation of rea-

son’’.101

Above all, Horkheimers ethics does not only stand in stark con-

trast to Kants moral philosophy, but it is also one of its possible

realisations.102 In the relation between one who feels sympathy and

one who is her/his object, the latter would not be only a means but

also an end to the former.103 As can be found in the analysis of the

role of sympathy in Greek Tragedy, this emotion has an egoistic

aspect because sympathy is accompanied by the fear of being victim

of the same misfortune. At the same time, the recognition of the

suffering of the other and the expression of some form of solidarity,

which is the active form of such feeling, would make one who is

suffering the object of the concern and solidarity of the one whowitnesses his or her suffering.

The ethics of sympathy developed within the ambit of Critical

Theory has consequences for the thinking of morality, but also for

the status of theory and for the philosophers themselves. If the basic

interest of Critical Theory is, according to Horkheimer, that of

striving to reduce suffering,104 theory acquires an ethical drive and

takes the form of an existential judgement.105 If the experience of

individual suffering is at the basis of social criticism, 106 then the main

object of theory is not the search for truth but rather the practical aim

99 Supra n. 82, at 401.100 Supra n. 80, at 296.101 Ibid ., at 294.102 A. Maestre, preface to M. Horkheimer, Materialismo, Metafı́ sica y Moral

(Madrid: Tecnos, 1999).103 Ibid .104 Supra n. 79, at 138.105 Supra n. 88, at 72.106 Supra n. 84, at 18.


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of the alleviation of pain. But again, such an object is not defined in

abstract or rationalistic terms: the relief of the suffering – which is

human, both individual and social, and that of past, present and

future generations – becomes the teleology of morality and theory,

and the political motive of the critical theorist. In this way, Hork-

heimers critique of Kantian morality does not only attack the proper

ideas of a metaphysical way of thinking but it also points to the

theorists themselves. Horkheimer does not criticise the metaphysical

forgetting of being but the immoral character of the forgetfulness of

the theorists of the suffering of the wretched of the earth and their

struggles in history.107

For Horkheimer, metaphysicians and officialphilosophers are scarcely impressed by what torments humanity

and, while their reflections on history and society are irreproachably

objective, suffering or even outrage over justice, or sympathy with

victims are foreign to them.108

2. RORTY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ETHICS OF EMOTIONS

AS ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Can the elaborations of the Critical Theory on the coldness of

modernity be part of the quest for an ethics of human rights? As

Adorno and Horkheimer do not explicitly extend their reflection on

ethics to the field of human rights, a bridge between moral sentiments

and rights is pursued in this article by a reading of Rorty s post-

modern approach to moral progress. The thematic affinities between

the insights of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and

postmodern thinkers were already signalled in the 1980s and

encompassed their anti-foundationalism, their concern for language,

the similarities between negative dialectics and deconstruction, and

their critique of reason.109 More recently clear analogies have been

traced between the ethical thinking of Horkheimer and that of Rorty,

particularly regarding their anti-metaphysics and anti-foundationalist

stances – of materialistic and pragmatic origins respectively – and the

107 Supra n. 88, at 78.108 Quoted in Schmitt, supra n. 86, at 29.109 P. Dews, Adorno, Post-Structuralism, and the Critique of Identity, in

A. Benjamin, ed., The Problems of Modernity. Adorno and Benjamin (London and

New York: Routledge, 1989), 1.


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international law of human rights which was born with the 1948

Universal Declaration is for Rorty the reply to the horrors of the gas

chambers and the concentration camps. Thus, the Adornian–Kantian

imperative and the Rortyan re-description of the culture of human

rights operate as two different and yet complementary answers to the

crisis of modernity and reason.

Close to the Marxian request to the philosophers to transform the

world, Rorty attempts – and invites us to do the same – to get hold of

history and to make human rights more effective, as for him the sense

of Neopragmatism is to bring about the utopia inhabiting human

rights.116

But again, in a move similar to that of Horkheimer, Rortyapproaches human rights and the human rights crisis by appealing to

emotions and to the experience of witnessing. The experience of ethics

is set off by a sensibility for those abused and by a question like Are

you suffering? or Are you in pain?.117 Coming from different

backgrounds, philosophical sources and political projects, Adorno

and Horkheimers critique of bourgeois stoicism and Rortys ethics of

emotions converge in finding in sympathy the more relevant moral

feeling, and in pointing to the possibilities of an ethics of sympa-

thy.118 But while Horkheimers ethics of sympathy remains within the

realm of morality, in Rortys case the idea of an ethics of sympathy is

taken to the realm of culture, maintaining that such an ethics cancontribute to ensure the efficacy of human rights norms. In other

words, that an ethics of emotions as ethics of human rights consti-

tutes a valid possibility to think not only the theoretical and scholarly

topic of human rights, but also to tackle the historical problem of the

abuse of power by strengthening the human rights culture.

Rortys ethics comes from the tradition of the theory of moral

sentiments, which has remained a marginal stream in modern ethics.

Relying on Annette Baiers interpretation of Hume, Rorty attempts

116 R. Rorty, Is Postmodernism relevant to Politics?, in R. Rorty, Truth, Politics

and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1997), 35.117 Supra n. 112, at 198.118 Perhaps there still remains another possibility for constructing a bridge be-

tween the Frankfurt School and the characteristically North American Pragmatism.

It is a contrafactual one indeed. Borges alluded to the possibility of imagining a

process of formation of an intellectual lineage that follows the opposite direction of

time. In this uncanny dynamics of cultural history, Kafka can stand as a precursor of

Aristotle. Confirming that future can forge a preceding tradition, this article can be

read as an attempt to think Adorno and Horkheimer from the perspective of Neo-

pragmatism, showing what probably could not be seen without the Neoromantic

insights and pragmatic orientation offered by Rorty.


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to re-establish the central role emotions have played in ethics by

opposing Humes ethics to Kantian morality. While in Kant morality

is a question of obedience to universal rules of pure practical reason,

for Hume the grounds and ultimate ends of morality should not rest

on intellectual faculties but on sentiments. In his account of morality,

emotions are not under the control of reason but within a web of

sentiments that allow feelings to control themselves.119 In Humes

ethics reason is admitted in the sphere of morality only as an aide to

emotions, helping to reach decisions about the right choice between

different alternatives, to weigh the consequences of actions and to

avoid contradictions.120

While the subject of Kants morality is onewho decides strictly according to rules, for Hume the moral subject is

a warm, sensitive and sympathetic human being.121 In this context,

the fundamental moral capacity is not the law discerning reason – the

intellectual ability to construct universal maxims, to apply them to

particular circumstances, or to recognise and obey them.122 The key

to morality would be sympathy, the capacity to make others joys

and sorrows our own in the terms of Hume, or the imaginative

ability to see strange people – those who are oppressed by humilia-

tion, cruelty and pain – as fellow sufferers in the terms of Rorty.123

Rortys critique of rationalist ethics is accompanied by his anti-

foundationalism, a critique of metaphysics, or of what remainsplatonic or metaphysical in modern philosophy, namely: the idea

of truth as universal and ahistorical. Drawing on Hegel and Nietz-

sche, Rorty asserts the historical, contextualist, or perspectivist

character of knowledge. A knowledge that is not born out of the

historical circumstances in which the world occurs is just the result

of the divinisation of the enquirer, and therefore a mere idealist

illusion.124 Anti-foundationalism also has to do with a critique of

a way of thinking that proceeds by looking for grounds. In the

platonic tradition Philosophy has configured itself as grounding, as a

119 A. Baier, Hume, the Women Moral Theorist?, in A. Baier, Moral Prejudices

(Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1996), 56–57.120 R. Rorty, Ethics without Principles, in R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope

(London: Penguin, 1999), 77.121 Ibid ., at 83.122 Supra n. 116, at 56.123 Supra n. 112, at xvi.124 R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 10.


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way of thinking engaged with the foundation of beings. This

endeavour supposes that foundations are before and beyond things,

and that they are the origin of beings, giving objectivity to reality. In

other words, the grounding is the cause of beings, what made them

possible, what gives reality to the real. To the ideas of ahistorical

truth and transcendental grounding Rorty opposes Jamess notion of

truth as what is better for us to believe, as the knowledge that

furthers our cultural and political projects. The search for truth for its

own sake is abandoned and inquiry for knowledge or philosophical

investigation is understood as a problem-solving activity – alongside

the lines of Dewey – and concept and ideas are assumed as beingaction-guiding, as in Pierce.125 Truth is what has the ability or the

capacity to help us to resolve the problems we confront – cruelty,

humiliation, injustice, oppression, human rights violations – and to

achieve our dreams and utopias.126

The critique of the metaphysical illusion developed by Rortys

anti-foundationalism goes beyond the deconstruction of the notions

of truth and grounding. Leaving the sphere of philosophy, he traces

the consequences his reflection has in the territory of political culture

and in the human rights arena. Rorty portrays a Post-Metaphysical

political culture as one characterised by irony.127 Ironists are those

who are conscious about the relative validity of their opinions, and inparticular, of their political convictions. They know their beliefs are

historical and do not have transcendental foundations. The Post-

Philosophical political culture is also identified with a visceral rejec-

tion of all forms of cruelty. This is not just a political ideal but a way

of being of a society, a generalised prejudice. It is a spontaneous

reaction, historically and culturally formed, against every situation in

which pain or suffering are caused, or in which individuals or social

groups are oppressed or humiliated. This unconscious and conscious

distaste can give rise to expressions of solidarity, to action orientated

to prevent or oppose cruelty, to a commitment with social justice.128

In this Post-Metaphysical political culture freedom is understood in

125 Supra n. 115, at 119.126 R. Rorty, Solidarity or Objectivity?, in R. Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and

Truth, Philosophical Papers Vol. 1 (Cambrige: CUP, 1991), 22.127 Rorty devotes the second part of his book Contingency, Irony and Solidarity to

make an extended exploration of the figure of the ironist individual. Supra n. 112.128 S. Critchley, Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal, in C. Mouffe,

ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 21.


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the classical liberal connotation of negative liberty in front of the

power of the state, and is adopted as a key political value.

The consequences of anti-foundationalism for human rights are

summed up in the idea that to make theories about the transcendental

foundations of human rights is outmoded.129 If grounding consists in

establishing the ahistorical source from which something emerges,

then to ground human rights would consist in a certain theorisation

that looks for their transcendental origins. Among these kind of

theories Rorty basically considers that of natural law. In the theory of

natural law human rights are derived from a human nature, an

essence or basic characteristic common to all human beings beyondcultural differences. Thus, human rights would be seen as intrinsic

needs or attributes of the human condition. To the metaphysical

theories of human rights Rorty opposes a historicist perspective. In

the field of the human it is not possible to speak about a human

nature because the ambit of the human is precisely the sphere proper

of culture. The human nature is cultural. The human condition is the

result of the historical dynamics in which human beings and societies

act on themselves. In addition, as there are no phenomena outside the

domain of history, there is no human or social nature but historical

and cultural configurations.

The introduction of an ethics of emotions and a critique of metaphysical foundations results in a shift in the strategy to

strengthen the human rights culture. Assuming human rights as past

and present practices of democracy, and as hopes and utopias to be

achieved, Rorty formulates a re-description of human rights in the

non-metaphysical vocabulary of self-creation and in that of the

shaping of what Raymond Williams termed the structure of feeling

of the epoch, of a sentimental education.130 The actualisation of the

human rights utopia is, in this perspective, a question of changing

moral intuitions and values, of acquiring or educating appropriate

moral sentiments, and of tuning our capacity to feel.131 More

specifically, sentimental education seeks to expand to a greater

number those to which we refer as people like us, by making us more

129 In this topic Rorty builds on the position of the Argentinian philosopher,

Eduardo Rabossi, developed in the article El feno ´ meno de los derechos humanos y

la posibilidad de un nuevo paradigma teo ´ rico, Revista del Centro de Estudios Con-

stitucionales, 3 (1989), 323–344.130 Supra n. 112, at 44.131 Ibid ., at 198.


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familiar with them and emphasising the likeness between them

and us.132 But a second movement is also pursued. A sentimental

education would point to make us more able to put ourselves in the

place of those strange people who are the object of cruelty or desti-

tution, who are in need or in pain,133 of those who have been victims

of human rights violations. The first coaches us to think of our

identity in a non-exclusionary fashion. The second invites us to act in

solidarity, as individuals or as a political community.

The task of the sensibilisation of the rationalist modern culture

finds in telling stories one of its more adequate possibilities. To po-

eticise the culture of modernity means to adopt literature as aninstrument able to transform the sensibility, self-image and identity of

individuals and societies of the epoch. The strengthening of the hu-

man rights culture is possible by telling stories about the variety of

cultures and points of views that it is possible to find in the human

experience, and which describe how strangers are and live. This

contact can allow us to transcend our ethnocentrism, the particular

process of socialisation and upbringing – historically, geographically

and culturally specific – that constituted us.134 This is a process of

extending our identity by the use of the imagination, of enlarging the

self by becoming acquainted with still more ways of being human.135

But, there are also stories about people who have been the object of oppression or humiliation, and who are shown in their plight and

fragility, in pain or lacking satisfaction of minimum needs. Those

stories would not only help to strengthen the capacity to sympathise

with those who suffer – by making our ability to feel sorry resonate

with the pain others endure – but they would also be able to form a

spontaneous attitude or vital impulse to act, to transform this

sentiment into effective human or social solidarity.136

In order to strengthen the contemporary human rights culture, the

task of advancing a sentimental education of the epoch could prove

more relevant and powerful than the work of the grounding of

human rights. As the formation or socialisation of people concerned

about others, sentimental education would not pass by the process of finding a priori rational universal rules and obeying them, but it

132 Supra n. 115, at 122–125.133 Ibid ., at 127.134 Supra n. 126, at 14.135 R. Rorty, The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of Literary Culture,

available at http://www.stanford.edu/~rrorty/decline.htm.136 Supra n. 115, at 134.


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would have to do with the cultivation of some character traits,

particularly the capacity for sympathy.137 It is in this sense that

MacIntyre maintains: to act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to

think, to act against inclination; it is to act from inclination formed

by the cultivation of the virtues. Moral education is an ‘‘education

sentimentale’’.138 The cultivation of a postmodernist sensibility, a

paideia in which sympathy is part of the character of its members, is

to be pursued by telling stories about strange and abused people, by a

poeticisation of the scientific modern culture.

CONCLUSION

The fight for human rights around the world at the beginning of the

21st century has in the cultural struggle one of its most valuable

resources. A human rights culture has recently acquired some noto-

riety in the global and national public debates and some firmness in

the consciousness of our times. However, menaced by the propa-

ganda and widespread abuses of governments and empires, and by its

own weaknesses, such culture needs a patient and centuries long

labour of strengthening. In this regard, the exploration of the

philosophical tradition can offer new insights about how to meet the

challenge of fostering the ethos of human rights from the perspectiveof an ethics of human rights. Although most of the times neglected or

even rejected, an ethics of emotions has remained alive alongside

hegemonic rationalist ethics. Heir of its times, the Frankfurt School

has translated the force of the crisis of our epoch into the formulation

of a theory of emancipation, which includes the development of and

ethics of sympathy. As a response to the collapse of Enlightenment

and metaphysical morality in Auschwitz and two world wars, an

ethics of sympathy, tacitly or implicitly inhabiting Adorno and

Horkheimers writings, deflates the omnipresence of idealist and

rationalist ethics and restores the rights of emotions in the realm of

morality. At the same time, such an ethics carries the possibility of a

warming of the cold modern morality and culture, which for Adorno

and Horkheimer, constitutes a path to avoiding the reincarnation of

barbarism. In a similar fashion, Rortys idea of a sentimental edu-

cation of the epoch is the actualisation in the ethos of contemporary

societies, in the culture of our times, of an ethics of emotions. But,

137 Ibid , at 129.138 A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (London: Duckworth, 1981), 140.


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this project of sensibilisation is not only at odds with a world of

coldness and hard human beings that incarnated in modern societies

and was able to bring about Auschwitz. For Rorty, the cultivation of

passions like sympathy can also contribute to strengthen the human

rights culture and, in this way, it constitutes a powerful resource for

the task of ensuring respect for human rights and promoting soli-

darity with the victims of abuse. Moral progress can be advanced by

increasing the sensibility and responsiveness to the plight of fellow

human beings, because moral progress is a matter of wider and wider

sympathy.139 Sentimental education is therefore a cultural, historical

and political project aimed at modelling the sensibility of societiesand of the age.140 From this perspective, it could be said that while

Modernity would be an epoch of enlightening by the universalisation

of the use of reason, Postmodernity would be an epoch of sensibili-

sation by contagion of feelings.

JOSE MANUEL BARRETO

School of Law

Birkbeck

University of London

Malet Street, Bloomsbury

London WC1E 7HX

E-mail: [email protected]

139 Supra n. 120, at 82.140 Supra n. 115, at 247, n. 13.


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