Adorno against the program of the better life

On the neutralization of negative dialectics

The January issue of De Witte Raaf was presented by editor-in-chief Christophe Van Gerrewey under the title “What is called thinking?”. In the editorial, the texts in this issue are said to take up the challenge “to think better, from the conviction that only thus a better life comes within reach”.

A comparative usually presupposes a point of reference, yet this is not explicitly named by the editorialist. The reader may suppose that the theme is set against the background of the malaise in which Western democracies have found themselves for several decades. The question then arises whether, in those decades, things have “not been thought well enough”.

Since the Second World War, an enormous amount of thought has been produced that was explicitly directed toward social transformation. On the socio-political and institutional level, one may think of the founding of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, or the ongoing process of European integration. Theoretical interventions such as the postcolonial thought of Frantz Fanon and Edward Said, structural critiques of Eurocentrism, or feminist and gender-critical analyses by authors such as Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler have intervened in existing frameworks of representation and power. Such movements of thought have contributed, not mechanically but through complex institutional, social, and political processes, to shifts that have meant real improvements in living conditions for many.

That such achievements are under pressure today does not prove that there has been “insufficient” thinking, but rather that the relation between thought and social reality is neither linear nor enforceable.

Against this background, the editorialist turns to Adorno, but only after first introducing Heidegger. The manner in which this is done already calls for a brief remark. Heidegger’s statement that we “do not yet think” does not refer to a lack of intellectual effort, but to a fundamental critique of modern, calculative thinking. By “not thinking”, Heidegger does not mean a shortage of ideas, but an incapacity to relate to what escapes calculative thought. By using the quotation as a rhetorical prelude to a call for “better thinking”, Heidegger’s fundamental critique of calculative thought is shifted onto the level of an appeal to intellectual improvement.

That Adorno is then introduced as a corrective is telling. It is as if Western thought must first pass through Heidegger and then, via Adorno, morally purify itself. But anyone familiar with the complex relation between Adorno and Heidegger knows that no simple solution is available here either.

To support his argument, the editorialist then quotes a passage from Negative Dialectics (1966), a passage that belongs to Adorno’s critique of the postwar revival of ontology, especially Heidegger’s thinking of Being. Adorno analyzes the way ontological thought, in its striving for purity and self-sufficient closure, risks hardening into rigidity. The quotation follows a passage in which the grammatical and conceptual subject is “ontology”. When Adorno writes that what appears “therein” is not so much mystical meditation as the distress of a thought seeking what is other than itself, that “therein” refers to the self-enclosure and ritualization of ontology. It does not refer to a general human desire for understanding, as the editorialist claims.

In Adorno, this is not at all a call for better thinking, nor for social intervention or moral optimization. Adorno is analyzing the internal dynamics of ontology itself: the fear of the concept that, in confronting the non-identical, it may lose its own claims, and philosophy’s tendency, out of this fear, to rigidify into ritual gesture.

The editorialist’s reading subtly yet decisively shifts the level of analysis. An immanent critique of a philosophical form thus becomes an anthropological observation, and from there a programmatic appeal to “think better”. The negative diagnosis is thereby converted into a motivating gesture.

The transition in the editorial is telling. Where Adorno writes that in philosophy’s falling silent “something true also stirs”, the editorialist immediately follows with the claim that thinking “neither stops nor falls silent”. What appears in Adorno as a moment of truth — a restraint before the non-identical, a refusal to subsume the other under the concept — is here implicitly taken up as a deficiency that must be overcome. In Adorno, falling silent is not a deficiency but a dialectical moment. For the editorialist, it becomes a state to be avoided.

In Adorno, this falling silent implies a form of conceptual modesty: a thinking that recognizes its limits and does not immediately translate itself into cultural production. The editorial, by contrast, links thinking directly to intervention, to reading as preparation, to essays as contributions to a better life. This is not a minor difference, but a different ethics of thought. This programmatic enlistment of Adorno’s thinking goes together with an instrumentalization of art and culture, which appear here primarily as “fuel for thought” — as if their value depended on their contribution to an intellectual project rather than on their own logic.

In its original context, the quotation articulates not the perseverance of thought but its paralysis; not the promise of a better life, but the tension between thought and its own impossibility.

What is at issue here is therefore not the social relevance of thought as such, but the programmatic enlistment of Adorno’s critique of ontology. If Adorno’s words retain their full weight, they do not confirm the program of “better thinking for a better life”. Rather, they cast doubt on the self-evidence with which such a program can be formulated. In that sense, the editorial risks doing precisely what Adorno analyzes: transforming philosophical tension into a reassuring gesture.

The crisis in which Western democracies find themselves is perhaps linked less to “deficient thinking” than to “deficient reading”. By means of a reading that shifts the ontological level, the editorialist deprives Adorno’s thought of its internal resistance and thereby neutralizes its critical tension. That is not without irony.

A subsequent intervention will examine the editorial and institutional context in which this response was not published.