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"Neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism—the view associated with thinkers such as Philippa Foot (2001), Michael Thompson (2008) and John McDowell (1996, 1998, 2009)—articulates an ethical framework centred around the concept ‘human’, understood as a particular natural kind. Thus, in the Aristotelian ethical language that these thinkers adopt, there is a naturally derived human good, a set of conditions under which individual human beings, as examples of the species they are members of, will flourish; consequently a naturally derived human bad, a set of conditions under which human animals will necessarily suffer and/or die. Motivating the material I present in this paper is a concern with the question of the plausibility of ethical naturalism, especially as articulated in contemporary neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy.
The appeal of the neo-Aristotelian view is, I think, substantial. In particular, a neo-Aristotelian framework offers us a coherent way of grounding ethical realism, thus avoiding various forms of ethical scepticism and relativism: for instance, those associated with reductive, scientistic naturalism (such as Evolutionary Debunking Arguments) or ‘postmodern’ social constructivism. The latter point also indicates a way in which a neo-Aristotelian view might be thought to be useful as a way of somehow grounding the claims of radical social and political thought. If there exists an actual human good (or bad), wholly outside of the ‘ideology’ of presently existing society and culture, then that human good (or bad) can be invoked critically against society as it presently exists.
Such a thought has recently been advanced in relation to the Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno—a radical critic of society and culture if ever there was one. I refer here in particular to the work of Fabian Freyenhagen, who in his 2013 book Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly attributes to Adorno a ‘distinctly negative’ form of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism. The thought here proceeds from the proscription, prominent in Adorno’s work, against our claiming that anything is, as it were, ethically good. This proscription follows largely from Adorno’s holding that all of our ideas about the good are bound to be distorted by their mediation through the wrong world in which we have been raised—call this the ‘wrong life claim’.
This form of ethical scepticism might seem to prevent Adorno from talking coherently about normativity wholesale—this is the so-called Problem of Normativity in Adorno’s ethics and critical theory. However, according to Freyenhagen, Adorno’s thought is saved from collapsing into nonsense insofar as no analogous proscription applies against our claiming that something is ethically bad—and badness is, as Freyenhagen claims, all we need in order to salvage normativity: both in the context of Adorno’s work and in ethics more generally. This is because we are, on this reading of Adorno, given a direct, unmediated experience of badness through sensations of bodily suffering —not necessarily just our own suffering but also that which, we might recognise, is being inflicted on others.
Such experiences, so the story goes, count as evidence of the inhuman: they can tell us if something is bad for us, as the sort of animals that we are. Hence, a ‘negative’ neo-Aristotelian account of normativity: it’s roughly analogous to the accounts given by other neo-Aristotelian ethicists insofar as it understands normative claims to be related somehow to our animal nature, but it differs from them insofar as no claims are supposed to be advanced about what the human ‘good’ is per se—since our only reliable guide is the bad, we find ourselves limited to talk of the ‘better’, or the ‘least worse’.
This is a powerful, coherent story about normativity in Adorno, and it is certainly also one that could be drawn upon to form a critical diagnosis of presently existing conditions. Moreover, what Freyenhagen offers is in many ways a very insightful reading of certain aspects of Adorno’s work (especially Adorno’s writings on Auschwitz, where the importance of experiences of bodily suffering is particularly emphasised); it also chimes with other recent work on Adorno which has promoted the idea that such experiences are central to his work (Hulatt 2014, Peters 2015).
But there is another reading of Adorno’s relationship to the neo-Aristotelians available to us: indeed one which it might—given the appropriate understanding of Adorno’s thought—seem much more natural for us to assume. On this reading, Adorno would not be someone who shares a conception of normativity with the neo-Aristotelians: far from it. In fact, he would be someone who offers us a very compelling critique of the neo-Aristotelians’ conception of normativity.
This is something which comes across particularly well, indeed, in one of the textual sources usually cited as evidence for Adorno’s ‘naturalistic’ ethics of bodily suffering—his 1965 lectures on Metaphysics. Whereas the latter third of those lectures is dedicated to reflections on ‘Metaphysics after Auschwitz’—which scholars often draw upon to supplement a reading of Model III of Negative Dialectics—Adorno uses the first two-thirds of that series to present an extended critique of Aristotelian metaphysics, as well as of Ancient metaphysics and ontology more generally. This first part of the Metaphysics lectures has, however, been almost entirely neglected by the scholarship. Adorno’s Aristotle critique is also presented in a still more obscure location: his unpublished 1956 lectures on moral philosophy, where Adorno’s criticisms are focused—as one might imagine—on Ancient ethical thought, including that of Plato.
In Sections 1 and 2 of this paper, I will fulfil what I hereby dub the ‘scholarly aim’ of this paper. My scholarly aim is to reconstruct Adorno’s Aristotle critique as it occurs in these two lecture series: this is a valuable goal just in-itself, since it is not something that anyone else has provided before.
The general thrust of Adorno’s Aristotle critique is as follows: we can, according to Adorno, understand Aristotelian ethics and metaphysics to constitute an important advance on Platonic ontology. There is a lot about Platonic ontology that is, according to Adorno, deeply problematic: in particular, it is supposed to be uncritical and dogmatic. Aristotle partially overcomes these problems but fails to do so sufficiently, retaining in his thought an ‘ontological residue’ which, in the final analysis, serves to render his whole system uncritical as well.
In Sections 3 to 5, I will pursue what I call the ‘critical’ aim of this paper. The critical aim is to show that—regardless of whether or not Adorno’s Aristotle critique represents good Aristotle scholarship (a point on which I will remain neutral)—it does constitute a compelling and novel critique of these contemporary neo-Aristotelian thinkers. In particular, I will demonstrate how Adorno’s Aristotle critique applies to the sort of ‘naturalised Platonism’ advocated by John McDowell. This will then allow us to see how dogmatic, uncritical elements are retained in neo-Aristotelian ethical frameworks.
In the conclusion, I will present some speculative remarks about where this leaves the project of formulating a robust ethical naturalism more generally. Let’s call this my paper’s ‘polemical aim’." pp.2-3)
"Socrates is held by Adorno to be responsible for a revolution in ethics insofar as he refocuses questions of right and wrong on the individual (Adorno 1956: Vo01344ff). This is more than just the individual as distinct from society: it means the individual as distinct from the entire material world. Thus in Socrates, and then in Plato, virtue becomes something indexed to the world of ideal forms, not something that has anything in particular to do with how it shows up in the empirical world.
This is problematic, because it leads to a separation between virtue (as the highest good) and right action: or, at any rate, right action considered as the sort of thing that it might be possible or desirable for human beings to do. Pure practical reason is thus hypostatised as something totally separate from human thought and experience. According to Adorno, this turns it into an alien force, dominant over the individual. It becomes something which, if we want to act rightly, we must simply bend our will to. And yet, for all this, the Platonic realm of ideal forms is necessarily, for Adorno, a sort of social product. Hence what we are supposed to bend to here is really just an ossified set of values inherited from a—necessarily imperfect—society and culture—even if these values are shaped according to said society’s own idea of perfection. Thus Socrates’ liberation of the individual, as the subject of ethical inquiry, turns out—for Adorno—to be simply another way of subjecting them to societal domination.
It is with his reading of Socrates and Plato in mind that we can understand what Adorno takes to be the central development of Aristotelian ethics. This is because Aristotle, according to Adorno, is precisely concerned to understand the good as something that falls within the reach of the practical range of peoples’ behaviour. This is a development that Adorno describes as ‘infinitely liberating [unendlich Befreiendes]’ (Adorno 1956: Vo01395): the realm of ideal forms is brought down to earth and, with it, practical reason as such becomes something inextricably intertwined with the idea of freedom. Right action is held to emerge from a context within which the individual is concretely situated: on this set-up, the sort of hypostatisation of the highest good associated with Socrates’ and Plato’s ethics can be avoided. Additionally, it implies two further points in Aristotle that Adorno speaks of approvingly: firstly, the fact that the possibility of right action is held to be somehow contingent on the way that the society in which one lives is constituted (Adorno 1956: Vo01395-6); secondly, that the notion of the good for individual human beings is to be indexed to the sort of thing that such individuals are, i.e. the sort of animal that they are, ‘human nature’ (Adorno 1956: Vo01410). Hence, that Aristotle is committed to a form of ethical naturalism.
And yet, for all this, Adorno nevertheless looks upon Aristotle’s ethics as a project that has, at some fundamental level, failed. There are three problems that Adorno notes with Aristotle’s ethics that I would like to highlight here. Firstly, the idea that the highest good has to be something that falls within the range of human practical activity ends up leading, in Aristotle, to the installation of contemplation as the highest good—thus, to the primacy of the dianoetic virtues over the ethical ones. Aristotle recognises that the possibility of right action is by and large contingent on the conditions for the performance of right action presenting themselves to concretely socially and historically situated individuals.
But this does not lead Aristotle to make the leap that Adorno himself does. Adorno wants to claim that if such conditions do not present themselves, then this precisely implies the need for critical theory. And what this means is: the transformative critique of society and culture, a critique of society and culture—in particular, the diagnosis of where it goes wrong or badly—that has an emancipatory purpose.10 Adorno is continually engaged in this sort of project, and whatever meta-philosophical problems he is interested in, they are entirely to do with its possibility. Thus Adorno is constantly interested in how thought could be exercised on the world in a way that could show—and make it so—that things could be otherwise than how they presently are. Aristotle, however, does not do this. Rather, he tries to find something that could, regardless of how bad things were ‘on the ground’, be salvaged. The ideal of pure contemplation, Adorno makes clear, emerges in conditions where individual citizens cannot hope to alter a hostile world around them, and so there is a retreat into inwardness ...]
Secondly (but relatedly): given that Aristotle’s ethics, according to Adorno, concerns concretely socially and historically situated individuals—for whom the possibility of acting rightly is, at least in part, determined by political conditions—this means that moral philosophy ought, properly speaking, to be bound up with the critique of the state: to the extent that any given state might fail to provide the conditions for human flourishing. Now, on the one hand, Aristotle seems to recognise this, given that the Ethics is explicitly supposed to be accompanied by the Politics. But then according to Adorno, Aristotle’s task there is miscarried: the ‘taxonomy’ of the state which Aristotle gives us in the Politics is not yet sufficient as a critique of it; when we really get down to it, the taxonomy is merely a description, presented as exhaustive, of things with the state precisely as they already are (Adorno 1956: Vo01413). This means that really existing injustices (most notably, slavery) become hypostatised, Plato-style, as if they are something simply necessary for any well-functioning human form of life (Adorno 1956: Vo01412).11 Again, there is a clear failure on Aristotle’s part to push forward into critical theory.
The third aspect of Aristotle’s ethics that Adorno targets is his doctrine of the Golden Mean. Aristotle, Adorno makes clear, is essentially a thinker of mediation (Adorno 1956: Vo01404). It is Aristotle’s concern with the mediation between abstract thought and world that leads to his interest in virtue as something necessarily realisable in the world. And yet this concern with mediation also leads him to the belief that virtue largely lies in the moderation between two extremes. This in turn results in what Adorno still further identifies as the fundamentally conservative, resignatory character of Aristotle’s thought: the good, it seems, lies in avoiding anything too excessive or untoward, keeping one’s head down, and adapting oneself to a hostile world. This resignatory character infects Aristotle’s ethics despite what Adorno identifies as Aristotle’s genuine ‘humaneness [Humanität]’: his concern with strengthening the individual against society (Adorno 1956: Vo01403). This is because of what this ‘strengthening’ ultimately consists in: what we might think of as merely ‘sensible advice’, as opposed (once more!) to something with genuine critical force.
In a certain sense, Adorno’s meditations on Aristotle in the 1956 lectures would seem to be an excellent basis for attributing to Adorno a ‘negative’ form of Aristotelian ethical naturalism, exactly as Freyenhagen does. Adorno seems to find a lot to like in the structure of Aristotle’s ethics: with its concern with the socio-historical situatedness of ethical subjects, and its indexing, at least in part, of ethical claims to the animal aspects of human being. And yet, as we have seen, almost all the positive content of Aristotle’s ethics is disavowed. If this isn’t a ‘negative Aristotelianism’, then what is ?
But in fact, Adorno’s concerns about Aristotle’s philosophy go deeper than concerns about the positive content of his ethics. This is something that Adorno already has in view in the 1956 lectures, and which comes to constitute the central polemical point of the two thirds of the Metaphysics lectures—the section of the work that Adorno dedicates to Aristotle." pp.3-6)
"The crucial distinction here is between Aristotelian ‘metaphysics’ and Platonic ‘ontology’. Adorno distinguishes between these two terms in a way that is—as much as it is intimately bound up with Adorno’s reading of the history of philosophy—largely distinct from ordinary philosophical usage. The term ‘ontology’ is, in Adorno, supposed to indicate the attempt to define universal concepts in a way that is detached from the experience of individual thinking subjects. In Plato’s thought, these concepts are what is hypostatised in the heaven of Ideas. This Platonic heaven is what is held to have absolute reality, since the Ideas are characterised by necessary existence, something which the ‘scattered multiplicity’ of particulars below lacks (Adorno 2000: 15, 18). The classic example here is that of the difference between the concept of a triangle and actual triangles that exist in the empirical world: the concept ‘triangle’ will always exist the same regardless, whereas actual triangles, themselves likely to be mathematically imperfect, will decay and cease to be triangles over time (or indeed: get consumed, as a triangle of cheese might be). This thought is used by Plato the denigrate the reality of the empirical world in favour of the Ideas. ‘Metaphysics’, by contrast, is used by Adorno to indicate the way in which Platonic ontology is developed by Aristotle. Whereas Plato is, according to Adorno, only interested in how the Idea exists in the Platonic heaven, Aristotle— as a thinker of mediation—is primarily interested in how it shows up in the world. Metaphysics proper emerges with Aristotle’s attempt, in the work of the same name, to unite the Idea with the scattered material particulars which exist in the empirical world below: that is, to unite what is experienced, with what is intelligible.
There are two broad reasons why, Adorno suggests, metaphysics might be preferred to ontology. The first is conceptual. Platonic ontology, as Adorno understands it—and, as he says, Aristotle understood it—is simply a clunkier system than Aristotelian metaphysics. It involves a needless ‘doubling’ of the world through the severance of the material world from the heaven of Ideas (Adorno 2000: 20). Moreover, it presents us with the mystery of how we are meant to reach these forms other than through the world of the senses, which are supposed to be an at best horribly unreliable guide to them. The two options seem to be either: a sort of rigorous methodological befuddlement (as indeed Socrates tends to practice in the dialogues); or: pompously assuming that you, of all people, can somehow detect what these forms are (which Socrates also, admittedly, does sometimes do: an example of such unwarranted assertion would arguably be the Chariot Allegory from the Phaedrus). By uniting world and idea, Aristotle can go some way to clearing up these problems.
The second reason is ethical–political—of course, this reason is the one which will be of most interest to us here. The Platonic doctrine of forms is held by Adorno to be, effectively, coercive in nature. Some of this has already been witnessed in the discussion of Adorno’s critique of Platonic ethics above. The forms are held to be a hypostatisation of existing social reality: necessarily derived from experience, they are then cordoned off from the experience of future agents by virtue of their being placed in the heaven of Ideas. There is also a hinted-at class element to this: in Plato, these values are the values of a very particular group of people: namely a patriarchal, slave-owning aristocracy. The Platonic project could thus be understood as the attempt—conscious or not—to simply impose the values of this class on the whole world outside of them, and indeed in The Republic, Plato’s Socrates seems to casually discuss this possibility like some sort of dementedly tyrannical town planner. By contrast, Aristotelian metaphysics, in its insistence on the necessary connection between the material world and the world of Ideas, allows for the possibility that the lived experience of concretely situated individuals could re-shape our concepts, as much as our concepts also shape them.
The liberating moment in this is that it opens up the possibility of thinking critically about the concepts we have inherited from our society and culture. Adorno suggests, early on in the lectures, that this can be thought of in terms of progressive levels of secularisation. Ontology itself, Adorno claims, emerges from theology. Theology, too, is an attempt to rise above the empirical world, from immanence into transcendence (Adorno 2000: 6).14 The difference is that it involves gods, rather than concepts. Ontology turns the gods into concepts: so instead of God, for instance, you have the highest good (or, the ‘Absolute’, or whatever else you want to call it). In this sense, Platonic ontology is a secularisation of theology.
But ontology, in Plato, retains a theological residue: the concepts continue to exist, quite literally, in heaven (Adorno 2000: 19). This necessitates a further secularisation, which we get in Aristotle: this is his bringing down the concept to the world of appearances—metaphysics is thus a secularisation of ontology. But, as it turns out, the process of secularisation ought not to stop there: just as ontology retains a theological residue, so metaphysics retains an ontological one. This is, at the most fundamental level, Adorno’s critique of Aristotle: all the problems that Adorno identifies in Aristotle’s thought stem in some way from this point. At its best, the idea of metaphysics offers an escape from a Platonic heritage which represents the estrangement of thought from world. And yet, in practice, Aristotle fails to complete his escape. Why ?
The first point to understand is that, according to Adorno, Aristotle retains, from Plato, the primacy of the universal (form, the Idea) over the particular (matter). Essentially, he buys Plato’s argument that since matter can decay in a way that its form cannot, the form of the thing has a sort of necessary reality: as opposed to matter, which merely happens to be real, thus is characterised by possibility rather than necessity (Adorno 2000: 56). Now of course, for Aristotle the Idea also needs to be manifested in the lower world of scattered particulars: indeed, as Adorno points out, it is only through the mediation of form and matter that either of them have reality as such. And yet, despite Aristotle’s focus on mediation, it remains the case that for him, the partner in the mediation that has the ‘higher’ reality is still the Idea (Adorno 2000: 39). This means that, in any given mediation between form and thing, it is not the case that both are transformed in the process. Rather matter, the lower partner in the exchange, is supposed to yield to the Idea. This ultimately means that Aristotle retains a picture, similar to the Platonic one, in which the Idea, presupposed in advance, is to a certain extent simply imposed upon the world. At worst, all Aristotle gives us as an advance on Plato is a sense of how this can be understood as a process.
This is something that Adorno thinks comes across particularly clearly on consideration of Aristotle’s doctrine of the unmoved mover. The unmoved mover is the principle by which Aristotle is supposed to be able to account for change. But in fact the doctrine of the unmoved mover ends up ossifying change as part of a static ontology, thus making change itself something unchanging (p. 86). The reason for this is that the unmoved mover is supposed to be, for Aristotle, pure actuality, pure perfection: it is effectively the Aristotelian version of God. The unmoved mover, just conceptually, is the ‘most real’ thing in Aristotle’s system: it is whatever has entirely necessary existence, and it is used to account for change by drawing everything that is ‘merely potential’ in towards it: all change, in Aristotle, is change towards the unmoved mover. And yet, for all that, the unmoved mover is also something that has been installed by Aristotle in his system as having always been from the start: this is just what it means for something to have necessary existence. Thus, change in Aristotle is not accounted for as something truly dynamic: it is always change towards something that itself cannot change. As per Goethe’s maxim, in Aristotle all change ultimately amounts to ‘everlasting peace in the Lord’ (Adorno 2000: 87).
What are the consequences for Aristotelian metaphysics, given that it remains on some level an ‘ontology’? The problem with Platonic ontology—when applied to ethics—was that virtue became alienated from human thought and action. The highest good was placed in the Platonic heaven where concretely situated ethical agents could only—even if they were (mysteriously, somehow) able to anticipate said good—be guided by it, not gain any critical purchase on it for themselves. Now, given Adorno’s own meta-philosophical assumptions, the idea of the ‘highest good’ here is necessarily a social product: thus by hypostatising it in the heaven of forms, Plato is simply being directly coercive.
Bringing the Idea down to earth makes it in theory possible for thought to get the sort of purchase on it necessary for thinking subjects to take it up and transform it for themselves, in response to conditions ‘on the ground’. That is: it would make it possible for individuals to gain critical purchase on the concepts and values they have inherited from their society and culture. In this sense, Aristotelian metaphysics could be the catalyst for something like critical theory. However—according to Adorno—Aristotle miscarries his project, by retaining an ‘ontological residue’, largely through the Platonic notion that the Idea has a primary and necessary existence over matter. This means that we cannot properly account for the dynamic interrelation between thought and world.
With this possibility curtailed, it makes sense that we are left with the conservative, resignatory character that Adorno repeatedly identifies in Aristotle’s ethics: the Platonic alienation remains. This does not, of course, mean that Aristotle is as bad as Plato: as Adorno points out, Aristotle’s interest is, in part, one that involves strengthening the individual against society. It is just, as a result of what Adorno identifies as the fundamental structure of his thought, Aristotle has been forced to accept that society as such can’t really be changed. From this, it seems, the fundamentally conservative character of Aristotle’s ethics necessarily proceeds: the structure produces the content. Adorno’s Aristotle critique thus runs as deep as it is possible to go." pp.6-9)
"I want to start out by briefly considering one naturalistic view that, I think it should be clear, Adorno definitely doesn’t hold. This would be a position which we can label ‘biologistic’ ethical naturalism. On this view, all that we would need in order to do ethics would be facts about human nature, as understood through the prism of modern natural science. These facts would exist somehow inherently ‘within’ our nature, and they would also be in some sense immutable: they have always existed—just so long as there have been creatures which can be called ‘human beings’—and we cannot do anything about them. These facts that are supposed to inform our ethical practices are just ‘human nature’ and will prove refractory to any attempt to engage with them transformatively.
It is a matter of some controversy as to whether or not any neo-Aristotelians are in fact committed to such a view. Certainly, some people have read Philippa Foot in this way (such as Fink 2008), although John McDowell directs his ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’ against this way of reading her thought (1998: 167ff); Foot herself does not say anything that suggests she is firmly committed one way or the other. For Adorno, such a view would clearly be problematic. On the one hand, Adorno is starkly critical of the scientific image of nature (see especially Adorno & Horkheimer 2002); how then should we expect him to endorse an ethics that proceeds from it? On the other—and this is something that has more to do with the context of this paper specifically—it can I hope quite readily be seen how such a naturalism would stand as a sort of modern version of a Platonic, ‘ontological’ account of ethics." p.9)
"According to biologistic naturalism, ‘human nature’ contains certain ethically relevant facts which, despite the fact they obviously have to be discerned by finite, socially and historically situated epistemic agents, are nevertheless supposed to exist somehow eternally outside of our thinking, standing over us with the hard compulsion of something ultimately real. There is, thus, a similar sort of hypostatisation going on in biologistic ethical naturalism, as that which Adorno criticises in Plato. And, likewise, such a hypostatisation is quite liable to reflect the values of the social world from which it derives: the evolutionary biologist who tells us that it is ‘natural’ for human males to be sexually aggressive is—whether consciously or otherwise—trying to sew the patriarchy into the very fabric of the world.
Probably the clearest example of a contemporary neo-Aristotelian who distances his ethics from this sort of biologism would be McDowell. Of all the neo-Aristotelians, McDowell is quite possibly the one with the clearest affinities to Adorno. Not only is his ethics anti-scientistic, but it also emphasises the importance of critical reflection. Hence why, in this section and the next, I will be directing my arguments—about the incompatibility of Adorno’s critical theory with neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism—specifically against McDowell. If his naturalism isn’t compatible with Adorno, then probably none of the rest of them will be either.
Nature, for McDowell, includes both what he calls ‘first’ and what he calls ‘second’ nature.20 For McDowell, first nature is to be identified in some way with the object of natural scientific investigation. For instance, in Mind and World, first nature is said to encompass ‘the realm of law’, with first-natural entities being the sort of things that fully admit of nomological explanations (McDowell 1996: 73). Later on, McDowell will modify this claim slightly: in his ‘Response to Halbig’ (2008), he simply says that whatever is first-natural, is to be identified with the object of natural-scientific intelligibility as such, regardless of whether or not this explanation is law-like (since he does not want to exclude from it certain more holistic forms of biological explanation). Either way, whatever first nature is, there is some sense that it proceeds blindly, apart from human spontaneity.
‘Second nature’, by contrast, is identified in Mind and World with the ‘logical space of reasons’ (McDowell 1996: 73). It is thus on the level of second nature that human conceptual thought operates. But it would be misleading to say that the idea of human conceptual thought exhausts McDowell’s notion of second nature. In the ‘Response to Halbig’, McDowell makes it clear that plenty of animals, not just humans, have a second nature.
The idea of second nature fits any propensities of animals that are not already possessed at birth, and not acquired in merely biological maturation (such as, for instance, the propensity to grow facial hair on the part of male human beings), but imparted by education, habituation, or training. (McDowell 2008: 220)
So a cat’s second nature might include the propensity to bury its faeces,21 or a dog’s second nature would include the ability to follow certain commands. For human beings, this includes our conceptual, linguistic capacities—insofar as these are the sort of things that require induction into a sense-community in order to be instantiated.
Another important distinction in McDowell’s work is the one that he makes between having a ‘world’ and existing within a mere ‘environment’. McDowell takes this distinction from part 3 of Gadamer’s Truth and Method (2011: 441ff). On this Gadamerian view, an ‘environment’ is ‘the milieu’ within which mere (non-rational) animals exist, ‘no more than a succession of problems and opportunities, constituted as such by ... biological imperatives’ (McDowell 1996: 115). By contrast, human beings possess a world—‘man’s relationship to the world is characterised by freedom from environment’ (Gadamer 2011: 441). In both Gadamer and McDowell, the key distinction between human beings and other animals, which allows us to possess a world, is that we have the ability to acquire linguistic capacities.
This freedom implies the linguistic constitution of the world. Both belong together. To rise above the pressure of what impinges on us from the world means to have language and to have a “world” (ibid.). When we acquire conceptual powers, our lives come to embrace not just coping with problems and exploiting opportunities, constituted as such by immediate biological imperatives, but exercising spontaneity, deciding what to think and do. (McDowell 1996: 115)
Hence, for human beings, acquiring conceptual, linguistic capacities—as a second nature—constitutes a liberation from the merely biological. Importantly, these capacities give us the ability to reflect on our surroundings; to weigh up alternatives, to decide what we ought or ought not to do. There is thus, as McDowell puts this point in ‘Two Sorts of Naturalism’, a ‘deep connection’ between reason and freedom (1998: 170). This is something that McDowell illustrates there with the fable of the rational wolves.
The fable of the rational wolves is a story that McDowell tells about a pack of wolves, all of whom suddenly—and simultaneously—acquire human-style conceptual capacities. What does this allow the wolves to do now, which they couldn’t before ? Previously, according to McDowell, the wolves were simply slaves of their Gadamerian ‘environment’. But now, having acquired reason, the wolves can take a step back from their previously instinctively governed lives, asking themselves questions of the form: ‘Why should I do this ?’
For instance: rational wolves can step back from their activity of hunting in packs and ask themselves, ‘but why should wolves hunt in packs ?’ (McDowell 1998: 171). And, in theory, the wolves could give all sorts of answers to this question: wolves should hunt in packs, one rational wolf might answer, because by doing so, they pool their energies, and are thus able to hunt more effectively. Or it could be that hunting in packs makes it easier for the stronger wolves to catch more prey, which they can then share with the weaker wolves. Equally though, a rational wolf might reply in the negative to this question: perhaps it is not good for wolves to hunt in packs after all, perhaps the stronger wolves would be better off doing their own thing and leaving the weaker wolves to starve: and so a rational wolf could very quickly invent Ayn Rand. Or perhaps wolves should not hunt at all: perhaps wolves should settle down and farm cattle instead, or maybe they shouldn’t even eat meat: a rational wolf could reflect on its diet against its instincts, and so we might get the first vegan wolves. The ability to ask the critical question throws all this open.
In this way, McDowell’s naturalism of second nature is able to anchor ethical reflection in human nature, whilst nevertheless avoiding biologism. For McDowell, it is precisely our nature to be rational and free, hence to stand in something like a transformative relationship with our surroundings—thus it is not possible, on a McDowellian picture, to be bound by our nature, in the way that we would be on an ‘ontologised’, biologistic view." pp.10-12)
"In Lecture IV of Mind and World, McDowell discusses the possibility of our inherited ethical outlook being deemed somehow inadequate for the realisation of the good, and therefore amended. This is a possibility that McDowell claims is going to be inherent in all thinking, simply as a result of the sort of thing that thinking is:
Like any thinking, ethical thinking is under a standing obligation to reflect about and criticize the standards by which, at any time, it takes itself to be governed. (McDowell 1996: 81) The image McDowell invokes in order to account for this possibility is that of ‘Neurath’s Boat’, in which a sailor overhauls his ship whilst it is still afloat. This is how McDowell thinks that the criticism of our ethical outlook should proceed: from immanently within it. Indeed, McDowell wants to utterly reject any idea that our ethical outlook could be validated from a position outside of the ethical as such—precisely why McDowell thinks that first nature can never hope to ground ethical reflection on its own, because first-natural facts are not, on their own, specifically ethical ones (they lie outside of what McDowell calls ‘the space of reasons’).
So far, this all sounds like a boat that Adorno could quite happily step aboard. The Neurath’s Boat image, as McDowell points out, can even account for the possibility of radical social criticism (ibid.): Neurath’s Boat could end up like Theseus’, where, after a lengthy overhauling process, not a single plank of the original remained (Hursthouse 1999: 166). But of course, something must be guiding our ethical reflection, and it is on this issue that, I believe, McDowell and Adorno importantly diverge. For if not a first natural one—and nothing else ‘external’ to the specifically ethical either—then what sort of critical standard does McDowell want to affirm ?
One possibility could be: standards entirely immanent to our society itself. This would certainly be one quite plausible way of grounding the idea of ‘internal’ social criticism: we could measure society’s inadequacies by how it fails to meet its own conception of itself. But for McDowell, this would not be sufficient. In his paper ‘Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics’, McDowell suggests that, were we to derive normativity solely from our particular, socially and historically specific context, the result would be an ethics which ‘smugly [accepts] the outlook of a particular social group’ (2009: 33). And, perhaps still more importantly, such a conception would fail to account for the fact that ‘reflection may undermine its starting-points’ (2009: 37). This point resonates with the line from Mind and World quoted above, where McDowell emphasises that ethical thinking must precisely be able to revise and criticise its own standards as well. Hence, we must require some way of transcending the (merely) social.
It is it seems for this reason that McDowell imports into his picture what looks like a rather Platonistic conception of ‘the ethical’ as such. Here’s the killer quote: The ethical is a domain of rational requirements, which are there in any case, whether or not we are responsive to them. We are alerted to these demands by acquiring appropriate conceptual capacities. When a decent upbringing initiates us into the relevant way of thinking, our eyes are opened to the very existence of this tract of the space of reasons. Thereafter our appreciation of its detailed layout is indefinitely subject to refinement, in reflective scrutiny of our ethical thinking. (McDowell 1996: 82)
‘The ethical’ here is explicitly defined by McDowell as a realm of reasons which will exist in any case, regardless of whether or not we are actually aware of what they are—in short, for McDowell, the ethical is something like a heaven of Ideas. And indeed, in Mind and World McDowell will go on to explicitly describe his naturalism of second nature as being identical with a ‘naturalised Platonism’ (McDowell 1996: 91). What does this mean? Well, on the one hand, simply the above point: that on McDowell’s picture, the dictates of reason are there in any case, and any proper upbringing will allow us to become aware of them (ibid.). They are, hence, what ethical reflection on our society and culture ought to aim at, or towards.
It should of course be noted that McDowell opposes this ‘naturalised Platonism’ to a ‘rampant Platonism’, on which ‘the rational structure within which meaning comes into view is independent of anything merely human, so that the capacity of our minds to resonate to it looks occult or magical’ (McDowell 1996: 92). The significance of the move to a ‘naturalised Platonism’ is thus that, on the ‘naturalised’ view, ‘the structure of the space of reasons is not constituted in splendid isolation from anything merely human. The demands of reason are essentially such that a human upbringing can open a human being’s eyes to them’.
But this just shows how McDowell’s thought really does end up mirroring the structure of Aristotle’s thought as Adorno describes it. The rampantly Platonistic picture that McDowell identifies clearly resembles the picture that Adorno attributes to Plato. And the naturalised Platonism that McDowell advances looks like it parallels exactly the attempt Adorno identifies in Aristotle to ‘bring the Idea down to earth’. This is especially insofar as McDowell describes the ethical as something that, though essentially attunable with human nature, is nevertheless ‘there in any case’ beyond us, perhaps just because there is a human nature. His standard for correctness in ethical reflection is, thus, assumed from the start. On an Adornian understanding, this standard thus contains an ‘ontological residue’.
It seems then that we have good reason to claim Adorno’s Aristotle critique does indeed apply to the form of ethical naturalism advocated by John McDowell. This implies that McDowell’s naturalism contains a conservative, uncritical core—in particular, this is because McDowell appears to be possessed of a world-picture on which standards of correctness are in theory specifiable in advance of any process of critical inquiry. This means then that McDowell’s ethics must be expressive of a form of alienation analogous to that which Adorno identifies in Aristotle: in short then, that there is always the risk, that what looks ultimately, insurmountably ‘good’, is really just the illegitimate hypostatisation of a particular form of class ideology." pp.14-16)
"If I am right and neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism is in some sense constitutively conservative, then this implies at least two things. Firstly, it means that a neo-Aristotelian conception of normativity cannot be invoked to ground something like Adorno’s critical theory of society and culture. Of course, it is doubtful that most actual contemporary Aristotelian ethicists would be especially worried about that. But more seriously, it strikes me that Adorno’s Aristotle critique must show up the way in which such naturalism is as it were structurally unsound. Contemporary Aristotelian ethical naturalists want to ground normativity in some sort of naturalistic story. But my reflections on Adorno’s Aristotle critique, as presented in this paper, suggest that the sort of naturalistic story these thinkers advance must be in some sense a hypostatisation of ideology derived from the society and culture that individual ethical naturalists inhabit. Thus the naturalism associated with neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy is, it seems, no real naturalism at all: rather, it is a cleverly disguised conventionalism. And such a conventionalism could never hope to ground ethical realism in anything like the way that ethical naturalism promises to.
Having said this, I do not believe that Adorno’s Aristotle critique is fatal for the project of developing a robust ethical naturalism wholesale. It is worth noting what it is precisely about the neo-Aristotelian view that makes it vulnerable to Adorno’s Aristotle critique. As we have seen in this paper, there is plenty about McDowell’s naturalism which seems quite apposite to Adorno’s own views. The problem emerges when McDowell is obliged to import a form of Platonistic essentialism into his ethics. This sort of essentialism is strongly associated with the neo-Aristotelian conception of normativity, from Foot onwards. And indeed, it is a large part of what makes the neo-Aristotelian ethical project seem so robust. It gives us a very clear index of the good.
But I do not think that such essentialism is, as it were, essential for ethical naturalism per se. And this is where there is some hope left for the project of ethical naturalism after all. If a Plato-style essentialism can be abandoned, and some other naturalistically derived framework of normativity put in its place, then we could develop some alternative form of ethical naturalism immune from accusations of conventionalism or conservatism.
What might such a conception of normativity look like ? Well, for one thing: it seems like such a conception of normativity must be grounded in an understanding of nature as dynamic, something that can change and shift over time. The appropriate conception of normativity would thus have to abandon any pretensions to apply transhistorically or universally. It also seems like such a conception of normativity would have to be radically objective, perhaps even irrationalistic: it would have to be derived immanently from exactly how nature (whatever nature is) is—purged of abstractions projected into it from the subject-side. Interestingly enough, both of these prescriptions express insights associated with Adorno’s own thought: on the one hand, his conception of nature as ‘natural-historical’ ...] on the other, his materialistic ethics and reflections on the significance of the ‘moral addendum’, which is supposed to escape being expressed in conceptual terms." pp.17)
-Tom Whyman, "Adorno's Aristotle Critique and Ethical Naturalism", European Journal of Philosophy (4):1208-1227 (2017).
=> l"acte moral est universel dans ses fins -prolonger l"individuation- ; singulière dans sa réalité car contextuel -la bonne solution n"est pas déductible d"une essence humaine invariable" et pluraliste -les donnés de la situation sont hétérogènes, nexus de déterminations socio-historiques ; probabiliste dans son mode délucidation -bien que la situation soit singulière, les conséquences probables des actions permettent d"orienter le jugement". La normativité nest pas universelle dans son contenu ou son élaboration délibérative mais dans sa fin. Les droits de lHomme peuvent avoir une validité universelle en tant quéléments à apprécier dans la détermination pluraliste du bien public, mais on ne peut pas ratifier leur caractère inaliénable ou absolu, sauf à retomber dans un essentialisme couvrant a priori tous les cas pouvant survenir.
