Barreto - Ethics of Emotions - Law and Critique

Law and Critique (2006) 17: 73106 Springer 2006
DOI 10.1007/s10978-006-0003-y
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 dierent light the relationship between legal
theory 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 nds 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 reects upon
Rortys proposal of sentimental education as an eective 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
* 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 Garca-Duttman for his suggestions. This text is ded-
icated to Paul Gready.
74 JOSE MANUEL BARRETO
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 sufces 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 an
account 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 ght 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),
106125.
5
J.S. Mill, Bentham, in J.S. Mill and J. Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Es-
says (London: Penguin, 1987).
ETHICS OF EMOTIONS AS ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS 75
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 Moue 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 oered 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 dicult partnership, if the writings
of 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 and
Adorno could be met with disbelief. Nowadays the Frankfurt
Schools theory of morality is usually identied 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 rst 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 critique
of 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. Moue, Which Ethics for Democracy?, in M. Garber, et al., eds, The Turn to
Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 92.
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), as
well 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 full 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 rst 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
petrication of Marxism in bureaucratic and totalitarian Commu-
nism rst in Russia; and then the surge of Fascism, the Second World
War and the Holocaust. For Garca-Duttman, 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 dene
history 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. Bon, 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. Garca-Duttmann, The Memory of Thought (London and New York: Con-
tinuum, 2002), 1.
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 denes 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 to
being called trivial,10 the name Auschwitz implies a judgement, a
denunciation in absolute terms. Such a condemnation entails a de-
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
dees 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), 361362.
12
T. Adorno and M. Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment (London: Verso,
1997), xi, and xvixvii.
13
Supra n. 11, at 366.
14
Supra n. 12, at xiii.
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 identication 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 rst 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
specically, 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, which
Hegel nds 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 191192.
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 would
be 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 denitively given and practical end
by the use of an increasingly precise calculation of means a thesis
adopted from Webers assessment of the process of rationalisation in
Modernity.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 eld 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 eld of morality has its
own specicity, pointing not only to the problem of its instrumen-
tality, but also to the specic impasse of the coldness of reason. The
20
W. Benjamin, Illuminations (London: Pimlico, 1999), 247248. 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 9192, 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), 293294.
24
Supra n. 16, at 1417.
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 reection, 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 rst,
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 9596.
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.
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
reective,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 reication 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 Kants principles, then
Adorno 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
KantSade, or SadeKant, where the very order of their names has
28
Quoted in Adorno and Horkheimer, supra n. 12, at 97, 101102.
29
Supra n. 12, at 8688.
30
Ibid., at 104.
31
Ibid., at 102.
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 Sadean
anti-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 satised 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 Zizeks 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 superegos imperative the dictum of
Enjoy, in what amounts to an identication of the pleasure principle with universal
duty. This identication 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), 285301. 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.
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 denition of sadism as that of the
gaining of sexual gratication by inicting 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 not
pleasure 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 modication 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 the
completion 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 Horkheimers thesis is not only that modern moral
philosophy created the cannon of totalitarianism,35 i.e. that the
writings of Kant pregured 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.
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 spacetime 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 by
Weber 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
inuence 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 fullment 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), 3334.
39
M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (London: Unwin
University Books, 1971).
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 using
wealth 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-reection the very same realm of
rational subjectivism. Protestant stoicism is nally rational because
40
Ibid., at 80.
41
R.H. Tawney, foreword to Weber, supra n. 39, at 3.
42
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
46
R. Brubaker, The Limits of Rationality. An Essay on the Social and Moral
Thought of Max Weber (London: Allen and Unwin, 1984), 29.
its shares the anti-emotional character of the ethos of rationalism.47 If

Protestant asceticism, as Weber dened 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 way
the 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, taking
revenge for the pain that has been suered. The ideal of hardness on
which moral education was based and the eorts 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 indierence 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 intensication 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
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 eective 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
rst 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 in
this 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., 197198.
53
Supra n. 16, at 13.
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 benet more from it. Probably there is also an
identication of the concept of the Enlightenment, a particular
historical example of a process of enlightening, with any other pos-
sibility of enlightenment of a dierent 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 (see
below). 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 reective 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 dene 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 modernity
precisely 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 Dierent Rationality (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999),
24.
55
Supra n. 12, at xiii, xvi, ixx.
56
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 rst priority the need to convey
every eort 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 justication. A justication should not be attempted, as it
would 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 reection 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 the
education 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 nave enthusiasm that allowed Kant to
salute the ethical impulse in the French Revolution, while remaining
silent 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 191192.
59
Ibid., at 192.
60
Ibid., at 194.
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 or
sapere aude. For Adorno, reection 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 identication with the collective and
the state, and constitute the rst 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 the
recurrence 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 dening 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 clarication and
modication of the conditions under which coldness or the
authoritarian character emerge.64 Exploring some possibilities for
making 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), 167184.
62
Supra n. 10, at 195 and 197.
63
Ibid., at 192193.
64
Ibid., at 199.
the insight into such mechanisms needs to be the content of a qual-

ied 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-nave enlightenment also needs to be
supported by an education toward self-critical reection, 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-reection 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 eort to make relatively conscious the motives that led to
the horror.68 In a similar sense, Zizek nds 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 eective.69
65
Ibid., at 202203.
66
Ibid., at 202.
67
Ibid., at 193.
68
Ibid., at 194195.
69
S. Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies (London and New York: Verso, 1997), 6265.
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 and
abysms 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 rst the historical consequence, the Holocaust, and

then traces its origins, nding 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 194195.
71
Ibid., at 201.
would not have occurred and, this is our addendum, would not occur
again. A reection 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 be
worth 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 indierence 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 individuals
as 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 reection
about the cultural strategies to full 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 in
Horkheimers 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 nds in an
impulse before the ego, which is not mediated by reason or philosophy, the source
from which freedom grows. Supra, n. 11, at 221223. (I am indebted to Alexander
Garca-Duttman for this reference).
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,74 Materialism 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
suering 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 in
the 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 and the 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 292293.
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.
separated, his view remains equidistant from rationalism and pure

emotivism.83
Horkheimers ethics is the consequence of a difcult marriage
between Schopenhauers pathos and Materialism,84 in which the
latter oers the teleology and the historicist landscape where the
reection 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,
nitude, contingency and suering 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 nitude, open to suering.87 An
ethics based on these premises cannot be but an individualistic,
utilitarian ethics... of solidarity of all life in the face of universal
suering.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
justications, 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
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 290292.
anti-foundationalist and sentimental fashion Horkheimer advances

an ethics forged around the ungrounded feeling of compassion for
suering 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
justication, which would be prompted by the logic of self-pres-
ervation, making morality in the nal 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, rst of all, at the alle-
viation of suering 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 suering of others,93
and would imply recognition of oneself in the suering of the other.94
But for Horkheimer, in the end, who are those who suer? 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 suering of others.95 For Horkheimer those who suer
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 289291.
92
Ibid., at 292293.
93
94
95
J.J. Sanchez, Compasion, Poltica y Memoria. El Sentimiento Moral en Max
Horkheimer, Isegora 25 (2001), 224.
96
97
98
Supra n. 88, at 69.
ethics into that of politics infecting those under its power with a
commitment to abolish suering, 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
suering of the other and the expression of some form of solidarity,
which is the active form of such feeling, would make one who is
suering the object of the concern and solidarity of the one who
witnesses his or her suering.
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 suering 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
100
101
Ibid., at 294.
102
A. Maestre, preface to M. Horkheimer, Materialismo, Metafsica y Moral
(Madrid: Tecnos, 1999).
103
Ibid.
104
105
Supra n. 88, at 72.
106
Supra n. 84, at 18.
of the alleviation of pain. But again, such an object is not dened in

abstract or rationalistic terms: the relief of the suering 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 suering of the wretched of the earth and their
struggles in history.107 For Horkheimer, metaphysicians and ocial
philosophers are scarcely impressed by what torments humanity
and, while their reections on history and society are irreproachably
objective, suering 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 reection on
ethics to the eld of human rights, a bridge between moral sentiments
and rights is pursued in this article by a reading of Rortys post-
modern approach to moral progress. The thematic afnities between
the insights of the rst 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.
proposal of an ethics of sympathy.110 Both positions also share a

vision of philosophy as a tool for justice, the Critical Theory from the
philosophy of praxis, and Rorty as one the dening features of his
Neopragmatism.111
Nonetheless, Rorty would not nd this menage a trois too
comfortable, as he believes Adorno and Horkheimer declared the
bankruptcy of the political project of modernity and did not offer any
utopia to replace it.112 Above all, when clearing the background for
an ethics of emotions, Rorty joins Adorno and Horkheimer in their
attack on Nietzsches contempt for sympathy.113 And when distanc-
ing himself from the sacralisation of science in modernity, he recalls
the not always acknowledged common thread that is present in the
thought of Husserl, Heidegger, Adorno and Horkheimer, i.e. the
tradition of the diagnosis of the crisis of the European modernity as
the enthronisation of technology.114 Rortys horizon of understand-
ing is also the historical context of Adorno and Horkheimers
reection. For Rorty the genocide of the European Jews plays a key
role in his re-contextualisation of human rights, and adopts the
Holocaust as the inevitable horizon of understanding from which
human rights need to be thought when he refers to our rights culture
as the Post-Holocaust human rights culture.115 While the imperative
Auschwitz never again is Adornos answer to the Holocaust, the
110
Supra n. 79, at 151 n. 43.
111
Although Habermas and Rorty share a range of stances in relation to the
project of Modernity and liberalism, the second generation of Critical Theory is not
tuned to some facets of Neopragmatism, including the question of sensitivity and
moral sentiments, which are kept in the borders of reason indeed, and only as limit
concepts of discourse ethics. J. Habermas, A Replay to my Critics, in J. Thompson
and D. Held, eds, Habermas. Critical Debates (London: Macmillan, 1982), 246247.
In addition, there is also the huge gap between Habermas transcendental pragmatics
and Rortys anti-foundationalist pragmatism. See L. Ray, Pragmatism and Critical
Theory, European Journal of Social Theory 7/3 (2004), 307321.
112
R. Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1989), 5657. The same sensation could be also present in Adorno and
Horkheimer, whose uneasiness about the company of Rorty could be greater because
Pragmatism is labelled as one of the exemplars of instrumental reason.
113
Ibid., at 197198.
114
R. Rorty, Philosophy as Science, as Metaphor and as Politics in R. Rorty,
Essays on Heidegger and Others, Philosophical Papers Vol. 2, (Cambridge New
York: CUP, 1996), 20.
115
R. Rorty, Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality, in S. Shute and
S. Hurley, eds, On Human Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 1993 (New York:
Basic Books, 1994), 115.
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 AdornianKantian
imperative and the Rortyan re-description of the culture of human
rights operate as two dierent 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, Rorty
approaches human rights and the human rights crisis by appealing to
emotions and to the experience of witnessing. The experience of ethics
is set o by a sensibility for those abused and by a question like Are
you suering? or Are you in pain?.117 Coming from dierent
backgrounds, philosophical sources and political projects, Adorno
and Horkheimers critique of bourgeois stoicism and Rortys ethics of
emotions converge in nding 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 can
contribute to ensure the ecacy 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. Conrming 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 oered by Rorty.
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
dierent alternatives, to weigh the consequences of actions and to
avoid contradictions.120 While the subject of Kants morality is one
who 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 suerers in the terms of Rorty.123
Rortys critique of rationalist ethics is accompanied by his anti-
foundationalism, a critique of metaphysics, or of what remains
platonic 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 congured 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), 5657.
120
R. Rorty, Ethics without Principles, in R. Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope
(London: Penguin, 1999), 77.
121
Ibid., at 83.
122
123
Supra n. 112, at xvi.
124
R. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), 10.
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 being
action-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 reection 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 in
particular, of their political convictions. They know their beliefs are
historical and do not have transcendental foundations. The Post-
Philosophical political culture is also identied 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 suering 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 gure of the ironist individual. Supra n. 112.
128
S. Critchley, Is Derrida a Private Ironist or a Public Liberal, in C. Moue,
ed., Deconstruction and Pragmatism (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 21.
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 beyond
cultural dierences. 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 eld 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 congurations.
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
specically, 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 fenomeno de los derechos humanos y
la posibilidad de un nuevo paradigma teorico, Revista del Centro de Estudios Con-
stitucionales, 3 (1989), 323344.
130
131
Ibid., at 198.
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 rst 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
nds in telling stories one of its more adequate possibilities. To po-
eticise the culture of modernity means to adopt literature as an
instrument 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 nd 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 specic 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 suer 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 eective 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
nding a priori rational universal rules and obeying them, but it
132
Supra n. 115, at 122125.
133
Ibid., at 127.
134
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.
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 scientic modern culture.
CONCLUSION
The ght 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 rmness 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 perspective
of 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, deates 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.
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 societies
and 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: jm.barreto@law.bbk.ac.uk
139
140
Supra n. 115, at 247, n. 13.

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Law and Critique (2006) 17: 73106 Springer 2006

JOSE MANUEL BARRETO *

ETHICS OF EMOTIONS AS ETHICS OF HUMAN RIGHTS:

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

In the current context of the dominant rationalist philosophical and

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

generally understood as one of the characteristic expressions of the

1. CRITICAL THEORY AND ETHICS

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

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

1.1. Auschwitz and the Critique of Modern Morality

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

process through which the Enlightenment led to Auschwitz as a

civilisation is also a document of barbarism. Benjamin here pointed

Excursus on Juliette displays a critique of modern morality by

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

different connotations.32 Although incompatible with the interpre-

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

1.2. Bourgeois Coldness and Nazi Hardness

society characteristic of the Frankfurt School, when morality is

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

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

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

1.3. The Imperative Born out of Auschwitz and Adornos General

imperative, termed a Kantian imperative by Adorno himself: to

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

In sum, general enlightenment is not characterised just by the

Adorno considers rst the historical consequence, the Holocaust, and

1.4. Horkheimers Ethics of Sympathy

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

separated, his view remains equidistant from rationalism and pure

anti-foundationalist and sentimental fashion Horkheimer advances

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

2. RORTY AND THE POSSIBILITY OF AN ETHICS OF EMOTIONS

Can the elaborations of the Critical Theory on the coldness of

proposal of an ethics of sympathy.110 Both positions also share a

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

way of thinking engaged with the foundation of beings. This

the classical liberal connotation of negative liberty in front of the

familiar with them and emphasising the likeness between them

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

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

JOSE MANUEL BARRETO

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