Adornoian Hope and Murdochian Despair

Adorno is not often thought of as a ‘hopeful’ thinker. This is understandable: after all, for Adorno, we are not only unfortunate enough to inhabit ‘the wrong life’ – we are also, by inhabiting it, supposed to be denied any knowledge of the good. And yet, there is a curious optimism to Adorno’s pessimism. In this paper, I show why this apparent paradox in fact makes total sense – by means of a comparison between Adorno and another of the 20th century’s great heterodox moral philosophers, Iris Murdoch. Murdoch’s picture is similar to Adorno in a number of interesting ways – but ultimately, I argue, her Platonic insistence of the reality of the ‘highest Good’ leaves her open to the threat of a sort of vertiginous moral scepticism and despair: a threat exacerbated by the ways in which our world is ‘bad’ at present. Adorno’s thought, however, is purged of any hints of the Platonistic optimism we might associate with Murdoch. His emphasis on the ethical significance of bodily suffering can be the seed of the sort of hopeful pessimism it seems like we really need today.