Abstract

A critical notice of Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly. The following is from the article's conclusion. 'Freyenhagen shows that Adorno’s thought has some practical import, but not that it could not have more. He shows that Adorno’s normative judgements can be read so as to cohere with the idea that today we cannot know the good, but not that the latter idea is true. Thus, Freyenhagen partially solves the two problems that he set out to solve. To that extent he achieves his main aim, which was to liberate Adorno’s practical philosophy from those difficulties. However, Freyenhagen leaves an important part of Adorno’s practical philosophy, namely its pessimism, rather unsupported; and that leaves Freyenhagen’s treatment of the two problems undermotivated. Notwithstanding these difficulties, the book is impressive and very illuminating, partly because Freyenhagen’s Adorno scholarship is excellent. Moreover, and despite its breadth and complexity, for the most part the book achieves a level of clarity that is rare in work on Adorno.'