Adam Smith and Theodor Adorno: a Dialectical Materialist Psychology

Leo Deng

12/15/23

Seminar on History in Philosophy: Smith and Hume

Professor Kevin Zollman (Adorno information reviewed by Professor Jay Lampert)

INTRODUCTION

             In Theodor Adorno’s Negative Dialectics (1966), the Concept is his seminal idea of the product of human subjectivity or psychological consciousness that is only known in distinction to its object. This distinction is what he calls Nonidentity—the absolute relationality and distinction of all objects—that is necessary for any identity to be made. Adorno’s emphasis on the negative was an attempt to correct what he saw as an error of Marxist discourse, which was overwhelmingly positive in his time, on dialectics—the logic of how contradictions resolve themselves, especially in the politico-economic realm. This was an issue of the balance between theory and praxis in Marxism, in which Adorno emphasized theory’s importance. What he missed was showing that the Concept had a reality, i.e., the product of the mind (concepts) always-already affects the production of material and of change (praxis). Here, Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) is a surprising but fitting support of the reality of the concept by his emphasizing the developmental bridge between “the amoral to the moral,” as argued by Maria Carrasco.[1] She argues against an ‘infrastructure’ to ‘superstructure’ view of psychology and morality that she accredits to past Smithians (Fleischacker and Raphael), but that there is a “genetic connection” between the two but morality becomes its own sphere driven by “our innate drive to sympathize.”[2] Carrasco’s cautious objection to prior Smithians’ reducing morality to a mere epiphenomenon of psychology has its merit, but I will go a step further to say that psychology and morality become dialectically interacting as modern subjects begin to confuse the two. Is the moral instinct of the wrongness of a murder not as immediate as the psychological instinct of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure? There are many instances when moral judgments can override psychological ones and vice versa and thus, I will argue that this framework of psychology and morality as the two main dialectical parts of human consciousness is what Adorno is missing in his theory of human subjectivity. The concepts produced by morality (justice, freedom, etc.) approach and clash against concrete psychological experiences in the same manner as Adorno explains the Concept’s approaching of the object. As a result, social norms become the ideological reflection of the history of moral judgments.

ADORNO - THE CONCEPT & THE NEGATIVE, OR OPENNESS

Theodor Adorno famously begins Negative Dialectics with the fact that “Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.”[3] This simultaneously reveals two integral aspects to his thought and its positionality: (1) the historical context which includes both (a) 20 years after the end of World War II that saw the utmost ‘barbarism’ of how reason was wielded in Nazi Germany[4] and (b) the stagnation of Marxist revolution in the Soviet Union and its social repression that upset many intellectuals alike. This historical context connects to (2), the Marxist background of Adorno himself where the ‘moment to realize philosophy’ was Marx’s XIth thesis on Feuerbach (1845)—“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it”[5]—and it had failed. Thus, Adorno returned to the realm of theory, as philosophy was now relevant again, to refine it in the name of new political praxis. His novel idea of Negative Dialectics did just that. The Marxist dialectic, by retrospect analysis of the Hegelian dialectic, was ruthlessly criticized to a new rupture where dialectics was forced to take on an absolute openness—Adorno enforced the primacy of the negative aspect of the dialectic, that the resolution of a contradiction was always in motion to the next (there was no stop or ‘positive resolution’). The positive dialectic as a logic of progress between conflicting ideas (Hegel) or material entities (Marx) as contradictions, in both cases, held on to an ability to be “resolved,” especially in historical epochs. Hegel’s absolute knowledge (Geist) as the Prussian State and Marx’s communism as the end of history were the utmost examples of a positive resolution in the dialectical method.[6] The Hegelian retrospect echoes in Adorno as “dialectics say no more… than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder,” and “contradiction is nonidentity under the aspect of identity.”[7] Thus, the Concept is the fundamental molecule, if you will, that links thought and reality in the dialectical method for Adorno. Here, I will explain the integral ideas of identity and nonidentity that are necessary for understanding how the Concept functions.

Simply, identity and nonidentity are the positive and negative attitudes towards objects that the thinking individual has; a=a is the identity that deems “a” as a positive object, while a≠b is the nonidentity or difference that distinguishes the two objects and gives them the potential to be separate identities, which always affects the Concept as such. This is because the Concept by itself is the product of human thought that approaches an object but can never reach it—the Concept never fully apprehends its object. In a Leibnizian sense, the Concept does the job of the Monad in that the object can be defined only by defining the rest of the universe—everything that the object is not. For example, the concept of a horse is never the same as the actual horse but attempts to anoint its identity can only be done through knowing what the horse is not. This is the operation of nonidentity.  In the aphorism on the disenchantment of the Concept by way of emphasizing its ‘infinitude,’ Adorno says:

No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of a whole. Thus the goal of philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept… yet it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds.[8]

“Works of art” are his arbitrary objects in which he is applying, in a preliminary fashion, his negative-dialectical way of thinking in so far as the Concept is not the product of a simple, positive identification of the object, but the sentiment of identification itself is necessary for “the truth of the work.” One may be able to guess at this point that the Concept is thus, on the contrary, only possible by means of nonidentity as there is no such thing as identity without nonidentity—one cannot identify anything as peculiar, special, or unique if there is no notion of difference, of things being nonidentical; without nonidentity everything is one and can never be divided. This ties back to the sentiment of identification above, Adorno’s main compliment of identity:

To define identity as the correspondence of the thing-in-itself to its concept is hubris; but the ideal of identity must not simply be discarded. Living in rebuke that the thing is not identical with the concept is the concept’s longing to become identical with the thing. This is how the sense of nonidentity contains identity.[9]

Thus, the longing for identity with the object is the Concept’s tendency of approaching the object. The Concept’s constant “butting heads” against reality is its primary quality (think of the horse example again, the concept of the horse clashing with its reality to make it more accurate; sometimes it fails and sometimes it succeeds depending on context and contingency, and of course this becomes more complicated with concepts that do not just have a single object).

Lastly, the issue of this notion of the Concept’s connection with Adorno’s overall project needs

to be tackled; this is the importance of nonidentity with materialism or, as Adorno calls it, “The Preponderance of the Object.”[10] “Nonidentity is the secret telos of identification. It is the part that can be salvaged; the mistake in traditional thinking is that identity is taken for the goal.”[11] This is the upshot of what I meant by identification’s sentiment being important for Adorno, as traditional philosophy has shown, because it tries to define things, delineate objects, or—most importantly—produce concepts. However, this sentiment need not have identity as its end goal, for Adorno, it is clearly the contrary. The goal of nonidentity is that any so-called “resolution” of a dialectical change or clash necessarily has an openness about it—that it is always-already in motion to the next dialectical contradiction; every concept is always-about-to-change. This is the essence of negative dialectics’ methodology, which coincides with his broader philosophical project in critiquing vulgar (Soviet) Marxism that is epitomized by its conception of totality. The totality is simply “Marx’s dictum: ‘The relations of production of every society form a whole’ is the methodological point of departure and the key to the historical understanding of social relations.”[12]

Concrete totality is, therefore, the category that governs reality… viz. capitalist society with its internal antagonism between the forces and the relations of production… we maintain that in the case of social reality, these contradictions are not a sign of the imperfect understanding of society; on the contrary, they belong to the nature of reality itself and to the nature of capitalism. When the totality is known, they will not be transcended and cease to be contradictions. Quite the reverse, they will be seen to be necessary contradictions arising out of the antagonisms of this system of production.[13]

Theoretically, the totality is the sum of all current societal contradictions and antagonisms, with some remnant of openness for change towards the end of the Lukács quote as he was critiquing the vulgar Marxists of the Second International that made the totality static and monolithic.[14] However, most openness was thwarted by Stalin’s ‘official line’ in Dialectical and Historical Materialism (1938), but it truly began “in 1936 [when] Stalin made the mistake of proclaiming that classes and class struggle had ceased to exist in the Soviet Union.”[15] As Lukács said about vulgar Marxist Max Adler, we can hear it resound for Soviet Marxism, “by this stroke the objective economic antagonism as expressed in the class struggle evaporates.”[16] Adorno clearly agrees, in the Marxist conception of class struggle as the ‘motor of history,’ that antagonisms have not evaporated and may never if dialectics must always be negative.[17] Thus, Adorno’s negative dialectics is the elaboration of the inner workings and logic of the open totality—a totality in its Lukácsian novelty of “the proletariat is at one and the same time the subject and object of its own knowledge.”[18] Adorno goes one leg further with ‘the preponderance of the object’ to necessarily have a grounding in concrete reality within his negative dialectics:

Subjectivity changes its quality in a context which it is unable to evolve on its own. Due to the inequality inherent in the concept of mediation, the subject enters into the object altogether differently from the way the object enters into the subject. An object can be conceived only by a subject but always remains something other than the subject, whereas a subject by its very nature is from the outset an object as well. Not even as an idea can we conceive a subject that is not an object; but we can conceive an object that is not a subject. To be an object also is part of the meaning of subjectivity; but it is not equally part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject.[19]

This preponderance of the object is one giant leap from Marx, whose “materialism has nothing to do with reference to matter”[20] and deemed “the subject is nothing other than practice”[21] by the XIth thesis. However, no matter how advanced Adorno’s conception of dialectics became, the long-standing problem in Marxism of any explanation of consciousness in the subject seems even more obsolete and neglected by this ‘preponderance of the object.’[22] The unlikely detour back to Adam Smith’s notion of moral conscience—a constantly necessary interaction between morality and psychology—allows Adorno’s elaborations on subjectivity to succeed.

SMITH - PSYCHOLOGY AND MORAL NATURALISM

Adorno’s account of individual consciousness is naturally predicated on his negative dialectical view of subject-object relations, but he misses the fact that there is a material grounding of consciousness that Adam Smith provides between psychology and morality. For Adorno, consciousness is the subjective experience of objects; since objects are primary, the subjective experience of ‘awareness’ is simply the constant reaction to the object’s preponderance. Only by the perception of an object—by its ‘entering one’s mind’—through a ‘somatic moment’ of sensation can one be aware that they are conscious at all.[23] Consciousness becomes a negative, resistive current against the objects’ universal impeding on the mind. This conception combined with the object’s preponderance and the ‘somatic moment’ of sensation shows Adorno’s desire for a materialist or naturalist account of consciousness. Also, the materialist grounding is necessary for the Marxist primacy of the material world and its reality, so politics and economics have concrete, material effects on others, and that it can be changed for the better. Thus, the definition of materialism I will use refers not only to the fact that social life is driven by material desires, but that matter is primary to mind (instead of the early modern view of physical reductionism).[24] Since then, the primacy of material has been emphasized in the Marxist tradition, although always acknowledging that the mind 0is dialectically interacting with material—dialectical materialism. However, the mind’s (consciousness) existence is treated like a given epiphenomenon that needs no explanation. Here, Smith’s naturalistic emphasis—in so far as psychology and morality arise from the development of nature that humans ultimately emerge from—of his theory of moral conscience simply requires the interpretation of nature as material to fit into a potentially dialectical materialist psychology. The merits will become clear from the outset since a phenomenon such as morality cannot be explained by Marxism since it simply does not have the tools to do so; it is simply discarded much of the time.[25]

Smith’s fundamental basis for his theory of morality is that people inherently find pleasure in sympathizing with another’s situation, as sympathy implies some form of taking on the other’s situation as one’s own.[26] Thus, sympathy is simply defined as “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever.”[27] His point is that this propensity of sympathy is universal in that it is ingrained in all individuals’ principles that are based in their “nature.”[28] This can be shown through the fact that when we observe one who is suffering, “by the imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive ourselves enduring all the same torments,… and become in some measure the same person with him,…and even feel something which, though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them.”[29] He goes on to give examples of spectators watching someone fall onto the ground or a slack-rope dancer evoking the imaginary pain and anxiety feelings as if the spectators were in those situations themselves.[30] The mutual sympathy comes about in the subject, who always-already has a desire to sympathize or care for others, when they “rejoice” (feel pleasure) in others adopting the subject’s passions as their own because it affirms the subject. Likewise, the subject “grieves” if others oppose one’s passions.[31] Smith’s notion of sympathy is thus beneficial in that it allows for the subject to reflect on what is happening during a moral judgment (since they are imagining it with their own faculties), and it explains humans’ tendency towards fellow-feeling as imagination is always tied to the passion that arises out of our own ‘hearts.’ From the subject’s side then, we feel the utmost pleasure when others sympathize with our emotions and feel very shocked by the contrary—this is the pleasure of approval and the pain of disapproval.[32] This direct relationship between natural sentiments (pleasure and pain) and approbation (approval and disapproval) is fundamental to the naturalist roots of Smith’s morality. The natural sentiments are the foundation on which approbation will be fused with the wielding of reason, that individuals begin reasoning to become more praiseworthy and avoid being blameworthy. This phenomenon always coincides with one’s realization of intersubjectivity, which bridges the amoral to moral, that is when an agent is able to see the world from the other’s perspective and make moral judgments because of it.

Smith’s bridge from the amoral (psychological) to moral (ethical) in his psychological-ethical theory builds a moral developmentalism that aptly fits Adorno because of its dialectical possibility and materialist grounding. This notion of the ‘bridge’ is primarily accredited to Maria Carrasco’s important essay in Smithian discourse “From psychology to moral normativity,” but I will depart from it slightly to argue for a more dialectical reading of Smith that will fit Adornian praxis better. Carrasco begins by reconstructing Smith’s notion of sympathy by identifying four types of it. The first two are ‘one-way’ sympathies that are intuitive upon my prior reconstruction; one is the ‘mechanical sympathy’ of instinctually feeling a passion another is feeling (“laugh when somebody else is laughing”[33]), and the other is the ‘identification-sympathy’ of putting oneself in another’s shoes.[34] The latter two are ‘mutual sympathies’ that contain Carrasco’s upshot of “the first great leap Smith makes”[35] and the critically important emergence of the ‘Impartial Spectator.’ These mutual sympathies are simply named ‘mutual sympathy’ (as such) and ‘mutual moral sympathy.’ ‘Mutual sympathy’ contains the novelty of the agent finally being “an active participant in the sympathy process… He strives to identify himself with the spectator, he looks at himself through the other’s eyes and brings his feelings up to the point which the spectator would approve of them.”[36] The active participation is precisely found in the fact that “both the spectator and the agent have to modify their feelings if they want the pleasure of mutual sympathy.”[37] This active participation for the pleasure of mutual sympathy goes beyond the one-way ‘identification-sympathy’ because “the ‘superimposed maps’[38] no longer remain static” by way of ‘consensual propriety.’

If the spectator finds no coincidence between his and the agent’s feelings, he will strive, through the virtues of humanity, to better identify himself with the agent, to better understand his situation and get as close as possible to his affective responses.[39]

The point of collision that is the coinciding of the agent and the spectator’s feelings is ‘consensual propriety,’ which will generate the Impartial Spectator through the multiplicity of consensual proprieties. This multiplicity is the concordance of all agents and spectators’ “average feelings,” making propriety “culture-relative” and “embodied in social norms, which will be the new standard for judgments”—the Impartial Spectator.[40] Thus, the Impartial Spectator is this imaginary, amorphous ‘being’ in one’s mind that holds the agent accountable for their actions according to a general average of the multiplicity of culturally-relative social norms of their time and place. The Impartial Spectator is the central notion for, lastly, ‘mutual moral sympathy.’

            ‘Mutual moral sympathy’ is where the bridge from the amoral to the moral is finally clear as the moral conscience emerges as its own sphere in human development, separate from the psychological conscience. As Carrasco states this is “Smith’s Copernican revolution, which finally shifts his psychological sympathy into moral sympathy and our raw sentiments into moral sentiments.”[41] As stated before, the Impartial Spectator becomes the central notion here; this is because it is precisely the subject’s experience of the other’s gaze—their “indifferent eyes”—that make us think and care about their position, overriding one’s raw (psychological), individual sentiments. This will produce “second-order or rational desires, finally bringing the ‘impartial spectator’ to existence” as precisely the amorphous agglomeration of real spectators—the perception of real others constitute the Impartial Spectator.[42] Here, a truly ‘situation-relative’ ethics of practical reason can emerge, and it is predicated always on “the infrastructure of mutual psychological sympathy” that combines the prior sympathies I have described. Specifically, morality will wield identity-sympathy as a vehicle for identifying “the relevant circumstances that in each particular occasion need to be considered.”[43] This is necessarily an individually developed sphere for Smith as he argues a young child has no self-command, but of course, has a psychological conscience. The demarcation between psychological and moral conscience becomes especially explicit in the aim or end these sentiments compel subjects to act for. What is different about mutual moral sympathy compared to the prior three psychological sympathies (mechanical, identity, and mutual) is that those acting on their moral conscience and faculties do so for praiseworthiness.[44] 

Psychological sympathy becomes moral sympathy when its motivation changes: when we start to intend praiseworthiness or virtue in our passions/actions instead of the pleasure of actual praise. This happens when our first-order passions start to be informed, mediated or modeled by the ‘impartial spectator within’ (or ‘reason, principle, conscience’ – TMS III.3.5); when they become second-order passions or, properly speaking, moral sentiments.[45]

This is the powerful leap from the simple desire for the pleasure of approbation to the potential of approbation itself (praiseworthiness), allowing the subject to no longer simply imagine the other’s scenario but judge it as if they are the impartial spectator themselves. Thus, “before judging, … the actual spectator brackets out his natural self-centeredness, his consciously known cultural prejudices, his interests, biases, and emotional ties; in order to become… a ‘man in general,’… ‘the representative of mankind’”—the Impartial Spectator.[46] This new ‘sympathetic-impartiality’ becomes the moral means of attaining propriety, which is always different and learned through self-command in different people, especially not to be confused with all moral subjects being able to be impartial on all judgments. Rather, it is the moment where subjects conceive of impartiality itself that allows the moral conscience to develop, i.e., the abstract Impartial Spectator is the congealed values and norms imposed on the subject learned through self-command. The Impartial Spectator’s existence is proved simply by the fact that one uses the uniquely moral faculties even when alone (e.g., one can feel bad for doing something unethical or immoral in their room, on their computers, etc. even when there are no real spectators around). The distinction between psychological and moral conscience is now clear through the mediation by the Impartial Spectator of first-order desires and thus, a subject with a developed moral conscience can say ‘I really understand where you are coming from, but I cannot justify your action.’[47] In this example, the spectator’s negative moral judgment contradicts their positive psychological judgment of the agent, showing the inevitable struggle between first-order desires and “the newly acquired habit of self-command.”[48] Finally, the spheres of psychological and moral conscience can be integrated into Adornian theory, with the Impartial Spectator being the produced Concept of morality.

SMITHIAN DIALECTICAL MATERIALIST PSYCHOLOGY

            What I shall deem Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology is a modality in analyzing conscious experiences or phenomena by way of the reciprocal yet oppositional interaction between the psychological and moral consciences. This psychology is dialectical because of an increasingly indistinguishable nature between the primacy of psychological or moral thought—moral judgments or sentiments can override psychological ones at times and vice versa at others; some may even confuse the two or influence how the other is experienced. This psychology is also materialist because the moral conscience produces concepts (the Impartial Spectator, conceptions of principles, norms, values, etc.) that interact with the materially grounded psychological conscience just as Adorno claims concepts do with objects. First, I will argue for the material grounding of, what I call, psychological and moral naturalism by buttressing Smith’s psychological sympathies with Humean psychology. Then, I will describe the complete functioning of this Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology in its theory and practice.

Materialism – Integrating Hume’s Naturalism

            The Smithian moral naturalism can be traced back to the simple desire for approbation, which David Hume best elaborates on the attributes of in A Treatise of Human Nature. Hume’s argumentation reduces our psychology to the absolute base, brute ‘senses’ of pleasure and pain, allowing for a materialist grounding of psychological experience by integrating Hume’s Empiricism into Adorno’s idea of the object’s preponderance. This goes back to Hume’s famous empiricist division of human perception into ideas and impressions. Impressions are the brute sense perceptions one gains a posteriori through one’s ‘five senses’ interacting with the material world. Ideas are the thoughts and memories that operate as ‘faded impressions’ for Hume—an idea’s corresponding impression can fade over time (“the most lively thought is still dimmer than the dullest sensation”[49]). This also means all ideas are based on or are a recombination of the data from impressions that can be made through reason or imagination. Here, the similarity to Adorno’s Concept approaching the object can be seen in how ideas ‘approach’ their impressions: “when we think back on our past sensations and feelings, our thought is a faithful mirror that copies its objects truly; but it does so in colours that are fainter and more washed-out than those in which our original perceptions were clothed.”[50] However, more complex psychological phenomena that Smith will need to build on for his theory of morality have not even come up yet; this is where Hume’s Treatise interjects to divide impressions themselves into two different types: original and secondary.

The original senses are pain and pleasure, naturally, as those associated with the most primal, intuitive, and instinctual responses to nature or the external world. They are original because they operate as a tautological truth that is biologically ‘hard-wired’ into us: not only do we tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain, but pleasure is defined by what we seek (enjoy) and pain by what we avoid (dislike).[51] The secondary impressions are known as ‘reflections’ that include the passions or emotions we are commonly acquainted with, which are also divided into direct and indirect passions. The direct passions arise immediately from pain or pleasure (“desire, aversion, grief, joy,” etc.) and indirect ones arise as a conjunction of different passions (“pride, humility, ambition, vanity, love, hatred,” etc.).[52] Hume calls these passions ‘reflections’ because they reflect the original senses’ pleasure and pain but with the new distinction of having a cause and object. For example, pride and humility are pleasurable and painful feelings, respectively, aimed at the object of the self and are caused by any source that is valuable or embarrassing to the subject (one is proud of a big house or humiliated by a small house).[53] Thus, these operations of the impressions give a materialist grounding in so far as they must arise between the interaction of two material elements: a cause and an object. Adorno’s idea of the object’s preponderance is precisely to show that nonidentity operates on the terrain of the material world.[54] Even having an emotion about an idea becomes an impression of a ‘faded impression.’ Ultimately, this Humean outlook becomes strikingly similar to Adorno’s ‘somatic moment’ of subjectivity—Adorno’s commentary on somatic suffering rings loudly here, too, “for suffering is objectivity that weighs upon the subject.”[55] Adorno is echoing his academic partner Max Horkheimer’s point that suffering—the brute reduction of the subject to their body through pain—overrides reason in fascist torture.[56] This is Hume’s precise point of dividing impressions into original and secondary ones. Pain’s directedness in Adorno is its originality (as in original impression) in Hume as it comes straight from the object (the external entity hurting you) and thus, secondary impressions (emotions) are subjective reactions, resistances, or reflections of objects (which cause original impressions) and their nonidentity. These inner functions of Hume’s psychology extrapolate up into Smith by way of their shared use of ‘passions.’ Thus, the Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology, by the support of Hume’s particulars of the psychological conscience, posits the sympathetic subject’s consciousness as the response and resistance to objects coming into contact with them. This is the materialistic nature of this novel lens.

Dialectics – Universal & Particular

By returning to Carrasco and reexamining her normative upshot of practical reason being the executing faculty of morality, the Impartial Spectator bridges the universal and the particular in Adorno’s Marxist totality. Carrasco states:

Moral sympathy and the impartial spectator are like the two sides of a coin. Moral judgments, although situation-relative, are also intrinsically connected to the universality of reason. In the figure of the impartial spectator and his sympathetic-impartial judgments contingencies are assumed, selected according to their relevance and ordered by a universal principle: the voice of that ‘man in the breast’ who continuously reminds us of our equal dignity. Hence in this theory, the impartial spectator is the one that bridges the gap between particularity and universality and works as the vehicle of practical reason.[57]

Here, I would like to argue that not only is the particular and the universal bridged by that of moral judgment (particular) and reason (universal), as Carrasco says, but also that of sympathetic perception and norms which are the reflective counterparts of judgment and reason. This is shown implicitly by Hankins and Thrasher’s article “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms,” which argues for Smith’s advantage over Hume because of his idea of the pleasure of mutual sympathy better explaining the emergence of norms. The primary norm they discuss is that of compensating a victim in an accident that you are involved in, even if it is not entirely your fault. Smith’s pleasure of mutual sympathy fits great here because “If I cause harm to someone else, I am likely to sympathize with their suffering, even when the harm is caused accidentally. I’m also likely to sympathize with their demand that something be done to make them whole again.”[58] They argue that the norm emerges from this “psychic bonus” that the pleasure of mutual sympathy functions as in such a scenario. For example, in a car accident between a leading and trailing car, the best possible outcome is for both to pursue the strategy of taking responsibility rather than blaming the other in a game theory lens. Both parties gain the pleasure of compensation and the bonus of mutual sympathy and thus, this broader communal convergence allows for the emergence of a norm of taking responsibility even if it is an accident.[59] This supports Carrasco’s distinction between psychic and moral judgments, too, as it allows one “to moderate [their] claim of innocence and augment [their] belief that something must be done for the victim,” effectively separating one’s psychological instinct of innocence with their moral action of compensating the victim.[60] What bridges the particular sympathetic perception with the universal norm of compensation here must be the Impartial Spectator, which explains the norm’s emergence—it is the broader communal convergence that will uphold these moral values. Finally, the discussion returns to Carrasco as sympathetic perception is simultaneously the faculty that allows for moral judgment and the social reflection of it in the realm of the particular. Likewise, norms allow for and are the social reflection of practical reason in the realm of the universal. This ardently emphatic bridge between the universal and particular is precisely what Adorno needs for a full elaboration of individual consciousness’s relation to its totality (the whole of social relations).

Smithian universal practical reason finds a position in Adorno’s critique of the Hegelian totality of ‘absolute reason’ (world spirit or Geist): the accumulated historical progress of human reason (‘absolute reason’) must be reimagined against its dogmatically deterministic and positive stance. Adorno’s totality is distinct from Hegel’s by emphasizing the particular as opposed to the universal to make it negative. The nonidentical particulars must exist and constitute the universal in order to create it (e.g., without particular individuals producing actions, there is no bigger web of social relations, of an economy, of government, etc.—the entire point of a totality that can be thought of as universal is that it becomes qualitatively and functionally different than a mere sum of its parts); just as there is no subject without object there is no universal (totality) without particulars.[61] Here, I draw on Smith to secure a dynamically changing nature of the constellation of norms (in society) that reflect practical reason. The Smithian conception of moral conscience is negatively dialectical because it explains the totality (universal reason as norms) as the conjunction of constant executions of moral judgment by way of subjects looking into their Impartial Spectator. These moral judgments are ‘situation-relative’, as stated before, and thus, are always different (even if it is slight) depending on the spectator, the agent, or the scenario. This ultimately allows for a slippage of how norms are constituted and how they should be followed, which means the entire social totality will transform according to this constantly changing process. This would unequivocally affirm Adorno’s aim of an open totality—one that is open to constant change and unexpected contradictions. However, the universal is not what Adorno’s (Marxist) theory struggles with, as most Marxist totalities have the advantage of the ‘last instance’[62] of the dialectic being economic, i.e., all social phenomena can be traced to some form of economic oppression or class antagonism through the totalizing view of society being the enormous circulation and interaction of commodities, of production, of consumption, of labor, of capital, etc. Thus, the more significant position of the particular must be tackled after showing Smith’s relevance to the universal in Adorno.

Psychology

If the universal in Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology is the constellation of norms constituting the social totality, then the particulars are the consciousnesses of individual subjectivities making moral judgments. This is shown by the dialectical relationship between the amoral and moral spheres revealing itself in that humans never strictly seek pleasure and avoid pain or the Humean passions that reflect them. As seen prior in the reconstruction of Carrasco’s argument, the distinction between the amoral and moral spheres is most concisely captured in the phrase ‘I really understand where you are coming from, but I cannot justify your action.’ Consciously or not, humans have been able to separate the amoral (psychological) and moral spheres in how they perceive and judge others. This dialectical clash that I posit occurs between these spheres that develop alongside each other when they collide, changing each other at times and being confused for each other at other times. It is simpler to see the amoral changing the moral as, after all, the moral must emerge from the psychological experiences of approbation and propriety that Carrasco has shown generate the Impartial Spectator. Then, how does the moral affect the amoral?

The moral affects the amoral precisely in changing what a subject’s psychological instincts are, which is seen in the confusion of the two spheres or the trouble in distinguishing them. An example of a nefarious act that intrudes the moral sphere is lying; I use this common example because it is an inherently human action that does not have the innately unpleasurable reaction of, say, tragedy (this would be the amoral identity-sympathy of someone suffering, and the spectator imagining that position of suffering). Lying is unpleasurable because it violates moral principles or norms that have been built by judgments of the Impartial Spectator, not because lying carries an immediately harmful essence to the receiving party. It is usually the revealing of lying—of finding out an intentional deception or concealment of truth—that harms an individual, although the action of the lie itself is the one deemed immoral. This implies an extant potentiality in actions that are up for moral evaluation, that they (lying and other purely morally impermissible acts) have the potential to harm. For lying, one primary potential harm is the betrayal of reality the liar tells a subject and thus, it manipulates the subject’s autonomy (usually for the liar’s gain) as the false reality contradicts the truth-values of reality that a subject must base their thoughts, actions, and judgments on. Thus, the objective feature that differentiates a moral thought is its mediation,[63] that the effect of a moral action is potent, must be unleashed, and thus requires a mediator of the Impartial spectator to tell the subject how to feel about it. However, the interesting phenomenon is that these mediated moral judgments can override the immediate psychological thoughts. For example, even if someone knew lying would leave them with a better psychological outcome in a situation (say, a white lie to delay a family tragedy that the receiver cannot afford to be burdened with in the moment), they may still desire honesty because of their moral principles (their Impartial Spectator). Additionally, the moral conscience becomes the distinguishing feature of humans in Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology[64]; this is because the Humean naturalist base impressions of pleasure and pain are shared with animals, but now the completely separate sphere of moral conscience in the human mind can override it. Not only that, but the moral conscience is ironically a product of a particular way of reasoning about pleasure, pain, and the socio-psychological phenomena of propriety and approbation that humans have developed. Thus, in an Adornian phraseology, the moral conscience takes revenge on the psychological conscience in modern society.

MORAL REALISM IN PRAXIS

Modern society[65] tumbles toward a reality dictated by social, moral norms that are less and less differentiated from psychological instincts. It seems as though society is structuring itself so that moral norms replace psychological instincts with a constant overriding of the latter by the former. The moral overriding the psychological can be seen by simply looking at a modern news site’s categorization of “moral issues.” Here, one sees the myriad of popular political issues from abortion rights to same-sex marriage to voting issues.[66] The moral is the political in the modern bourgeois society precisely because that is what one can control and change, as opposed to the psychological (like tragedy always being perceived as a stroke of bad luck and thus, universally ‘sympathizable’). The ‘situation-relative’ nature of moral judgment comes into play again as these moral-political topics show a dissonance in people’s moral principles and thus, a dissonance of Impartial Spectators. That is why these issues are debated on the main stage of political theatre, and people will get angry at those with a different stance or even decide not to associate with someone who has contradicting morals. A society approaching moral realism ushers in the creation of moral instincts. It is important to note that such a society only exists at the expense of others that very much have the psychological as primary: the imperialist world order that destructively ‘outsources’ their labor to the ‘Third World’ has seen the response of revolution against the particularized forms of oppression in aggression, massacre, enslavement, colonization, etc.[67] Morality is superfluous in the context of enforced barbarism. Thus, the privileged ‘First World’ sees the creation of moral instincts only by the dialectical influence of the moral sphere on the psychological—the constant practice of morality (the virtue of “self-command”) through ‘education,’ as Smith would say.[68],[69] Thus, moral instincts are those of instinctual disgust from a socially conditioned education of one’s moral conscience, e.g., instinctually morally disapproving someone who is against abortion or is an infidel, etc. Of course, positive moral instincts apply similarly but with approval and positive affect. Finally, to connect this particularity to the universal, we shall view the growing dominance of morality in society as an inevitable yet contradictory phenomenon in human history.

Morality is the epiphenomenon of the accumulation of the historical progress of practical reason. Even then, morality as an epiphenomenon is ardently impactful on society because norms can change judgments themselves. Here is a final dialectic between morality (a reflection of accumulated judgments as a general standard) and the individual moral judgments and acts themselves: once morality has accumulated to a certain point, the norms that are relatively concretized in a society influence individual acts, while simultaneously acts are still progressively changing the norms. For the latter to occur, the task has become something different than just letting norms emerge from actions because there will always be a contingent amount of already-existing norms—norm change occurs when a collective sympathizes enough with each other against a current norm to change it.[70] This is precisely why Carrasco’s contributions of a ‘situation-relative’ and Impartial Spectator being made by real others are so important; it thwarts the ahistorical interpretations of the Impartial Spectator being some mythical third party without a known origin. The historical character of the always ‘situation-relative’ lens of Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology fits into Adorno’s historical materialism.

They (the norms of justice and property) are the result of a historical process that is rooted in our natural sentiments and can be rationally explicated, but which cannot be directly justified by reason or founded in nature. The Smithian approach must rely on the contingencies of history to supply the content to the norms that can be justified in a purely formal sense. That is, while we can see through reason why a property norm, say, would be valuable, and how we could be motivated by such a norm once it exists, we cannot generally reason our way into such norms. And, as we suggested in the previous section, because a shared capacity for “mutual sympathy” can recommend strikingly different behavior in different times and places, Smith’s theory has a natural mechanism for explaining why certain types of norms seem to be universal despite having content that differs so much.[71]

The fact that we cannot ‘reason our way into such norms’ affirms the immense heteronomy of how morality functions in the social totality. As Adorno says, “Today, morality has been restored to the heteronomy it loathes, and its tendency is to void itself. Without recourse to the material, no ought could issue from reason; yet once compelled to acknowledge its material in the abstract, as a condition of its own possibility, reason must not cut off its reflection on the specific material. Precisely this would make it heteronomous.”[72] The ‘loathed heteronomy’ means morality’s original ideal of ‘self-command’—of control as opposed to heteronomy—hinting at precisely what I called the revenge of the moral conscience on the psychological. Morality has betrayed its very ideal by becoming the accumulation of its particulars into a dominant ideology of the social totality. The definition of ideology I am using is simply the Marxist one: the dominant set of beliefs or values that make citizens reproduce the relations of production as they are (i.e., reproducing capitalism, the status quo, and society as they are currently).[73] In other words, morality should be seen as an integral component of what continues to make people believe in the project of humanity, of ‘progressing’ society through our Smithian ‘education’ of ‘self-command.’ In terms of praxis (how to change the world), people revolt against their oppressive conditions when it gets bad enough economically (Marxist) since they no longer believe in society as it is—“that things should be different.”[74] This resistance is precisely paralleled on the moral plane when norms need to be changed—when the current norm no longer satisfies the current socio-cultural conditions of how people make moral judgments of a time and place. From this point forward, morality as the peak representation of human consciousness can be viewed as always dialectically contingent and connected to the social totality—between the particulars of spectator judgements on agents and universal social norms.

Therefore, Smith’s theory of morality completes Adorno’s theory of subjective consciousness by bridging the universal and the particular of the social totality. The novel Smithian Dialectical Materialist Psychology provides a way to analyze the particular consciousness of individuals through the amoral and moral spheres, which combine as reflections but also as determinants of the social totality. Thus, the ultimate point of this lens is to be able to analyze moral judgments or actions in relation to the social totality—that they are always-already influenced by the conditions of the economy, societal norms, government, culture, and epoch, and morality also reciprocally influences these conditions (the totality). My analysis ends here at what I believe critically completes Adorno’s account of subjectivity that is missing from a project that emphasizes the preponderance of the object and the particular. However, if a normative claim is to be made through how a Smithian Dialectical Materialist morality should be followed, it naturally must be based on Adorno’s culminating dictum after discussing a most prominent moral theorist Kant: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”[75] Thus, any ethics derived from such a Smithian-Adornian morality that begins with the particular agent must always have real necessity[76], i.e., actions that are necessarily correlated to the social totality to continue resistance and emancipation against all current oppressions.

[1] Maria Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” ed. Fonna Forman-Barzilai, The Adam Smith Review, Routledge 6 (2011): 9.

[2] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 9.

[3] Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Reprint edition (New York: Continuum, 1987), 3.

[4] This can almost be directly corelated to his intellectual partner Max Horkheimer’s famous essay “The End of Reason” (1941) but also their combined effort in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

[5] Karl Marx, Theses on Feuerbach (Moscow, Soviet Union: Progress Publishers, 1969), https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

[6] Frieder Otto Wolf, “Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ Lecture and Lecture Notes” (Lecture, “German Philosophy from Kant to Habermas” FUBiS Summer 2023, PPT No. 6, Freie Universität berlin, July 28, 2023). Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, Second Edition (W. W. Norton & Company, 1978). Communism as resolution is also tackled by Marx, Engels, and other Marxists as the ‘negation of negation.’

[7] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 6.

[8] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 14.

[9] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.

[10] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183-186. The title of the aphorism is “The Object’s Preponderance.”

[11] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 149.

[12] Georg Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” in History and Class Consciousness, Foundations 19 (Paris: Foreign Languages Press, 2021), https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C19-History-and-Class-Consciousness-2nd-Printing.pdf. This chapter as essay was originally written in January 1921. “Marx’s Dictum” is cited as “The Poverty of Philosophy, p. 123” in the text. Lukács is an extremely suitable citation here as not only a foremost Marxist theorist of the early 20th-century but of his contradictory position as the primary influence to the entire Frankfurt School (of Adorno) and the court philosopher of the Soviet Union that Adorno criticized immensely.

[13] Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” 19.

[14] Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” 9-35.

[15] Jose-Maria Sison, On the Philosophy of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, Sison Reader Series, Book 2 (The Netherlands: International Network for Philippine Studies (INPS), 2021), 92.

[16] Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” 21.

[17] “Elitist pride would be the last thing to befit the philosophical experience. He who has it must admit to himself how much, according to his possibilities in existence, his experience has been contaminated by existence, and ultimately by the class relationship.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 42.

[18] Lukács, “What Is Orthodox Marxism?,” 31.

[19] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 183.

[20] Étienne Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, trans. Chris Turner (London ; New York: Verso, 2007), 23. The rest of the quote reads, “and this will remain the case for a very long time, until Engels undertakes to reunite Marxism with the natural sciences of the second half of the nineteenth-century.”

[21] Balibar, The Philosophy of Marx, 25.

[22] It is worthy to note that Freudo-Marxism and Althusser’s use of Lacanian psychoanalysis can be seen as two major attempts at a Marxist conception of psychology. However, the former was not really the case as it used psychoanalysis as a means towards society’s drives (rather than vice versa), and the latter was short-lived as Althusser only had the time in his career to make his novel discoveries in Ideology and Reproduction, really only leaving notes towards a possible union between Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

[23] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 193.

[24] Marx and Engels state in the German Ideology, “In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth (idealism), here we ascend from earth to heaven… We set out from real, active men, on the basis of their real life process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process.” Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 154. My parentheses. -L.D.

[25] Although ‘humanist’ Marxism exists, the predominant Marxist outlook has become ‘anti-humanist’ as morality and ethics are seen as micropolitical, liberal-bourgeois distractions of the masses so that they do not revolt against an inherently exploitative system of capitalism. “Ethics does not need to be named as such to inhere in thought. Or rather, as soon as it is named as such and proposes to represent the philosophical ‘mediation’ between the standpoints of knowledge and the world and transformation of the world, it inevitably becomes an enterprise of conciliation and reconciliation…what is required to give ethics its due, in knowledge and politics alike, is instead to dwell in contradiction: not in immobile, passive fashion, but in the form of a constant, uneasy endeavor to find their shared points of application and to effect the convergence therein of substantial intellectual and social forces.” Balibar, “Introduction to the New Edition: From Althusserian Marxism to the Philosophies of Marx? Twenty Years After.” Also, see Althusser’s famous chapter “Marxism is not a Historicism” from Reading Capital (1965) to see the origin of this argument.

[26] John McHugh, “Working Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “The German Ideology: Part I,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd Revised & enlarged edition (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978)..

[27] Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments: To Which Is Added, a Dissertation on the Origin of Languages (G. Bell & Sons, 1892), 4.

[28] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1.

[29] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 2.

[30] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3.

[31] Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 7-8.

[32] McHugh, “Working Out the Details of Hume and Smith on Sympathy,” 684-5.

[33] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 10.

[34] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 11.

[35] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 13

[36] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 14.

[37] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 14.

[38] This is just Carrasco’s way of elaborating ‘identification-sympathy,’ that when one places themselves in another’s situation, they are superimposing their “egocentric map” on another one. Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 12.

[39] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 15.

[40] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 15.

[41] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 15.

[42] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 16.

[43] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 16.

[44] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 17.

[45] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 17.

[46] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 18.

[47] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 18.

[48] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 18.

[49] David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Jonathan Bennett (Jonathan Bennett, 2017), 7.

[50] Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, 7. My italics: -L.D.

[51] David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects (John Noon, 1739), 275-77.

[52] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 277.

[53] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 288.

[54] “It is by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic. The object, the positive expression of nonidentity, is a terminological mask. Once the object becomes an object of cognition, its physical side is spiritualized from the outset by translation into epistemology, by a reduction of the sort which in the end, in general, was methodologically prescribed by the phenomenology of Husserl.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 192.

[55] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 17.

[56] “It (pain) reduces them to the body, to part of the body. Pain levels and equalizes everything, man and man, man and animal. It absorbs the entire life of the being whom it racks, reducing him to a husk of pain. Mutilation of the ego… thus again repeats itself in each case of torture.” Max Horkheimer, “The End of Reason,” in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, vol. IX (New York City: The Institute of Social Research, 1941), 386.

[57] Carrasco, “From Psychology to Moral Normativity,” 22. My bolding -L.D.

[58] Keith Hankins and John Thrasher, “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 105, no. 3 (2022): 645, https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12833.

[59] Hankins and Thrasher, “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms,” 646.

[60] Hankins and Thrasher, “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms,” 646.

[61] “A true preponderance of the particular would not be attainable except by changing the universal. Installing it as purely and simply extant is a complementary ideology. It hides how much of the particular has come to be a function of the universal—something which in its logical form it has always been.” Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 313.

[62] This phrase has been extremely popularized by Engels and taken on by many Marxists after him. This essay gives a quick summary at the beginning: Louis Althusser, “Appendix to Contradiction and Overdetermination,” in For Marx (Penguin Press, 1962), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1962/appendix.htm.

[63] As opposed to the immediacy of amoral, psychological thoughts which are really reactions, instincts, or tendencies (this last one is used to include Smtih’s psychological sympathies).

[64] This is posited in a similar fashion as when consciousness, reason (Descartes), language (Wittgenstein), etc. have been anointed as the distinguishing feature of humans from animals or nature by other philosophers.

[65] Here, I use ‘modern society’ in precisely the way Adorno does throughout Negative Dialectics, i.e., the post-world-war context of humanity making sense of our social relations after the worst moments of human history (Auschwitz for Adorno). This context is of an imperialist world order soon to be dominated by the post-industrial-revolution USA, marked by the illusion of ‘peace’ that guises the civil wars and exploitation throughout the ‘underdeveloped’ nations the Western masses are quelled into not caring about; the antagonisms between the ‘Third World’ and the Western hegemons only become more fortified and acute.

[66] Gallup Inc, “Moral Issues | Gallup Topic,” July 7, 2023, https://news.gallup.com/topic/moral-issues.aspx.

[67] This is best demonstrated by the psychological study of violence and the psyche of a colonized people (Algiers in this instance) by Frantz Fanon in The Wretched of the Earth.

[68] Kevin Zollman, “Week 7 Class on Comparing the Moral Theoris of Smith and Hume” (Lecture, Seminar on History in Philosophy: Smitha and Hume, Carnegie Mellon University, Baker Hall, October 23, 2023).

[69] It is worth noting that the universal pleasure of mutual sympathy—since it does not necessarily imply morality—does not seem to be as given as the original or even the secondary Humean impressions. This makes sense, though, since even the secondary impressions or passions are one-directional from the subject to an object (and, of course, the cause), while mutual sympathy implies the intersubjectivity Carrasco presents. Thus, it should be emphasized that the pleasure of mutual sympathy is universal in so far as it is a natural tendency of humans during their psychological and moral developments (of approbation and propriety, and so on).

[70] Zollman, “Week 7 Class on Comparing the Moral Theories of Smith and Hume.” Hankins and Thrasher, “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms.”

[71] Hankins and Thrasher, “Smithian Sympathy and the Emergence of Norms,” 652. My italics and parenthetical. -L.D.

[72] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 243.

[73] Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm.

[74] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 203.

[75] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 365.

[76] ‘Real necessity’ is a phrase from critical theory that differentiates itself from traditional theory (enlightenment and positivist science) that is seen as unfortunately lapsing into a fetishistic affirmation of its own principles called ‘logical necessity.’ Critical theory aims to emancipate science by having a ‘real necessity’ of theorizing with a purpose for changing real conditions, real people, etc. Max Horkheimer, “Traditional and Critical Theory,” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, ed. David Ingram and Julia-Simon Ingram, 1st edition (New York: Paragon House, 1998).

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