willow: "i know i'm being that guy again but geuss says the same thing in that volume hehe"

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willow @dreary.dev

i know i'm being that guy again but geuss says the same thing in that volume hehe

raymond geuss, "outside ethics" in outside ethics, pg 56
Adorno held that advanced societies in the modern world were closed, total institutions that were radically implicated in evil. In such societies, no action could be, as it were, fully innocent,39 and consequently demands that philosophy be connected with any kind of injunction to perform specific actions are themselves both forms of repression and an incitement to evil. Any attempt on the part of the individual to consider what he or she as an individual ought to do is a completely pointless exercise, and the only possibility remaining to us is to continue to reflect on the infinitely complex and subtle ways in which the falsity of the world as a whole poisons the possibilities of genuinely beneficial individual action and individual happiness. All that is left to us is a doomed attempt to maintain shreds of our subjectivity and spontaneity before they are finally crushed (like everything else), and to cultivate reflection so as to understand as fully as possible the complex structure of the evil in which we are necessarily implicated, no matter how we act. Beyond that we can have only a messianic hope in a total transformation of the society in which we live. This hope, however, would be for something that might come from outside the present and change our world utterly, that is, it is a hope for something that cannot even in principle be brought about by anything we could do.

March 1, 2025 at 3:03 PM