From the chapter on 'Freedom' in Adorno's Negative Dialectics, Adorno's critique of affirmative freedom is used to illustrate his claim to freedom under the dialectic of non-identity. In Adorno's view, freedom in Kant's third dichotomy, which necessarily exists in causality, creates a subservient individual and a compulsory community. The essay argues that Adorno's reflective critique of 'freedom' is in fact a search for the possibility of a correct life after Auschwitz, a critique of the illusory homogenization of bourgeois social phenomena, but also a reflection on the free and autonomous individual. Adorno's critique of Kant's metaphysical vision of freedom is therefore not a mechanical reductionist operation, but has practical implications in the moral philosophy. The dialectic of the non-identity of freedom is the denial of the 'unfreedom in freedom'. But the critique of freedom in capitalist ideology from the logic of the "star cluster" is inevitably negative, so that the subject cannot emerge from a dialectic of unity with history.

Xuan Wang. The Dialectic of the Non-identity of Freedom—Based on Adorno's Critique of Kant's Third Dichotomy. International Journal of Frontiers in Sociology (2023), Vol. 5, Issue 8: 102-109. https://doi.org/10.25236/IJFS.2023.050817.

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