Asceticism and Negative Virtue Epistemology: Nietzsche and Adorno

This article examines an apparent affinity between Nietzsche's and Adorno's epistemological ideas. It explores how and why both authors conceive of cognitive success and failure in normatively charged terms, as having a just or vibrant experience of the object, aspirations that they articulate in terms of a cognitive ethos and not formal definitions of truth or knowledge. Both authors also view success as elusive and failure the norm, at least under modern socio-cultural conditions; they provide similar explanations for these positions, which combine socio-historical analyses and diagnoses of psychological pathology. However, it argues that, from Nietzsche's perspective, Adorno's method of negation, and cognitive ideal of noncoercive synthesis, amounts to another philosophical defense of "the ascetic ideal," which his own "perspectivism" is pitched as a "life affirming" alternative to.