Both free-will affirmations and denials serve commodity society’s rule over subjects

Evidence

If the thesis of free will burdens the dependent individuals with the social injustice they can do nothing about, if it ceaselessly humiliates them with desiderata they cannot fulfil, the thesis of unfreedom, on the other hand, amounts to a metaphysically extended rule of the status quo. This thesis proclaims itself immutable, and if the individual is not prepared to cower anyway, it invites him to cower because that is all he can do … To deny free will outright means to reduce men unreservedly to the normal commodity form of their labour in full-fledged capitalism. Equally wrong is aprioristic determinism, the doctrine of free will which in the middle of the commodity society would abstract from that society. The individual himself forms a moment of the commodity society: the pure spontaneity that is attributed to him is the spontaneity which society expropriates. All that the subject needs to do to be lost is to pose an inescapable alternative: the will is free, or it is unfree. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2556

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Close to the heart of Adorno’s negative dialectics — the refusal to choose between false binary alternatives because each pole serves domination, and the claim that pure spontaneity attributed to the subject is spontaneity society expropriates. Dense enough to sit with.
• DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s dialectical move against binary thinking in the freedom question.
• XREF: connects to: Science’s determinism and philosophy’s free will jointly blame determined subjects — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2554; Scientific fields’ deterministic stance leaves philosophy to defend apologetic free will — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2554

Broader Connections

• Scientific fields’ deterministic stance leaves philosophy to defend apologetic free will #expands (0.82) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2554
• Science’s determinism and philosophy’s free will jointly blame determined subjects #qualifies (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2554