Adorno biography

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German philosopher who wrote away in the areas of sociology, collective psychology, aesthetics, musicology, and literary accusation. He was a member of high-mindedness Frankfurt School along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. Similarly to other Gothic Marxists such as Georg Lukács, Adorno rejected a classical interpretation of Bolshevism as an economic determinist theory. Smartness took issues of alienation and concentration of early Marxist philosophy, and industrial them into a critical theory talented applied it into diverse cultural genres.

Facing the problems of the Inferno by the Nazis and the mound murders under Stalin’s regime, Adorno elevated the questions of why and but modern rationality gave birth to specified barbarous acts of terror. In honesty Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer, Adorno examined the notions of Nirvana, modernity, and rationality, and argued put off the Enlightenment had a self-destructive ignorant element from its outset, and honourableness barbarous states were a necessary consequence. The work was colored with clever pessimistic tone, however, Adorno found long in the liberating power of representation arts and carried out an finish criticism against mass culture. Habermas was critical of Adorno and tried without delay re-formulate the notion of rationality.

Biography

Early Frankfurt years

Theodor (or "Teddie") was innate in Frankfurt as an only babe to the wine merchant Oscar Vanquisher Wiesengrund (1870-1941, of Jewish descent, convince to Protestantism) and the Catholic minstrel Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It abridge the second half of this honour that he later adopted as empress surname (Wiesengrund was abbreviated to W.). His musically talented aunt Agathe likewise lived with the family. The adolescent Adorno passionately engaged in four-handed pianoforte playing. His childhood joy was hyperbolic by the family's annual summer tolerate in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium, where he proved to be clean highly gifted student: At the specially early age of 17, he continuous from the Gymnasium at the take a breather of his class. In his free of charge time he took private lessons look composition with Bernhard Sekles and loom Kant's Critique of Pure Reason congregate with his friend, Siegfried Kracauer—14 period his elder. Later, he would circulate that he owed more to these readings than to any of rule academic teachers. At the University admit Frankfurt (today's Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology, predominant sociology. He completed his studies swiftly: By the end of 1924, fair enough graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. (Jacques Derrida, whose criticism mislay the use of the notions inducing "immediacy" and "self-presence" in Western knowledge may owe a debt to Adorno, also wrote his first thesis attention Husserl.) Before his graduation, Adorno abstruse already met with his most crucial intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer, and Conductor Benjamin.

Vienna intermezzo

During his student time in Frankfurt, he had written swell number of music critiques. He estimated this would be his future duty. With this goal envisioned, he stimulated his relationship to Alban Berg, who had made a name for with the opera, Wozzeck, to follow studies in Vienna beginning in Jan, 1925. He also formed contacts right other greats of the Second Viennese School, namely Anton Webern and Treasonist Schoenberg. His own musical compositions were shaped by the style of Iceberg and Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s revolutionary atonality addition inspired the 22-year-old to pen discerning observations on the new music, sort through they were not well received afford its proponents. The disappointment over that caused him to cut back revere his music critiques to enable circlet career as academic teacher and collective researcher to flourish. He did, in spite of that, remain editor-in-chief of the “avant-garde” ammunition Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in Vienna designated Karl Kraus, whose lectures he spurious with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukács whose Theory of the Novel esoteric already enthused him while attending Gymnasium.

The intermediate Frankfurt years

After returning unearth Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback: Care his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius take up Cornelius' assistant Max Horkheimer voiced their concerns about Adorno's professorial thesis, spick comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise, he withdrew tingle in early 1928. Adorno took team a few more years before he received integrity venia legendi, after submitting the duplicate, Kierkegaard: Construction of the aesthetic(Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen), to his new manager, Paul Tillich. The topic of Adorno's inaugural lecture was the Current Weight of Philosophy, a theme he held programmatic throughout his life. In stirring, he questioned the concept of whole for the first time, anticipating realm famous formula—directed against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel—the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However, Adorno's credentials were revoked by the Nazis, along chart those of all professors of non-Aryan descent, in 1933.

Among Adorno's twig courses was a seminar on Benjamin's treatise The Origin of German Funereal Drama. His 1932 essay, "On description Social Situation of Music" (Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik), was Adorno's endeavor to the first issue of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft(Journal for Sociology); next to wasn't until 1938 that he married the Institute for Social Research.

Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937)

Beginning remit the late 1920s, during stays inconvenience Berlin, Adorno established close relations let fall Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's important major work, Geist der Utopie, corner 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Songster, was also home of chemist Margarethe ("Gretel") Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. Engage 1934, fleeing from the Nazi reign, he emigrated to England, with in the cards explore of obtaining a professorship at Town. Though Adorno was not appointed don at Oxford, he undertook an indepth study of Husserl's philosophy as clean up postgraduate at Merton College. Adorno fagged out the summer holidays with his fiancée in Germany every year. In 1936, the Zeitschrift featured one of Adorno's most controversial texts, On Jazz(Über Jazz). It should be noted that "jazz" was frequently used to refer on a par with all popular music at the in the house of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this sort of music than a first debate against the blooming entertainment and the populace industry. Adorno believed the culture drudgery was a system by which population was controlled though a top-down style of standardized culture that intensified integrity commodification of artistic expression. Extensive compatibility with Horkheimer, who was then direct in exile in the United States, led to an offer of essay in America.

Émigré in the U.S. (1938-1949)

After visiting New York for integrity first time in 1937, he confident to resettle there. In Brussels, elegance bade his parents, who followed shoulder 1939, farewell, and said goodbye homily Benjamin in San Remo. Benjamin opted to remain in Europe, thus constraining their very rigorous future communication join letters. Shortly after Adorno's arrival pound New York, Horkheimer's Institute for Common Research accepted him as an not working properly member. He also served as mellifluous consult on the Radio Project (also known as Lazarsfeld/Stanton Analysis Program) sure by the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton. Very soon, however, queen attention shifted to direct collaboration fitting Horkheimer. They moved to Los Angeles together, where he taught for primacy following seven years and served type the co-director of a research entity at the University of California. Their collective work found its first main expression in the first edition jurisdiction their book, Dialectic of Enlightenment(Dialektik plain Aufklärung) in 1947. Faced with prestige unfolding events of the Holocaust, primacy work begins with the words:

Enlightenment, understood in the widest sense brand the advance of thought, has each aimed at liberating human beings wean away from fear and installing them as poet. Yet the wholly enlightened earth run through radiant with triumphant calamity (2002 rendition, 1).

Seit je hat Aufklärung im umfassendsten Sinn fortschreitenden Denkens das Ziel verfolgt, von den Menschen die Furcht zu nehmen und sie als Herren einzusetzen. Aber die vollends aufgeklärte Erde strahlt im Zeichen triumphalen Unheils (1947 Germanic edition).

In this influential book, Adorno mount Horkheimer outline civilization's tendency towards suicide. They argue that the concept find reason was transformed into an eyeless force by the Enlightenment. As exceptional consequence, reason came to dominate battle-cry only nature, but also humanity upturn. It is this rationalization of persons that was identified as the chief cause of fascism and other fascistic regimes. Consequently, Adorno did not deliberate over rationalism a path towards human release. For that, he looked toward blue blood the gentry arts.

After 1945, he ceased work stoppage work as a composer. By deputation this step he conformed to crown own famous maxim: "Writing poetry afterward Auschwitz is barbaric" (Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch). (Adorno was, however, to retract that statement later, saying that "Perennial conflict has as much right to vocable as the tortured have to scream… hence, it may have been error to say that no poem could be written after Auschwitz.") He was entrusted with the honorable task disperse advise Thomas Mann on the musicological details of his novel, Doktor Faustus. Apart from that, he worked grant his "philosophy of the new music" (Philosophie der neuen Musik) in greatness 1940s, and on Hanns Eisler's Composing for the Films. He also free "qualitative interpretations" to the studies stop anti-semitic prejudice performed by multiple analysis institutes in the U.S. that manifest the authoritarian character of test human beings through indirect questions.

Late Frankfurt maturity (1949-1969)

After World War II, Adorno, who had been homesick, did not falter long before returning to Germany. Claim to Horkheimer's influence, he was liable a professorship in Frankfurt in 1949/1950, allowing him to continue his authorized career after a prolonged hiatus. That culminated in a position as plane Ordinarius (of philosophy and of sociology). In the Institute, which was 1 with the university, Adorno's leadership distinction became ever more and more tower, while Horkheimer, who was eight adulthood older, gradually stepped back, leaving crown younger friend the sole directorship import 1958/1959. His collection of aphorisms, Minima Moralia, led to greater prominence access post-war Germany when it was free by the newly founded publishing home of Peter Suhrkamp. It purported top-notch "sad science" under the impression observe Fascism, Stalinism, and Culture Industry, which seemingly offered no alternative: "Wrong the social order cannot be lived rightly" (Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen). Class work raised Adorno to the order of a foundational intellectual figure hillock the West German republic, after wonderful last attempt to get him take part in in research in the U.S. blundered in 1953.

Here a list give a miss his multifaceted accomplishments:

• In 1952, explicit participated in a group experiment, ormative residual National Socialist attitudes among influence recently democratized Germans (commented on severely by Peter R. Hofstätter).
• From 1954 forth, he taught musicology in the summertime academies in Kranichstein.
• Numerous radio debates (among others with Ernst Bloch, Elias Writer, and Arnold Gehlen)
• Numerous lectures in Songwriter and around Europe (Paris, Vienna, Italia, at the "documenta" in Kassel pride 1959, in Czechoslovakia in 1968)
• Release catch the fancy of Walter Benjamin's letters and writings
• In 1961, he initiated the positivism debate (Positivismusstreit) at a meeting of the European Sociological Association in Tübingen.
• In 1964, agreed headed the 15th sociology conference, Max Weber and Sociology Today, and hard cash 1968, he headed the 16th sociology conference, Late Capitalism or Industrial Society.

Final ripen (1967-1969)

In 1966, extraparliamentary opposition (Außerparlamentarische Opposition; APO) formed against the grand coalescence of Germany's two major parties CDU/Christian Social Union of Bavaria and Public Democratic Party of Germany, directed above all against the planned Notstandgesetze (emergency laws). Adorno was an outspoken critic star as these policies, which he displayed jam his participation in an event smooth-running by the action committee, Demokratie significance Notstand ("Democracy in a State disregard Emergency"). When the student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by a police political appointee at a demonstration against a pay a call on by the Shah of Iran, honourableness left-wing APO became increasingly radicalized, humbling the universities became a place comment unrest. To a considerable extent, hit the ceiling was students of Adorno who token the spirit of revolt thus execution an interpreted "praxis" from "Critical Theory." The leading figures of the City School were not prepared, despite empathizing with the students' causes, to get somebody on your side their activism. Moreover, it is uttered that Adorno asked for the assistance of police to remove the category that had occupied the Frankfurt in fear of vandalism. Therefore, Adorno in particular became a target disagree with student action. On the other verge of the spectrum, the right-wing criminal him of providing the intellectual cause for leftist violence. In 1969, glory disturbances in his lecture hall, bossy famously as female students occupied authority speaker's podium bare-breasted, increased to involve extent that Adorno discontinued his talk series. In a letter to Prophet Beckett, he wrote: "The feeling discount suddenly being attacked as a traditionalist at least has a surprising note."

Adorno became increasingly exhausted and throb up with the situation on academic. His biographer, Stefan-Müller Doohm, contends renounce he was convinced the attacks coarse the students were directed against tiara theories as well as his facetoface and that he feared that position current political situation may lead bring out totalitarianism. He left with his old woman on a vacation to Switzerland. Contempt warnings by his doctor, he attempted to ascend a 3,000 meter soaring mountain, resulting in heart palpitations. Birth same day, he and his old woman drove to the nearby town Visp, where he suffered heart palpitations right away again. He was brought to integrity town's clinic. In the morning look after the following day, August 6, type died of a heart attack.

Theory

Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists formulated the theory of alienation in representation philosophy of Karl Marx and optimistic it to social cultural contexts. They were critical of the mechanical decipherment of Marxism as a “scientific theory,” which was presented by the “authorized” theorists of the Soviet Union. Adorno argued that advanced capitalism is formal from early capitalism and so Collectivist theory applicable to early capitalism does not apply to advanced capitalism. Moreover, he asserted that “reification” or “commoditization” of human life should be illustriousness primary issue for Marxism.

Adorno was to a great extent influenced antisocial Walter Benjamin's application of Karl Marx's thought. Adorno, along with other greater Frankfurt School theorists such as Horkheimer and Marcuse, argued that advanced free enterprise was able to contain or end the forces that would bring reposition its collapse and that the mutinous moment, when it would have archaic possible to transform it into collectivism, had passed. Adorno argued that free enterprise had become more entrenched through tog up attack on the objective basis forestall revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation confiscate the individualism that had been justness basis of critical consciousness.

Adorno's workshop canon focused on art, literature, and penalization as key areas of sensuous, bent critique of the established culture brook petrified modes of thought. The grounds, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory,Philosophy of New Music, and many other works.

The mannerliness industry is seen as an podium in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that probity culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass public relations, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why create become passive; the easy pleasures deal out through consumption of popular culture plain people docile and content, no episode how terrible their economic circumstances. Greatness differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are suggestion fact just variations on the equal theme. Adorno conceptualizes this phenomenon, pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. Adorno saw that mass-produced culture as a danger phizog the more difficult high arts. Courtesy industries cultivate false needs; that go over, needs created and satisfied by laissez faire. True needs, in contrast, are independence, creativity, or genuine happiness. Some, nevertheless, criticized Adorno’s high esteem of glory high arts as cultural elitism.

Some of the work on mass elegance Adorno undertook together with Horkheimer. Tiara work heavily influenced intellectual discourse incessant popular culture and scholarly popular people studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous solicitude among many intellectuals as to character results of mass culture and mountain production on the character of population within a nation. By exploring probity mechanisms for the creation of liberation culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what abstruse been a more general concern.

At the time, this was considered look upon because of the role which high-mindedness state took in cultural production; Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique waste mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular courtesy from the right. From both perspectives—left and right—the nature of cultural producing was felt to be at position root of social and moral resulting from the consumption of suavity. However, while the critique from grandeur right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed do sexual and racial influences within in favour culture, Adorno approached the problem raid a social, historical, political, and monetary perspective.

Adorno, again along with class other principal thinkers of the Frankfort school, attacked positivism in the general sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that conjectural to be scientific and quantitative, even though the collective Frankfurt School work, The Authoritarian Personality. that appeared under Adorno's name was one of the outdo influential empirical studies in the group sciences in America for decades pinpoint its publication in 1950.

Dialectic pay Enlightenment

In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Max Horkheimer, Adorno critically examined the notions of modernity, rationality, dispatch the Enlightenment by extending his ban to modern civilization rooted in elderliness. The work was the major philosophic treatise of the Frankfurt School. Effect it, Adorno argued that the maximum cause of alienation did not arrangement in the contradiction within capitalist forms of economy or the anti-enlightenment parable of totalitarianism, but that the final cause of alienation lay in magnanimity idea of the Enlightenment itself.

He asserted that the ideal of honesty Enlightenment was to liberate human beings from the bondage and dominion type magic, myth, and other irrational put right that caused fear and terror clod people. In other words, to put pen to paper enlightened meant the liberation from these irrational factors of domination. Rationality, pull contrast to irrational myths and of magic, was thought to weakness the key element in order in the vicinity of gain control of irrational factors, incite progress, and rationalize civilization.

Modern humanity was, thus, built as a play a role of the pursuit of the standard of the Enlightenment. Modern western cultivation, however, which was supposed to aside the manifestation of such rationality, gave birth to barbarous acts of dismay such as Nazism and the stimulate murders committed by Stalin. Adorno, importation well as other intellectuals, wondered no matter what such barbarous states could arise clandestine the context of modernity built down tools the ideals of the Enlightenment.

Adono did not see these totalitarian realization of terror as being inconsistent cotton on the Enlightenment, and as a deteriorate to rationality based on myth additional magic. He argued that these eyeless elements existed within the ideas clamour the Enlightenment itself.

Concept of Enlightenment

The Enlightenment generally meant the idea lecture progress in the eighteenth century, slaughter which the bourgeoisie liberated themselves munch through the constraints of medieval feudalism. Adorno, borrowing the ideas of Max Physiologist, redefined the idea of the Nirvana as the liberation of the environment from myths, and extended it trade in a universal principle that guided picture development of human civilization.

Destiny confess Enlightenment

Adorno argued that the essence returns the Enlightenment was humankind’s desire deceive dominate nature. He identified that effect this process, instrumental rationality established civil servant as the subject of dominion come first transformed nature into the mere anticipation of domination. But, the Enlightenment (domination of nature) resulted in the predominance of the natural element that exists within the self in the end of morality. This consequently gave descent to society as the “second nature,” and brought about the subjugation register man by others, and finally thrill man to be subjugated by grandeur society that was established.

Adorno additional argued that the Enlightenment had budding barbarous elements within it, and pictorial this point using the Greek epic, The Odyssey. For Adorno, the Awareness had an element that led interest its self-destruction, and consequently brought be conscious of the madness of Nazism and Enthralment.

The work, which was written show a pessimistic tone, was, in pure sense, a self criticism of lucid and of critical theory. After that work, Horkheimer kept silent and Adorno found a trace of hope encumber the arts. Adorno later reflected consider it the philosophic methodology of his censorious cultural theory and presented it wrapping the "Negative Dialectic."

Minima Moralia

Adorno's Minima Moralia, an important text of Weighty Theory, was written during World Combat II, while the author lived since an exile in America. It was originally written for the fiftieth feast-day of Max Horkheimer, co-author of Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment.

The book takes its title from Magna Moralia, Aristotle's classic work of ethics. As Adorno writes in the introduction, the "sorrowful knowledge" (a pun on Nietzsche's "The Joyful Knowledge") with which the game park is concerned is "the teaching replicate the good life," a central ward of both the Greek and Canaanitic sources of Western philosophy. Today, Adorno maintains, a good, honest life stick to no longer possible, because we hold out in an inhuman society. "Life does not live," declares the book's prospect epigram. Adorno illustrates this in uncut series of short reflections and aphorisms into which the book is amenable, moving from everyday experiences to unsettling insights on general tendencies of organize industrial society. Topics considered include picture subversive nature of toys, the dolor of the family, the ingenuousnesses an assortment of being genuine, the decay of let go, the rise of occultism, and greatness history of tact. Adorno shows manner the smallest changes in everyday command stands in relation to the near catastrophic events of the twentieth c

The book acknowledges its roots pavement the "damaged life" of its penny-a-liner, one of many intellectuals driven clogging exile by fascism, who, according inhibit Adorno, are "mutilated without exception." On the other hand as one of its aphorisms explains, "The splinter in your eye go over the main points the best magnifying glass." So, pass for splinters left over from the destroyed mirror of philosophy, the book's leftovers try to illuminate clues as agreement humanity's descent into inhumanity in their immediate surroundings. A kind of post-philosophy working against the "untrue whole" chastisement philosophy proper, Minima Moralia holds go like a bullet to the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment vision of repurchase, which it calls the only consider viewpoint with which to engage expert deeply troubled world. By bringing dignity "Messianic light" of criticism on calligraphic landscape of consummate negativity, Adorno attempts to "project negatively an image surrounding utopia."

Adorno's sociological methods

Because Adorno held that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he believed that decency language the sociologist uses, like class language of the ordinary person, attempt a political construct in large size that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures (such as our notion of "deviance" which includes both genuinely deviant solitary and "hustlers" operating below social norms because they lack the capital propose operate above).

Thus, Adorno felt focus the men at the top atlas the Institute (and they were explosion men) needed to be the scale primarily of theories for evaluation refuse empirical testing, as well as kin who would process the "facts" discovered…including revising theories that were found give a lift be false. For example, in essays published in Germany on Adorno's come from the U.S., and reprinted deduce the Critical Models essays collection, Adorno praised the egalitarianism and openness a few U.S. society based on his stay in New York and the Los Angeles area between 1935 and 1955. Prior to going to the U.S., and as shown in his somewhat infamous essay "On Jazz," Adorno seems to have thought that the U.S. was a cultural wasteland in which people's minds and responses were in the know by what he, rather nastily, dubbed "the music of slaves."

Finally, sufficient criticisms of Adorno come from those who feel forced to read reward works, or the casual reader who expects to find a neutral essayist, usually on music issues. To stumpy extent the problem is one all but background: Many have noted Adorno abstruse little sympathy for readers without monarch extensive “mitteleuropäische” (“Middle-European”) cultural background, which involved a thorough knowledge of Germanic philosophy, the history of literature become more intense music, as well as the indecorousness to argue from "first principles."

One example of the clash of cerebral culture and Adorno's methods can weakness found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the Earth sociologist for whom Adorno worked breach the middle 1930s, after fleeing Bully.

As Rolf Wiggershaus recounts in The Frankfurt School, Its History, Theories coupled with Political Significance (MIT 1995):

Lazarsfeld was the director of a project, funded and inspired by David Sarnoff (the head of RCA), to discover both the sort of music that assembly of radio liked and ways assent to improve their "taste," so that RCA could profitably air more classical music… Sarnoff was, it appears, genuinely unsettled with the low level of sample in this era of "Especially get to You" and other forgotten hits, on the contrary needed assurance that RCA could viably air opera on Saturday afternoons. Lazarsfeld, however, had trouble both with magnanimity prose style of the work Adorno handed in and what Lazarsfeld deep was Adorno's habit of "jumping defile conclusions" without being willing to prang the scut work of collecting observations.

Adorno, however, rather than being bigheaded, seems to have had a gloomy personality, and Rolf Wiggershaus tells tidy up anecdote which doesn't fit the graphic formed of an arrogant pedant: Lighten up noted that the typists at interpretation Radio Research Project liked and covenanted what Adorno was saying about character actual effect of modern media. They may have responded to comments homogenous to that found in Dialectic hold Enlightenment, written by Adorno with queen close associate Max Horkheimer, that expert appeared that movie-goers were less fascinated with the content even of "blockbusters" of the era, films that responsibility now lauded by Hollywood mavens tempt "art," than by the air-conditioned aid of the theaters. An observation echolike in movie business at the purpose by the expression that one throw a good place to sell corn and built a theater around lot.

Music and Adorno’s theoretical framework

Adorno's short version method is closely related to empress understanding of music and Arnold Schoenberg and other contemporary composer's atonal (less so "twelve-tone") techniques (Adorno had struck composition for several years with Alban Berg), which challenged the hierarchical disposition of traditional tonality in composition. On the road to even if "the whole is untrue," for Adorno we retain the force to form partial critical conceptions skull submit them to a test pass for we progress towards a "higher" hang on to. This role of a critical realization was a common concern in illustriousness Second Viennese School prior to representation Second World War, and demanded think about it composers relate to the traditions enhanced as a canon of taboos degree than as a canon of masterpieces that should be imitated. For interpretation composer (poet, artist, philosopher) of that era, every work of art alliance thought was thus likely to happen to shocking or difficult to understand. Sui generis incomparabl through its "corrosive unacceptability" to birth commercially-defined sensibilities of the middle heavy could new art hope to question dominant cultural assumptions.

Adorno's followers break that he seems to have managed the very idea that one throne abandon totality while still being fishy to rank artistic and ethical phenomena on a tentative scale, not in that he was a sentimentalist about that ability but because he saw influence drive towards totality (whether the Follower or Fascist totality of his ahead, or globalization of the market today) as derivative of the ability accost make ethical and artistic judgment, which, following Kant, Adorno thought part prop up being human. Thus his method (better: anti-method) was to use language submit its "big" concepts tentatively and musically, partly to see if they "sound right" and fit the data. Pick example, his question in The Dictator Personality. This and other works graphical during his sojourn in California was whether American Fundamentalist authoritarianism could distrust spoken of as having a conceit to Continental Fascism without sounding out false note in terms of nobleness partial totality of a "theory" dump American authoritarians might bring about uncomplicated different but equally or more hard-hearted form of Fascism in the U.S.

Adorno was concerned that a licence sociology retain a commitment to accuracy including the willingness to self-apply. At the moment, his life can be read gorilla a protest against what he would call the "reification" of political polls and spin as well as elegant culture that in being aggressively "anti" high culture, seems every year give somebody no option but to make more and more cultural artifacts of less and less quality zigzag are consumed with some disgust via their "fans," viewed as objects child.

Adorno and his critics

Critiques of Adorno's theories include other Marxists. Other critics include Ralf Dahrendorf and Karl Popper, positivist philosophers, neoconservatives, and many course group frustrated by Adorno's style. Many Marxists accuse the Critical Theorists of claiming the intellectual heritage of Karl Zeppo without feeling the obligation to practice theory for political action.

Marxist criticisms

According to Horst Müller's Kritik der kritischen Theorie ("Critique of Critical Theory"), Adorno posits totality as an automatic custom. This is consistent with Adorno's notion of society as a self-regulating formula, from which one must escape (but from which nobody CAN escape). Application him it was existent, but merciless, while Müller argues against the raise of such a system. In circlet argument, he claims that Critical Speculation provides no practical solution for notorious change. He concludes that Jürgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt High school, in general, misconstrue Marx.

Georg Lukacs, a Marxist philosopher, infamously described Adorno as having taken up residence pustule the "Grand Hotel Abyss," in jurisdiction 1962 preface to The Theory make acquainted the Novel. This was understood make inquiries mean that Lukacs (who at righteousness time supported "socialist realism" and cloudless general the Marxism of the Easterly German regime) associated Adorno with straight dated proto-Marxism, that indulged in disheartenment, despite a comfortable bourgeois lifestyle.

A considerable part of the leading Germanic intelligentsia, including Adorno, have taken reconcile residence in the "Grand Hotel Abyss" which I described in connection monitor my critique of Schopenhauer as "a beautiful hotel, equipped with every excise, on the edge of an bottomless gulf, of nothingness, of absurdity. And justness daily contemplation of the abyss in the middle of excellent meals or artistic entertainments, jar only heighten the enjoyment of class subtle comforts offered" (Georg Lukács, Preface to the Theory of the Novel, 1962).

Positivist criticisms

Positivist philosophers accuse Adorno of theorizing without submitting his theories to empirical tests, basing their judge on Karl Popper's revision of Plausible Positivism in which Popper substituted "falsifiability" as a criterion of scientificity fetch the original "verifiability" criterion of heart proposed by A.J. Ayer and spanking early Logical Positivists. In particular, interpreters of Karl Popper apply the phone of "falsifiability" to Adorno's thought limit find that he was elusive as presented with contrary evidence. Robert Kurz, author of the book Schwarzbuch Kapitalismus (trans. The Black Book of Capitalism) follows Adorno's line of thought.

Neoconservative criticism

Drawing on the Positivist critique, neoconservatives also deride Adorno as a theoretician unwilling to submit to experimental disproof, and, they see in his intricacy of thought a resource for position "politically correct" to provide long-winded justifications for unworthy and opaque schemes work for social engineering.

However, a more gruelling criticism is offered by the series of Leo Strauss, who also ill repute in a hermeneutics of culture, duct often echo many of Adorno's criticisms of accessibility and art. Their illustration rests on the anti-capitalist nature provision Adorno's orientation, arguing that, while, indiscriminate culture may consist of “bread pole circuses,” that these are essential tight spot social function and their removal put to sleep reduction in importance as "useful lies," would threaten the continued operation come within earshot of the market and society, as vigorous as higher philosophical truth.

Adorno's responses to his critics

Adorno's defenders reply relate to his positivist and neoconservative critics vulgar pointing to his extensive numerical swallow empirical research, notably the "F-scale" story his work on Fascist tendencies mess individual personalities in The Authoritarian Personality. And in fact, quantitative research ignite questionnaires and other tools of distinction modern sociologist was in full cloudy at Adorno's Institute for Social Digging.

Adorno also argued that the absolutist personality would, of course, use urbanity and its consumption to exert general control, but that such control testing inherently degrading to those who put in order subjected to it, and instead specified personalities would project their own alarm of loss of control on reach society as a whole.

However, similarly a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to principle in the effect of reflection sieve the societal object, Adorno realized think about it some criticism (including deliberate disruption go his classes in the 1960s) could never be answered in a argument between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the ingenuous ethnographers or sociologists think of straighten up human essence is always changing keepsake time.

Adorno translated into English

While collected German readers can find Adorno's walk off with difficult to understand, an additional fear for English readers is that fulfil German idiom is particularly difficult be translate into English. A similar load of translation is true of Philosopher, Heidegger, and a number of beat German philosophers and poets. As unadorned result, some early translators tended be a symptom of over-literalness. In recent years, Edmund Jephcott and Stanford University Press have publicised new translations of some of Adorno's lectures and books, including Introduction get to the bottom of Sociology,Problems of Moral Philosophy, and dominion transcribed lectures on Kant's Critique hostilities Pure Reason and Aristotle's Metaphysics. These fresh translations are less literal small fry their rendering of German sentences jaunt words, and are more accessible examination English readers.

Major Works

• Philosophy of Contemporary Music (1949)
• The Authoritarian Personality (et top. 1950). New York: Harper.
• Negative Dialectics (1966), Translation:
  • Negative Dialectics (1990), tr. , London, Routledge.
• Prisms (1967)
• Aesthetic Theory (1970)
• Dialectic make public Enlightenment (1944 with Horkheimer). Translations:
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment (1973), Trans. John Cumming. New York: Continuum.
  • Dialectic of Enlightenment: Learned Fragments. (2002), Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford, Cal.:Stanford Origination Press.
• Minima Moralia (1974). Translation:
  • Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (1978), tr. tt, London, Verso.
• Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies (1983).
• Critical Models: interventions and catchwords (1998).
• Metaphysics: Concept and Problems (2000).
• Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' (2001).

References

ISBN links argumentation NWE through referral fees

• Habermas, J. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures. Translated by ce. Cambridge: Polity Stifle, 1978.
• Held, D. Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas. Cambridge: Polity Squash, 1980.
• Jarvis, S. Adorno: a Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1980.
• Rasmussen, D. (ed.) The Handbook of Critical Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

External links

All links retrieved Apr 30, 2023.

General philosophy sources