Theodor W. Adorno | |
|---|---|
 Adorno in Heidelberg in April 1964 | |
| Born | Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund 11 September 1903 |
| Died | 6 August 1969 (aged 65) |
| Alma mater | Goethe University Frankfurt |
| Spouse | |
| Era | 20th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | |
| Academic advisors | Hans Cornelius Gilbert Ryle |
| Doctoral students | Hans-Jürgen Krahl[1] Alfred Schmidt |
| Other notable students | Jürgen Habermas Peter Gorsen |
Main interests | |
Notable ideas |
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| Part of a series on the |
| Frankfurt School |
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Theodor W. Adorno (/əˈdɔːrnoʊ/ ə-DOR-noh;[8] German: [ˈteːodoːɐ̯ ʔaˈdɔʁno] ;[9][10] born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist.
He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951), and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.
Amidst the vogue enjoyed by existentialism and positivism in early 20th-century Europe, Adorno advanced a dialectical conception of natural history that critiqued the twin temptations of ontology and empiricism through studies of Kierkegaard and Husserl. As a classically trained pianist whose sympathies with the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg resulted in his studying composition with Alban Berg of the Second Viennese School, Adorno's commitment to avant-garde music formed the backdrop of his subsequent writings and led to his collaboration with Thomas Mann on the latter's novel Doctor Faustus, while the two men lived in California as exiles during the Second World War. Working for the newly relocated Institute for Social Research, Adorno collaborated on influential studies of authoritarianism, antisemitism, and propaganda that would later serve as models for sociological studies the Institute carried out in post-war Germany.
Upon his return to Frankfurt, Adorno was involved with the reconstitution of German intellectual life through debates with Karl Popper on the limitations of positivist science, critiques of Heidegger's language of authenticity, writings on German responsibility for the Holocaust, and continued interventions into matters of public policy. As a writer of polemics in the tradition of Nietzsche and Karl Kraus, Adorno delivered scathing critiques of contemporary Western culture. Adorno's posthumously published Aesthetic Theory, which he planned to dedicate to Samuel Beckett, is the culmination of a lifelong commitment to modern art, which attempts to revoke the "fatal separation" of feeling and understanding long demanded by the history of philosophy, and explode the privilege aesthetics accords to content over form and contemplation over immersion. Adorno was nominated for the 1965 Nobel Prize in Literature by Helmut Viebrock.[11]
- ^ Swift, Christopher (2010). "Herbert Marcuse on the New Left: Dialectic and Rhetoric". Rhetoric Society Quarterly. 40 (2): 151. doi:10.1080/02773941003614472. ISSN 1930-322X. JSTOR 40647345. S2CID 144076949.
- ^ Christine Fillion (Fall 2012). "Adorno's Marginalien zu Theorie und Praxis: In Praise of Discontinuity". Humanitas. 2 (1).
- ^ Adorno/Horkheimer, The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.
- ^ Theodor W. Adorno (trans. Francis McDonagh), "Commitment" [based on a March 1962 radio broadcast under the title "Engagement oder künstlerische Autonomie"] in Andrew Arato, Eike Gebhardt (eds.), The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, Continuum, 1978, pp. 300–318 (modernist art as an opposition to the conventional experience of the mass media).
- ^ Gary Day, Literary Criticism: A New History, Edinburgh University Press, 2008, p. 265.
- ^ Adorno defined maturity as the courage and the ability to use one's own understanding independently of dominant heteronomous patterns of thought; see Macdonald, Iain (2011), "Cold, cold, warm: Autonomy, intimacy and maturity in Adorno", Philosophy & Social Criticism, 37(6), 669–689.
- ^ "[Art's] paradoxical task is to attest to the lack of concord while at the same time working to abolish discordance" (Adorno quoted by James Martin Harding in Adorno and "a Writing of the Ruins", SUNY Press, 1997, p. 30); variant translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor in Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, 1997, University of Minnesota Press, p. 168: "Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation; this is a possibility only for its nondiscursive language."
(Original German: Paradox hat sie das Unversöhnte zu bezeugen und gleichwohl tendenziell zu versöhnen; möglich ist das nur ihrer nicht-diskursiven Sprache.). - ^ Ferrarotti, Franco (September 1994). "Beyond the authoritarian personality: Adorno's demon and its liberation". International Journal of Politics, Culture and Society. 8 (1): 105–127. doi:10.1007/bf02199308. ISSN 0891-4486.
- ^ Krech, Eva-Maria; Stock, Eberhard; Hirschfeld, Ursula; Anders, Lutz Christian (2009). Deutsches Aussprachewörterbuch [German Pronunciation Dictionary] (in German). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. p. 293. ISBN 978-3-11-018202-6.
- ^ "Duden | Adorno | Rechtschreibung, Bedeutung, Definition". Duden (in German). Retrieved October 22, 2018.
- ^ "NobelPrize.org". April 2020. Retrieved November 11, 2020.