Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German sociologist, philosopher, pianist, musicologist, and composer. He was a member of the Frankfurt School along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project.Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Theodor W. Adorno was primarily a philosophical thinker. The label social philosopher emphasizes the socially critical aspect of his philosophical thinking, which from 1945 onwards took an intellectually prominent position in the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Theodor (or "Teddie") was born in Frankfurt as an only child to the wine merchant Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund (1870–1941, of Jewish descent, converted to Protestantism) and the Catholic singer Maria Barbara, born Calvelli-Adorno. It was the second half of this name that he adopted as his surname upon becoming a naturalized American citizen in the 1930s ("Wiesengrund" was abbreviated to "W"). His musically talented aunt Agathe also lived with the family. The young Adorno passionately engaged the piano; he especially liked four-handed playing because, he later wrote, the need for coordination increased his skill and appreciation.[1] His childhood joy was increased by the family's annual summer sojourn in Amorbach. He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium where he proved to be a highly gifted student: at the exceptionally early age of 17 he graduated from the Gymnasium at the top of his class. In his free time he took private lessons in composition with Bernhard Sekles and read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason together with his friend Siegfried Kracauer — 14 years his elder — on Saturday afternoons. Later he would proclaim that he owed more to these readings than to any of his academic teachers. At the University of Frankfurt (today's Johann Wolfgang Goethe Universität) he studied philosophy, musicology, psychology and sociology. There he wrote his first academic work, a review of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He completed his studies swiftly: by the end of 1924 he graduated with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. (Jacques Derrida, whose criticism of the use of the notions of "immediacy" and "self-presence" in Western metaphysics may owe a debt to Adorno, also wrote his first thesis on Husserl.) Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.
Adorno was chiefly influenced by Max Weber's critique of disenchantment, Georg Lukacs's Hegelian interpretation of Marxism, as well as Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, although the influence of the former has until recently been underestimated. Adorno, along with the other major Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse, argued that advanced capitalism had managed to contain or liquidate the forces that would bring about its collapse and that the revolutionary moment, when it would have been possible to transform it into socialism, had passed. As he put it at the beginning of his Negative Dialectics (1966), philosophy is still necessary because the time to realise it was missed. Adorno argued that capitalism had become more entrenched through its attack on the objective basis of revolutionary consciousness and through liquidation of the individualism that had been the basis of critical consciousness.
Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensuous, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.
Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.
The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.
At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives — left and right — the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology.
Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music.
Adorno, again along with the other principal thinkers of the Frankfurt school, attacked positivism in the social sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be scientific and quantitative, although the collective Frankfurt School work The Authoritarian Personality that appeared under Adorno's name was the single most influential empirical study in the social sciences in America for decades after its publication in 1950.
Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection.
A Frankfurti Iskola első generációjának tagja. Frankfurtban született 1903. szeptember 11-én, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund zsidó borkereskedő és Maria Calvelli-Adorno korzikai énekesnő gyermekeként. Filozófiából doktorált a frankfurti egyetemen, itt ismerkedett meg Max Horkheimerrel és Walter Benjaminnal, akik fontos szellemi társak maradtak életében. A húszas években több hosszú látogatást tett Bécsbe, ahol Alban Bergnél tanult zeneszerzést, illetve két évig az Anbruch c. zenei folyóiratot szerkesztette. (Ekkoriban már a modern zene kíméletlen kritikusaként tartották számon – sokat elárul, hogy egyik cikkírói álneve a „Hektor Rottweiler” volt.) 1931-ben habilitált Bécsben egy Kierkegaard-ról írt dolgozattal, majd a frankfurti egyetemen kezdett filozófiát tanítani, egészen Hitler hatalomra kerüléséig.
A nácik elől Oxfordba, majd New Yorkba menekült, ahol bekapcsolódott az empirikus szociológia egyik alapító atyja, Paul Lazarsfeld által vezetett Princeton Radio Research-be. Innen hamarosan elbocsátották, mert az adatok értékelése helyett a zenei tudat eldologiasodásáról nyújtott be hosszú memorandumokat. 1941-ben Los Angeles-be költözött Horkheimerrel, aki időközben szinte mindenkit eltávolított a Társadalomkutató Intézetből, hogy anyagi hátteret biztosítson magának a kritikai elmélet alapművének szánt „Dialektikus logika” megírásához. A mű sosem készült el; helyette született meg – immár Adorno hathatós közreműködésével – A felvilágosodás dialektikája. A másik híres emigrációbeli együttműködés a Doktor Faustus-hoz fűződik: a Thomas Mann nagyregényében szereplő zenetörténeti eszmefuttatások, illetve az elképzelt zeneművek leírásai szinte szó szerint Adornótól származnak. Ekkortájt vezette Adorno az autoriter személyiséggel kapcsolatos híres kutatást is, mely mélyinterjúk és pszichoanalitikai elemzések alapján arra a következtetésre jutott, hogy az USA-ban gyakorlatilag mindenki potenciális náci.
A háború után visszatelepült Németországba, filozófiát kezdett tanítani Frankfurtban (bár az egyetem reakciós vezetése megakadályozta, hogy rendes professzori kinevezést kapjon), majd az újjáalakult Institut társ-igazgatója lett, ahol Horkheimerrel a posztnáci Németország élő lelkiismereteként képviselték a maguk szélsőségesen radikális kritikai álláspontját. A hatvanas évektől kezdve két nagy mű foglalta le: a Negatív dialektika, mely Hegellel polemizálva dolgozta ki az ész kudarcának elméletét (nem közismert, de Adorno e mű révén lényegében Heideggerrel próbált konkurálni); és az Esztétikaelmélet, mely a modern művészet lényegét próbálta megragadni a maga már-már felfoghatatlanul bonyolult módján. Adorno állítólag egy harmadik nagy művet is tervezett, mely a kanti hármasság mintájára az erkölcs kérdésével foglalkozott volna. Haláláig dolgozott egy Beethovenről szóló, összefoglaló zenefilozófiai köteten is, de ebből csak töredékek maradtak.
Noha a frankfurti intézet a diákmozgalmak egyik központja lett, és a mozgalmárok részben pont az „alapító atyákra” hivatkoztak, Adorno sem szellemileg, sem gyakorlatban nem tudott a fiatalok mellé állni: több botrányos összetűzés után ő maga üríttette ki a rendőrséggel az Institut megszállt épületét. Sokak szerint részben ezek a megrázkódtatások gyengítették el végleg. A svájci Brigben halt meg 1969. augusztus 6-án, az Esztétikaelmélet munkálatai közben.
Whilst Adorno's work focuses on art, literature and music as key areas of sensuous, indirect critique of the established culture and modes of thought, there is also a strand of distinctly political utopianism evident in his reflections especially on history. The argument, which is complex and dialectic, dominates his Aesthetic Theory, Philosophy of New Music and many other works.
Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated. He argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population. Popular culture was identified as a reason why people become passive; the easy pleasures available through consumption of popular culture made people docile and content, no matter how terrible their economic circumstances. The differences among cultural goods make them appear different, but they are in fact just variations on the same theme. Adorno conceptualised this phenomenon as pseudo-individualization and the always-the-same. He saw this mass-produced culture as a danger to the more difficult high arts. Culture industries cultivate false needs; that is, needs created and satisfied by capitalism. True needs, in contrast, are freedom, creativity, and genuine happiness. But the subtle dialectician was also able to say that the problem with capitalism was that it blurred the line between false and true needs altogether.
The work of Adorno and Horkheimer heavily influenced intellectual discourse on popular culture and scholarly popular culture studies. At the time Adorno began writing, there was a tremendous unease among many intellectuals as to the results of mass culture and mass production on the character of individuals within a nation. By exploring the mechanisms for the creation of mass culture, Adorno presented a framework which gave specific terms to what had been a more general concern.
At the time this was considered important because of the role which the state took in cultural production; Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right. From both perspectives — left and right — the nature of cultural production was felt to be at the root of social and moral problems resulting from the consumption of culture. However, while the critique from the right emphasized moral degeneracy ascribed to sexual and racial influences within popular culture, Adorno located the problem not with the content, but with the objective realities of the production of mass culture and its effects, e.g. as a form of reverse psychology.
Many aspects of Adorno's work are relevant today and have been developed in many strands of contemporary critical theory, media theory, and sociology. Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past (Auschwitz), morals or the Culture Industry. The latter has become a particularly productive, yet highly contested term in cultural studies. Many of Adorno's reflections on aesthetics and music have only just begun to be debated, as a collection of essays on the subject, many of which had not previously been translated into English, has only recently been collected and published as Essays on Music.
Adorno, again along with the other principal thinkers of the Frankfurt school, attacked positivism in the social sciences and in philosophy. He was particularly harsh on approaches that claimed to be scientific and quantitative, although the collective Frankfurt School work The Authoritarian Personality that appeared under Adorno's name was the single most influential empirical study in the social sciences in America for decades after its publication in 1950.
Adorno's work in the years before his death was shaped by the idea of "negative dialectics", set out especially in his book of that title. A key notion in the work of the Frankfurt School since Dialectic of Enlightenment had been the idea of thought becoming an instrument of domination that subsumes all objects under the control of the (dominant) subject, especially through the notion of identity, i.e. of identifying as real in nature and society only that which harmonized or fit with dominant concepts, and regarding as unreal or non-existent everything that did not. Adorno's "negative dialectics" was an attempt to articulate a non-dominating thought that would recognize its limitations and accept the non-identity and reality of that which could not be subsumed under the subject's concepts. Indeed, Adorno sought to ground the critical bite of his sociological work in his critique of identity, which he took to be a reification in thought of the commodity form or exchange relation which always presumes a false identity between different things. The potential to criticise arises from the gap between the concept and the object, which can never go into the former without remainder. This gap, this non-identity in identity, was the secret to a critique of both material life and conceptual reflection.
A Frankfurti Iskola első generációjának tagja. Frankfurtban született 1903. szeptember 11-én, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund zsidó borkereskedő és Maria Calvelli-Adorno korzikai énekesnő gyermekeként. Filozófiából doktorált a frankfurti egyetemen, itt ismerkedett meg Max Horkheimerrel és Walter Benjaminnal, akik fontos szellemi társak maradtak életében. A húszas években több hosszú látogatást tett Bécsbe, ahol Alban Bergnél tanult zeneszerzést, illetve két évig az Anbruch c. zenei folyóiratot szerkesztette. (Ekkoriban már a modern zene kíméletlen kritikusaként tartották számon – sokat elárul, hogy egyik cikkírói álneve a „Hektor Rottweiler” volt.) 1931-ben habilitált Bécsben egy Kierkegaard-ról írt dolgozattal, majd a frankfurti egyetemen kezdett filozófiát tanítani, egészen Hitler hatalomra kerüléséig.A nácik elől Oxfordba, majd New Yorkba menekült, ahol bekapcsolódott az empirikus szociológia egyik alapító atyja, Paul Lazarsfeld által vezetett Princeton Radio Research-be. Innen hamarosan elbocsátották, mert az adatok értékelése helyett a zenei tudat eldologiasodásáról nyújtott be hosszú memorandumokat. 1941-ben Los Angeles-be költözött Horkheimerrel, aki időközben szinte mindenkit eltávolított a Társadalomkutató Intézetből, hogy anyagi hátteret biztosítson magának a kritikai elmélet alapművének szánt „Dialektikus logika” megírásához. A mű sosem készült el; helyette született meg – immár Adorno hathatós közreműködésével – A felvilágosodás dialektikája. A másik híres emigrációbeli együttműködés a Doktor Faustus-hoz fűződik: a Thomas Mann nagyregényében szereplő zenetörténeti eszmefuttatások, illetve az elképzelt zeneművek leírásai szinte szó szerint Adornótól származnak. Ekkortájt vezette Adorno az autoriter személyiséggel kapcsolatos híres kutatást is, mely mélyinterjúk és pszichoanalitikai elemzések alapján arra a következtetésre jutott, hogy az USA-ban gyakorlatilag mindenki potenciális náci.
A háború után visszatelepült Németországba, filozófiát kezdett tanítani Frankfurtban (bár az egyetem reakciós vezetése megakadályozta, hogy rendes professzori kinevezést kapjon), majd az újjáalakult Institut társ-igazgatója lett, ahol Horkheimerrel a posztnáci Németország élő lelkiismereteként képviselték a maguk szélsőségesen radikális kritikai álláspontját. A hatvanas évektől kezdve két nagy mű foglalta le: a Negatív dialektika, mely Hegellel polemizálva dolgozta ki az ész kudarcának elméletét (nem közismert, de Adorno e mű révén lényegében Heideggerrel próbált konkurálni); és az Esztétikaelmélet, mely a modern művészet lényegét próbálta megragadni a maga már-már felfoghatatlanul bonyolult módján. Adorno állítólag egy harmadik nagy művet is tervezett, mely a kanti hármasság mintájára az erkölcs kérdésével foglalkozott volna. Haláláig dolgozott egy Beethovenről szóló, összefoglaló zenefilozófiai köteten is, de ebből csak töredékek maradtak.
Noha a frankfurti intézet a diákmozgalmak egyik központja lett, és a mozgalmárok részben pont az „alapító atyákra” hivatkoztak, Adorno sem szellemileg, sem gyakorlatban nem tudott a fiatalok mellé állni: több botrányos összetűzés után ő maga üríttette ki a rendőrséggel az Institut megszállt épületét. Sokak szerint részben ezek a megrázkódtatások gyengítették el végleg. A svájci Brigben halt meg 1969. augusztus 6-án, az Esztétikaelmélet munkálatai közben.
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