Theodor W. Adorno

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article needs additional citations for verification.
Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008)

Theodor W. Adorno

Max Horkheimer (front left), Theodor Adorno (front right), and Jürgen Habermas (in the background, right), in 1965 in Heidelberg.
Full name Theodor W. Adorno
Born September 11, 1903(1903-09-11)
Frankfurt, Germany
Died August 6, 1969 (aged 65)
Visp, Switzerland

Era 20th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School critical theory · marxism
Main interests social theory  · sociology  · psychoanalysis  · epistemology  · aesthetics  · musicology  · literary theory · mass media
Notable ideas Culture industry  · Dialetics of Enlightenment  · Authoritarian Personality  · Negative Dialectics

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno (September 11, 1903 – August 6, 1969) was a German-born international sociologist, philosopher, and musicologist. He was a member of the Frankfurt School of social theory along with Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, Jürgen Habermas, and others. He was also the Music Director of the Radio Project from 1937 to 1941, in the U.S.

Already as a young music critic and amateur sociologist, Adorno considered himself primarily a philosophical thinker.

Biography

The early Frankfurt years

Theodor (or "Teddie") was born in Frankfurt as an only child to the wealthy 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.[1] He attended the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gymnasium where he did well, graduating at the age of 17 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, graduating in 1924 with a dissertation on Edmund Husserl. Before his graduation, Adorno had already met with his most important intellectual collaborators, Max Horkheimer and Walter Benjamin.

Vienna intermezzo

During his student years in Frankfurt Adorno had written a number of music critiques, but primarily wanted to be a composer. With this goal envisioned, he used his relationship to Alban Berg to pursue studies in Vienna beginning in January, 1925, making contacts with members of the Viennese School, Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg’s revolutionary atonality particularly inspired the 22-year-old to pen philosophical observations on the new music, though they were not well received by its proponents. The disappointment over this caused him to cut back on his music critiques to enable his career as academic teacher and social researcher to flourish. He did however remain editor-in-chief of the avant-garde magazine Anbruch. His musicological writing already displayed his philosophical ambitions. Other lasting influences from Adorno's time in Vienna included Karl Kraus, whose lectures he attended with Alban Berg, and Georg Lukács whose Theory of the Novel had already enthused him while attending Gymnasium and whose History and Class Consciousness he had reviewed a year previously.[2]

The intermediate Frankfurt years

After returning from Vienna, Adorno experienced another setback. After his dissertation supervisor Hans Cornelius and Cornelius's assistant Max Horkheimer had voiced their concerns about Adorno's professorial thesis—a comprehensive philosophical-psychological treatise—he withdrew it in early 1928. Adorno took three more years before he received the venia legendi, after submitting the manuscript Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen ("Construction of the Aesthetic") to his new supervisor, Paul Tillich. The topic of Adorno's inaugural lecture was the Current Importance of Philosophy, a theme he considered programmatic throughout his life. In it, he questioned the concept of totality for the first time, anticipating his famous formula (directed against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel) that the whole is the untrue (from Minima Moralia). However, Adorno's credential was revoked by the Nazis, along with those of all professors of non-Aryan descent, in 1933.

Adorno's 1932 essay Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik ("On the Social Situation of Music") was his contribution to the first issues of Horkheimer's Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung ("Journal for Social Research") [3] ; it wasn't until 1938 that he joined the Institute for Social Research.

Commuter between Berlin and Oxford (1934-1937)

Beginning in the late 1920s during stays in Berlin, Adorno established close relations with Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch; Adorno had become acquainted with Bloch's first major work, Geist der Utopie, in 1921. Moreover, the German capital, Berlin, was also home of chemist Margarethe ('Gretel') Karplus (1902-1993), whom Adorno would marry in London in 1937. In 1934, fleeing from the Nazi regime, he emigrated to England, with hopes of obtaining a professorship at Oxford. Though Adorno was not appointed professor at Oxford, he undertook an in depth study of Husserl's philosophy as a postgraduate at Merton College. Adorno spent 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 to all popular music at the time of Adorno's writing. This article was less an engagement with this style of music than a first polemic against the blooming entertainment and culture industry. Adorno believed the culture industry was a system by which society was controlled through a top-down creation of standardized culture that intensified the commodification of artistic expression. This topic is also discussed in his essay On the Fetish-Character in Music (Zeitschrift, 1938), in which Adorno formulated his famous quote "every pleasure which emancipates itself from the exchange-value takes on subversive features".[4]