Theodor W. Adorno | Biography

German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) moved freely across academic disciplines exploring contemporary European culture and the predicament of modern man. A leading member of the influential intellectual movement known as the Frankfurt school, he was born in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, on September 11, 1903, the only son of an upper middle-class family. His father, Oskar Wiesengrund, was an assimilated Jewish merchant; his musically gifted mother, Maria Calvalli-Adorno, of Italian-Catholic descent. He adopted his mother's patronomic Adorno in the late 1930s.

An economically secure, artistically rich home encouraged Adorno's talents in both music and humanities. Adorno was encouraged by his mother to study piano, his mastery of which sustained his interest in music's philosophical and technical aspects. Enrolled at the Frankfurt University, Adorno was interested in philosophy, psychology, sociology, and music, and he wrote a dissertation on Husserl's phenomenology. Impressed by Wozzeck, Alban Berg's opera, Adorno began a serious study of music. Two years in Vienna taught Adorno about contemporary music and led him even to attempt musical composition. Adorno analyzed published on the work of Schoenberg.

Returning to Frankfurt in 1925 Adorno wrote two Habilitationsschrift, the second of which (on Søren Kierkegaard) qualified him for university appointment. The chief contention of his Habilitationsschrift was that Kierkegaard, having rejected Georg Hegel's grandiose systematization of philosophy, retreated into pure subjectivity.

Adorno informally joined the Institute for Social Research, established in 1923 as an affiliated body of the Frankfurt school. Marxist in outlook, the Institute researchers were concerned with intellectual work rather than direct political action.

Adorno began teaching philosophy at his alma mater in 1931, but Hitler's seizure of power disrupted Adorno's academic career and eventually forced him into exile. Adorno went to Oxford, England (1934-1937) and then to the United States. He returned to Germany in 1949 to resume teaching at Frankfurt University. Jewish suffering and the crimes of the Third Reich became his major concerns.

Adorno wrote for the Institute's official journal: "The Social Condition of Music" in the first issue (1932); "Jazz" (1936); and the more important "Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of the Listeners" (1936). In the last, Adorno observed that the commercially oriented music industry manipulates listeners' musical tastes. Helpless listeners are seduced into accepting arbitrary cuts and interruptions in radio broadcasting. He maintained that such cuts are made for commercial gains at the expense of the music's integrity and in disregard of listeners' intelligence. This article details his arguments against the culture industry which were developed more fully in his later writings.

In the United States (1937-1949) Adorno worked on a number of projects which the members of the Institute for Social Research conducted individually or collectively. At Princeton, he played a leading role in a large collaborative project which resulted in the publication of the influential Authoritarian Personality. Toward the end of the war Adorno and Horkheimer wrote Dialectic of Enlightenment published in Amsterdam (1947). Defining enlightenment as demythologizing, the authors traced the process of taming nature in Western civilization. The argument here is that in the name of enlightenment a technological civilization which sets humans apart from nature has been developed causing dehumanization and regimentation in modern society. They asserted that civilization is an instrument for controlling nature and people rather than enhancing human dignity and originality. In the book's 1969 edition, shortly before Adorno's death, the authors declared that the enlightenment led to positivism and to identification of intelligence with what is hostile to spirit (Geistfeindschaft).

After World War II many Frankfurt school members remained in the United States or in Great Britain, but Horkheimer and Adorno returned to Germany. Adorno returned to Germany in 1949 although he spent a year in the United States in 1952. Adorno wrote many articles and books and trained a new generation of German scholars. The true extent of his originality cannot be determined until the projected twenty-three volumes of his complete works are available.

In 1951 he published Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life consisting of articles he wrote during the war. The most personal of his writings, these short essays were written in an aphoristic style reminiscent of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

Negative Dialectics (1966), is a sustained polemic against the dream of philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel to construct philosophical systems enclosing coherently arranged propositions and proofs. One terse statement in the book is "Bluntly put, closed systems are bound to fail." As this statement indicates, Adorno's aim in this book was to vindicate the vitality and intractability of reason.

Prisms, (1967) another major work, contains essays on a wide range of topics from Thorstein Veblen to Franz Kafka. However, the main theme in the book is the gradual decomposition of culture under the impact of instrumental reason. In this book and in Aesthetic Theory, his last major work unfinished at the time of his death in 1969 but edited and published posthumously, Adorno advanced the thesis that the integrity of creative works lies in the autonomous acts of artists who are at once submerged in and triumphant over social forces.

A persistent critic of positivism in philosophy and sociology and a bitter foe of commercialism and dehumanization promoted by the culture industry, Adorno championed individual dignity and creativity in an age increasingly menaced by what he regarded as mindless standardization and abject conformity. At a time when many academic philosophers were weary of dealing with questions for fear of violating the canon of rigorous philosophical reasoning, Adorno boldly asserted that the function of philosophy is to make sense out of the totality of human experience. Adorno, who was hailed as one of the ideological godfathers of the New Left Movement in the 1960s because of his indictment of both capitalism and communism, was criticized and humiliated by his former followers for his opposition to violent social activism.