The irony of the tensions between Adorno and some student activists are legible enough. But the most notorious incident was yet to come. The tension and misunderstanding between Adorno and some of the student activists was by no means universal.
Theodor W. Adorno
Indeed, many found the public provocations of Adorno by a minority of students misplaced and embarassing. Adorno spoke out publicly against the German Notstandsgesetze Emergency Laws. The proposed bill that would make Emergency Laws legal in Germany was passed on 30 May For Adorno, the political impact of his work is not to be measured by the extent to which it enables unmediated social praxis but rather by the extent to which it effects a broad change in consciousness.
Here, the oppositional pair of thought and action itself is suspended. Professor Adorno, two weeks ago, the world still seemed in order. You said that your relations with the students were not strained. In your courses, you said, discussions were fruitful, sober, and untainted by personal disturbances. But now you have cancelled your lecture. I hope to start up again in a few weeks. All colleagues do this when their lectures are so massively disrupted. That was obviously the plan.
Are you repulsed only by the manner in which students today take action against you—students who once were on your side—or did their political goals also disturb you? After all, it is fair to say that there used to be agreement between you and the rebels. Recently I said in a television interview that, even though I had established a theoretical model, I could not have foreseen that people would try to implement it with Molotov cocktails.
This sentence has been cited numerous times, but it requires substantial interpretation. It is not as if I had turned away from praxis only recently; my thinking always has stood in a rather indirect relationship to praxis. But Critical Theory does not wish to keep conditions as they are. The SDS students learned this from you. If only you change little things here and there, then perhaps everything will be better. And in that area nothing has changed in me. I attempt to put into words what I see and what I think. But I cannot predicate this on what will be done with it or what will become of it.
A small group of students succeeds time and again in enforcing loyalty, something which the vast majority of leftist students may not fully resist. But I wish to emphasize again the following: They simply cannot refer to models of action that I allegedly gave them in order then to place me at odds with these models. There are no such models. Yet it is the case that students refer, at times very directly, at other times indirectly, to your critique of society.
Without your theories, the student protest movement might not even have developed. I do not wish to deny that. Nevertheless, it is difficult for me to assess this connection fully. But I think that one often conceives the connection between theory and praxis too reductively. Possibly, but not necessarily so. In our writings, the value of so- called individual actions is delimited by an emphasis on societal totality.
This is asking too much of me. Historically, there have been countless instances in which precisely those works that pursued purely theoretical intentions altered consciousness and, by extension, societal reality. But in your writings you have set Critical Theory apart from other kinds of theory.
It should not merely describe reality empirically, but also should consider [ mit bedenken ] the proper organization of society. Here, I was concerned with a critique of positivism. In no way does this sentence suggest that I would be so presumptuous as to tell people how to act. But I am equally convinced that these individual actions are predestined to fail; this also proved to be the case during the May revolt in France. There is a sentence by Grabbe that reads: I would agree with Habermas on this point. For another, I have the strongest reservations against any use of violence. I would have to disown my entire life—my experiences under Hitler and what I have observed of Stalinism—if I did not refuse to participate in the eternal circle of using violence to fight violence.
The only meaningfully transformative praxis that I could imagine would be a non-violent one. To a real Fascism, one can only react with violence. I am anything but rigid on this point. But I refuse to follow those who, after the murder of countless millions in the totalitarian states, still preach violence today. That is the decisive threshold. To think that they did this to me, of all people, someone who has always opposed any kind of erotic repression and sexual taboo!
To mock me and to loose three girls dressed up as hippies on me! I found that repulsive. It seems to me that these actions against me have little to do with the content of my lectures; what is more important to the extreme wing is the publicity. They suffer from the fear of being forgotten. In this way they become slaves of their own publicity. A lecture such as mine, which is attended by about people, is obviously a magnificent forum for activist propaganda. Can this deed not also be interpreted as an act of despair?
The students did not even attempt to have a discussion with me. What makes my dealings with students so much more difficult today is the prioritization of tactics. My friends and I have the feeling that we have been reduced to mere objects in precisely calculated plans. The idea of minority rights, which after all is constitutive of freedom, no longer plays any role whatsoever. If I were to give practical advice, as Herbert Marcuse has done to a certain degree, it would detract from my productivity. You have chosen for yourself the theoretical part, then, leaving the practical part to others; indeed, they are already working on it.
Would it not be preferable if theory simultaneously reflected praxis? And, by extension, also the present actions? There are situations in which I would do this. I value theory more highly at this point. I dealt with these issues —especially in my Negative Dialectic —long before the current conflict erupted. A question that you have asked yourself. I still believe that one should hold on to theory, precisely under the general coercion toward praxis in a functional and pragmatized world.
And I will not permit even the most recent events to dissuade me from what I have written. Then, would it be the virtue of philosophy to look the negative in the eye but not to change it? It effects change precisely by remaining theory. I think that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them.
Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis? Are there not situations, for example in Greece, in which you endorse action that goes beyond critical reflection? It goes without saying that in Greece I would approve of any kind of action. The situation that prevails there is totally different. But for someone who is ensconced in safety to advise others to start a revolution is so ridiculous that one ought to be ashamed of oneself.
I am not in the least ashamed to say very publicly that I am working on a major book on aesthetics. Beyond and through such determinate negation, a dialectical enlightenment of enlightenment also recalls the origin and goal of thought itself. Such recollection is the work of the concept as the self-reflection of thought der Begriff als Selbstbesinnung des Denkens , DE Conceptual self-reflection reveals that thought arises from the very corporeal needs and desires that get forgotten when thought becomes a mere instrument of human self-preservation.
It also reveals that the goal of thought is not to continue the blind domination of nature and humans but to point toward reconciliation. His most comprehensive statement occurs in Negative Dialectics , which is discussed later. Dialectic of Enlightenment presupposes a critical social theory indebted to Karl Marx.
Adorno reads Marx as a Hegelian materialist whose critique of capitalism unavoidably includes a critique of the ideologies that capitalism sustains and requires. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. Like ordinary producers and consumers under capitalist conditions, bourgeois economists treat the commodity as a fetish. They treat it as if it were a neutral object, with a life of its own, that directly relates to other commodities, in independence from the human interactions that actually sustain all commodities.
Marx, by contrast, argues that whatever makes a product a commodity goes back to human needs, desires, and practices. Significant changes have occurred in the structure of capitalism since Marx's day. This requires revisions on a number of topics: Rather, commodity exchange has become the central organizing principle for all sectors of society. This allows commodity fetishism to permeate all social institutions e.
The root cause, Adorno says, lies in how capitalist relations of production have come to dominate society as a whole, leading to extreme, albeit often invisible, concentrations of wealth and power ND — Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value. Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: Politically and economically he responds to a theory of state capitalism proposed by Friedrich Pollock during the war years.
An economist by training who was supposed to contribute a chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment but never did Wiggershaus , —19 , Pollock argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America. Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive.
The social-psychological level in Adorno's diagnosis serves to demonstrate the effectiveness and pervasiveness of late capitalist exploitation. Adorno's cultural studies show that a similar logic prevails in television, film, and the recording industries. In fact, Adorno first discovered late capitalism's structural change through his work with sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld on the Princeton University Radio Research Project. Once marketability becomes a total demand, the internal economic structure of cultural commodities shifts.
Theodor Adorno
Instead of promising freedom from societally dictated uses, and thereby having a genuine use value that people can enjoy, products mediated by the culture industry have their use value replaced by exchange value: His main point is that culture-industrial hypercommercialization evidences a fateful shift in the structure of all commodities and therefore in the structure of capitalism itself. Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works Gesammelte Schriften.
All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies.
Adorno rejects any such separation of subject matter from methodology and all neat divisions of philosophy into specialized subdisciplines. This is one reason why academic specialists find his texts so challenging, not only musicologists and literary critics but also epistemologists and aestheticians.
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All of his writings contribute to a comprehensive and interdisciplinary social philosophy Zuidervaart First published the year after Adorno died, Aesthetic Theory marks the unfinished culmination of his remarkably rich body of aesthetic reflections. It casts retrospective light on the entire corpus. It reconstructs the modern art movement from the perspective of philosophical aesthetics. It simultaneously reconstructs philosophical aesthetics, especially that of Kant and Hegel, from the perspective of modern art. From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed.
Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. The book begins and ends with reflections on the social character of modern art. Two themes stand out in these reflections. One is an updated Hegelian question whether art can survive in a late capitalist world. The other is an updated Marxian question whether art can contribute to the transformation of this world. But Adorno combines this Kantian emphasis on form with Hegel's emphasis on intellectual import geistiger Gehalt and Marx's emphasis on art's embeddedness in society as a whole.
The result is a complex account of the simultaneous necessity and illusoriness of the artwork's autonomy. Adorno regards authentic works of modern art as social monads. The unavoidable tensions within them express unavoidable conflicts within the larger sociohistorical process from which they arise and to which they belong.
These tensions enter the artwork through the artist's struggle with sociohistorically laden materials, and they call forth conflicting interpretations, many of which misread either the work-internal tensions or their connection to conflicts in society as a whole. Their complete resolution, however, would require a transformation in society as a whole, which, given his social theory, does not seem imminent. As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts.
One gets frequent glimpses of this in Aesthetic Theory. Typically he elaborates these categories as polarities or dialectical pairs. One such polarity, and a central one in Adorno's theory of artworks as social monads, occurs between the categories of import Gehalt and function Funktion. Adorno's account of these categories distinguishes his sociology of art from both hermeneutical and empirical approaches.
A hermeneutical approach would emphasize the artwork's inherent meaning or its cultural significance and downplay the artwork's political or economic functions. An empirical approach would investigate causal connections between the artwork and various social factors without asking hermeneutical questions about its meaning or significance. Adorno, by contrast, argues that, both as categories and as phenomena, import and function need to be understood in terms of each other.
On the one hand, an artwork's import and its functions in society can be diametrically opposed. On the other hand, one cannot give a proper account of an artwork's social functions if one does not raise import-related questions about their significance. So too, an artwork's import embodies the work's social functions and has potential relevance for various social contexts. In general, however, and in line with his critiques of positivism and instrumentalized reason, Adorno gives priority to import, understood as societally mediated and socially significant meaning.
The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. This is consistent with a hyperbolic version of the claim that modern art is society's social antithesis: Because of the shift in capitalism's structure, and because of Adorno's own complex emphasis on modern art's autonomy, he doubts both the effectiveness and the legitimacy of tendentious, agitative, or deliberately consciousness-raising art.
Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Under the conditions of late capitalism, the best art, and politically the most effective, so thoroughly works out its own internal contradictions that the hidden contradictions in society can no longer be ignored.
The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory , are emblematic in that regard. Adorno finds them more true than many other artworks.
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To gain access to this center, one must temporarily suspend standard theories about the nature of truth whether as correspondence, coherence, or pragmatic success and allow for artistic truth to be dialectical, disclosive, and nonpropositional. According to Adorno, each artwork has its own import Gehalt by virtue of an internal dialectic between content Inhalt and form Form. This import invites critical judgments about its truth or falsity. To do justice to the artwork and its import, such critical judgments need to grasp both the artwork's complex internal dynamics and the dynamics of the sociohistorical totality to which the artwork belongs.
The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Such truth content is not a metaphysical idea or essence hovering outside the artwork. But neither is it a merely human construct.
It is historical but not arbitrary; nonpropositional, yet calling for propositional claims to be made about it; utopian in its reach, yet firmly tied to specific societal conditions.
Truth content is the way in which an artwork simultaneously challenges the way things are and suggests how things could be better, but leaves things practically unchanged: Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly in Negative Dialectics.
These claims, in turn, consolidate and extend the historiographic and social-theoretical arguments already canvassed. Adorno says the book aims to complete what he considered his lifelong task as a philosopher: This occurs in four stages. Part Two ND — works out Adorno's alternative with respect to the categories he reconfigures from German idealism. Like Hegel, Adorno criticizes Kant's distinction between phenomena and noumena by arguing that the transcendental conditions of experience can be neither so pure nor so separate from each other as Kant seems to claim.
As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding Verstand would be unintelligible if they were not already about something that is nonconceptual. Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual intuitions. Not even a transcendental philosopher would have access to them apart from concepts about them.
Genuine experience is made possible by that which exceeds the grasp of thought and sensibility. The concept of the nonidentical, in turn, marks the difference between Adorno's materialism and Hegel's idealism. Although he shares Hegel's emphasis on a speculative identity between thought and being, between subject and object, and between reason and reality, Adorno denies that this identity has been achieved in a positive fashion.
For the most part this identity has occurred negatively instead. That is to say, human thought, in achieving identity and unity, has imposed these upon objects, suppressing or ignoring their differences and diversity. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence exchange value of what is inherently nonequivalent use value.
Whereas Hegel's speculative identity amounts to an identity between identity and nonidentity, Adorno's amounts to a nonidentity between identity and nonidentity. Adorno does not reject the necessity of conceptual identification, however, nor does his philosophy claim to have direct access to the nonidentical. Under current societal conditions, thought can only have access to the nonidentical via conceptual criticisms of false identifications.
Through determinate negation, those aspects of the object which thought misidentifies receive an indirect, conceptual articulation. The motivation for Adorno's negative dialectic is not simply conceptual, however, nor are its intellectual resources. Another resource lies in unscripted relationships among established concepts. In insisting on the priority of the object, Adorno repeatedly makes three claims: Under current conditions the only way for philosophy to give priority to the object is dialectically, Adorno argues.
He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. To think is to identify, and thought can achieve truth only by identifying.
Negative Dialectics - Wikipedia
So the semblance Schein of total identity lives within thought itself, mingled with thought's truth Wahrheit. The only way to break through the semblance of total identity is immanently, using the concept. Accordingly, everything that is qualitatively different and that resists conceptualization will show up as a contradiction. By colliding with its own boundary [ Grenze ], unitary thought surpasses itself. But thinking in contradictions is also forced upon philosophy by society itself. Society is riven with fundamental antagonisms, which, in accordance with the exchange principle, get covered up by identitarian thought.
The only way to expose these antagonisms, and thereby to point toward their possible resolution, is to think against thought—in other words, to think in contradictions. The point of thinking in contradictions is not simply negative, however. It has a fragile, transformative horizon, namely, a society that would no longer be riven with fundamental antagonisms, thinking that would be rid of the compulsion to dominate through conceptual identification, and the flourishing of particular objects in their particularity. Because Adorno is convinced that contemporary society has the resources to alleviate the suffering it nevertheless perpetuates, his negative dialectics has a utopian reach: This idea of reconciliation sustains Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics.
Like Adorno's epistemology, his moral philosophy derives from a materialistic metacritique of German idealism. The first section in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics indicates the direction Adorno's appropriation will take ND 3—4. There he asks whether and how philosophy is still possible. Adorno asks this against the backdrop of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach , which famously proclaimed that philosophy's task is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. In distinguishing his historical materialism from the sensory materialism of Ludwig Feuerbach, Marx portrays human beings as fundamentally productive and political organisms whose interrelations are not merely interpersonal but societal and historical.
Although Adorno shares many of Marx's anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness had disastrous effects on both sides of the iron curtain. The Introduction to Negative Dialectics begins by making two claims.
First, although apparently obsolete, philosophy remains necessary because capitalism has not been overthrown. Second, Marx's interpretation of capitalist society was inadequate and his critique is outmoded. Hence, praxis no longer serves as an adequate basis for challenging philosophical theory. In fact, praxis serves mostly as a pretext for shutting down the theoretical critique that transformative praxis would require.
Having missed the moment of its realization via the proletarian revolution, according to early Marx , philosophy today must criticize itself: Philosophy must shed such naivete. It must ask, as Kant asked about metaphysics after Hume's critique of rationalism, How is philosophy still possible? More specifically, How, after the collapse of Hegelian thought, is philosophy still possible?
How can the dialectical effort to conceptualize the nonconceptual—which Marx also pursued—how can this philosophy be continued? This self-implicating critique of the relation between theory and practice is one crucial source to Adorno's reflections on ethics and metaphysics. Another is the catastrophic impact of twentieth-century history on the prospects for imagining and achieving a more humane world. Metaphysically, philosophers must find historically appropriate ways to speak about meaning and truth and suffering that neither deny nor affirm the existence of a world transcendent to the one we know.
Whereas denying it would suppress the suffering that calls out for fundamental change, straightforwardly affirming the existence of utopia would cut off the critique of contemporary society and the struggle to change it. Neither logical positivist antimetaphysics nor Heideggerian hypermetaphysics can do justice to this experience. Adorno indicates his own alternative to both traditional metaphysics and more recent antimetaphysics in passages that juxtapose resolute self-criticism and impassioned hope.
- Panem et Circensis - Caligulas Beziehungen zu Volk und Militär (German Edition).
- La strana morte dellammiraglio (Italian Edition).
- Theodor W. Adorno (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).
His historiographic, social theoretical, aesthetic, and negative dialectical concerns meet in passages such as this:. Section 1 lists many of Adorno's books in English, including several he co-authored, in the order of their abbreviations. Section 2 lists some anthologies of Adorno's writings in English. Books listed in section 1 without abbreviations were originally published in English; all others were originally published in German. A date in parentheses following a title indicates either the first German edition or, in the case of posthumous publications, the date of the original lectures.
Often the translations cited above have been silently modified. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften , edited by Rolf Tiedemann et al. Adorno Archive in the collection Nachgelassene Schriften Frankfurt: Dialectic of Enlightenment 3. Critical Social Theory 4. Aesthetic Theory Philosophical and sociological studies of the arts and literature make up more than half of Adorno's collected works Gesammelte Schriften. Negative Dialectics Adorno's idea of artistic truth content presupposes the epistemological and metaphysical claims he works out most thoroughly in Negative Dialectics. Ethics and Metaphysics after Auschwitz Like Adorno's epistemology, his moral philosophy derives from a materialistic metacritique of German idealism.
His historiographic, social theoretical, aesthetic, and negative dialectical concerns meet in passages such as this: Thought that does not capitulate before wretched existence comes to nought before its criteria, truth becomes untruth, philosophy becomes folly. And yet philosophy cannot give up, lest idiocy triumph in actualized unreason [ Widervernunft ] … Folly is truth in the shape that human beings must accept whenever, amid the untrue, they do not give up truth.