61 Facts About Theodor Adorno

Theodor W Adorno was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer.

Theodor Adorno 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.

Theodor 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.

Theodor Adorno's childhood was marked by the musical life provided by his mother and aunt: Maria was a singer who could boast of having performed in Vienna at the Imperial Court, while her sister, Agathe, who lived with them, had made a name for herself as both a singer and pianist.

Theodor Adorno was not only a precocious child but, as he recalled later in life, a child prodigy who could play pieces by Beethoven on the piano by the time he was twelve.

The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Bloch, each of whom Theodor Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-1920s; after fourteen years, Gretel Karplus and Theodor Adorno were married in 1937.

Berg, whom Theodor Adorno called "my master and teacher", was among the most prescient of his young pupil's early friends:.

Cornelius advised Theodor Adorno to withdraw his application on the grounds that the manuscript was too close to his own way of thinking.

Between 1928 and 1930 Theodor Adorno took on a greater role within the editorial committee of the Musikblatter des Anbruch.

At this point Theodor Adorno reversed his earlier priorities: now his musical activities came second to the development of a philosophical theory of aesthetics.

Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Theodor Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences.

Under the direction of Gilbert Ryle, Theodor Adorno worked on a dialectical critique of Husserl's epistemology.

Unsurprisingly, Theodor Adorno's studies found little resonance among members of the project.

In November 1941 Theodor Adorno followed Horkheimer to what Thomas Mann called "German California", setting up house in a Pacific Palisades neighborhood of German emigres that included Bertolt Brecht and Schoenberg.

Theodor Adorno arrived with a draft of his Philosophy of New Music, a dialectical critique of twelve-tone music that Theodor Adorno felt, while writing it, was a departure from the theory of art he had spent the previous decades elaborating.

In line with these studies, Theodor Adorno produced an analysis of the Californian radio preacher Martin Luther Thomas.

Fascist propaganda of this sort, Theodor Adorno wrote, "simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today's standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity".

In California Theodor Adorno made the acquaintance of Charlie Chaplin and became friends with Fritz Lang and Hanns Eisler, with whom he completed a study of film music in 1944.

Theodor Adorno assisted Thomas Mann with his novel Doktor Faustus after the latter asked for his help.

Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Theodor Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology, and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music.

All the enthusiasm Theodor Adorno's students showed for intellectual matters could not erase the suspicion that, in the words of Max Frisch, culture had become an "alibi" for the absence of political consciousness.

In 1952 Theodor Adorno participated in a group experiment, revealing residual National Socialist attitudes among the recently democratized Germans.

Theodor Adorno then published two influential essays, The Meaning of Working Through the Past, and Education after Auschwitz, in which he argued on the survival of the uneradicated National Socialism in the mind-sets and institutions of the post-1945 Germany, and that there is still a real risk that it could rise again.

In September 1951 Theodor Adorno returned to the United States for a six-week visit, during which he attended the opening of the Hacker Psychiatry Foundation in Beverly Hills, met Leo Lowenthal and Herbert Marcuse in New York and saw his mother for the last time.

Theodor Adorno became increasingly involved with the publishing house of Peter Suhrkamp, inducing the latter to publish Benjamin's Berlin Childhood Around 1900, Kracauer's writings and a two-volume edition of Benjamin's writings.

Yet Theodor Adorno was no less moved by other public events: protesting the publication of Heinrich Mann's novel Professor Unrat with its film title, The Blue Angel; declaring his sympathy with those who protested the scandal of big-game hunting and penning a defense of prostitutes.

At the Philosophers' Conference of October 1962 in Munster, at which Habermas wrote that Theodor Adorno was "A writer among bureaucrats", Theodor Adorno presented "Progress".

At the invitation of Wolfgang Steinecke, Theodor Adorno took part in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music in Kranichstein from 1951 to 1958.

Theodor Adorno additionally befriended the writer and poet Hans Magnus Enzensberger as well as the film-maker Alexander Kluge.

In 1963, Theodor Adorno was elected to the post of chairman of the German Sociological Society, where he presided over two important conferences: in 1964, on "Max Weber and Sociology" and in 1968 on "Late Capitalism or Industrial Society".

At the invitation of Peter Szondi, Theodor Adorno was invited to the Free University of Berlin to give a lecture on Goethe's Iphigenie in Tauris.

Theodor Adorno's isolation was only compounded by articles published in the magazine alternative, which, following the lead of Hannah Arendt's articles in Merkur, claimed Adorno had subjected Benjamin to pressure during his years of exile in Berlin and compiled Benjamin's Writings and Letters with a great deal of bias.

An open appeal published in Die Zeit, signed by Theodor Adorno, called for an inquiry into the social reasons that gave rise to this assassination attempt as well as an investigation into the Springer Press' manipulation of public opinion.

Theodor Adorno rejected the so-called unity of theory and praxis advocated by the students and argued that the students' actions were premised upon a mistaken analysis of the situation.

In September 1968 Theodor Adorno went to Vienna for the publication of Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link.

Theodor Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled "Charmed Language," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again.

Yet Theodor Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the conservative thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Theodor Adorno's teaching.

Theodor Adorno dedicated himself to this task in one of his later major works, the Negative Dialectics.

Class theory, which appears less frequently in Theodor Adorno's work, has its origins in Marxist thinking.

Theodor Adorno made explicit reference to class in two of his texts: the first, the subchapter "Classes and Strata", from his Introduction to the Sociology of Music; the second, an unpublished 1942 essay, "Reflections on Class Theory", published postmortem in his Collected Works.

Theodor Adorno read Sigmund Freud's work early on, although, unlike Horkheimer, he had never experienced psychoanalysis in practice.

Theodor Adorno first read Freud while working on his initial habilitation thesis, The Concept of the Unconscious in the Transcendental Theory of Mind.

Theodor Adorno emphasized the necessity of researching prevailing psychological drives in order to explain the cohesion of a repressive society acting against fundamental human interests.

Theodor Adorno always remained a supporter and defender of Freudian orthodox doctrine, "psychoanalysis in its strict form".

Theodor 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.

Theodor 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.

Theodor Adorno criticized jazz and popular music, viewing it as part of the culture industry, that contributes to the present sustainability of capitalism by rendering it "aesthetically pleasing" and "agreeable".

Theodor Adorno saw the culture industry as an arena in which critical tendencies or potentialities were eliminated.

Theodor Adorno argued that the culture industry, which produced and circulated cultural commodities through the mass media, manipulated the population.

Theodor Adorno wrote that "the same thing is offered to everybody by the standardized production of consumption goods" but this is concealed under "the manipulation of taste and the official culture's pretense of individualism".

Theodor Adorno's analysis allowed for a critique of mass culture from the left which balanced the critique of popular culture from the right.

Thinkers influenced by Theodor Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past, morals, or the Culture Industry.

Theodor 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, Theodor 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.

Theodor Adorno's sweeping criticisms of jazz and championing of the Second Viennese School in opposition to Stravinsky have caused him to fall out of favour.

Theodor Adorno forgets that one of the most cunning and interesting aspects of consumer music, the mass media, and indeed of capitalism itself, is their fluidity, their unending capacity for adaptation and assimilation.

Theodor Adorno's scheme is directed towards the different objective elements involved in the experience of recognition, than the actual experience felt for the individual.

Theodor Adorno concludes that Jurgen Habermas, in particular, and the Frankfurt School in general, misconstrue Marx.

Theodor Adorno makes a distinction between "Apologetic music" and "Critical music".

Serious music, according to Theodor Adorno, achieves excellence when its whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Theodor Adorno felt that those at the top of the Institute needed to be the source primarily of theories for evaluation and empirical testing, as well as people who would process the "facts" discovered.