Author: M. Farahi Tujgei
A Brief Overview of the Frankfurt School (Part 8)
Theodor Adorno was without a doubt the most important thinker of the Frankfurt School. Within this school, he played the crucial mediating role between Marxism and other philosophical schools, as well as between philosophy itself and sociology and cultural studies. His studies on Hegel, Heidegger, Husserl, Kierkegaard, and other major philosophers are unmatched in their intelligent precision.(1)
Adorno was influenced by great philosophers such as Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche.(2)
Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund Adorno was born on September 11, 1903, in Frankfurt. He was the only son of Oscar Wiesengrund, a wealthy, cultured Jewish merchant who converted to Protestant Christianity a few months after his son’s birth. His mother, Maria Calvelli, was a Catholic aristocrat from Corsica.
As a young man, Theodor Wiesengrund used his mother’s surname, Adorno, when writing essays on music, and eventually in 1942, in the United States, he adopted the name permanently. During his teenage years, he studied music and became so skilled at the piano that everyone admired his talent.
In 1918, Siegfried Kracauer, a family friend who was fourteen years older than Theodor, gave him books by Kant, Hegel, Marx, Bloch, and Lukács. Adorno read these gifts attentively, and this sparked his interest in philosophy and the social sciences. In 1920, he read Lukács’s Theory of the Novel, which had just been published, and was deeply influenced by it. The following year, he graduated from high school and entered Johann Wolfgang Goethe University to study philosophy. Three years later, he completed his degree in philosophy with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology—he was only 21 at the time. His favorite doctoral mentor was Cornelius, who introduced him to the writings of Neo-Kantian philosophers and further encouraged his left-leaning political tendencies. During Cornelius’s lectures in 1922, he met Max Horkheimer, and their friendship and collaboration lasted until the end of their lives. Encouraged by Horkheimer, Adorno studied psychology, which left a significant mark on his works.
In 1925, Adorno went to Vienna to continue his studies in music, and in the spring of 1927 he returned to Frankfurt. At that time, he joined the Institute for Social Research, then headed by Carl Grünberg. That same summer, he defended his doctoral thesis on the concept of the unconscious in the theory of Edmund Bern. From then on, Adorno began teaching philosophy and music. Around the same time, he fell in love with a woman named Gretel Karplus and frequently traveled to Berlin to see her. During these trips, he became acquainted with her friends, including Bertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. His friendship with Benjamin opened a new path in his intellectual journey. In those same years, he also met Herbert Marcuse, a student of Martin Heidegger. It is said that Adorno’s debates with Marcuse were among the key reasons for Marcuse’s eventual break from Heidegger’s philosophy.
In 1931, when Horkheimer became director of the Institute for Social Research, Adorno became more deeply engaged in its work and published an article titled On the Social Situation of Music. Around the same time, Marcuse began his work at the Institute, and under his guidance, Adorno studied Marx’s early writings, which had only just begun to be published. From then on, the concept of alienation—as another form of reification described by Lukács in History and Class Consciousness—took a central place in Adorno’s works.
Adorno also engaged in serious studies on the roots of existential philosophy, which culminated in his controversial book Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, a critical and challenging examination of the Danish philosopher’s thought.
On May 8, 1931, Adorno delivered a lecture titled The Actuality of Philosophy, a work that holds exceptional significance in understanding his philosophical outlook. This text was published only after his death.
Hitler’s Rise to Power and Adorno’s Migration to England and America
Adorno’s teaching and writing activities continued until 1933, when the Nazis came to power in Germany. One of Hitler’s first measures in the realm of cultural and academic activities was the closure of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. As political pressures mounted, the members of the Institute fled Germany. Horkheimer went to Switzerland, while Adorno went to Oxford. Using a fake passport, he managed to travel back to Germany several times and transfer many of the Institute’s documents to Geneva. In late 1937, during a short stay in Berlin, he married Gretel Karplus. In February 1938, they moved to New York, where Horkheimer had reestablished the Institute as part of Columbia University.
After leaving Germany, Adorno spent about four years in England at Oxford University, where he focused mainly on music. Among his works from this period was the first version of The Fetish Character of Music, one of his most important essays opposing the “culture industry.”
After arriving in the United States, Adorno collaborated with Paul Lazarsfeld at Princeton University. However, it was inevitable that their partnership would not last long, since Lazarsfeld was a positivist, strongly committed to empirical micro-sociological research and local surveys based on individual questionnaires. As a result, their collaboration ended after only a year, producing just a few essays on the role of radio in undermining the impact of music.
Later, Adorno moved to California. Between 1940 and 1942, he worked with Leo Lowenthal on a research project on anti-Semitism and wrote an essay titled Anti-Semitism and Fascist Propaganda, which was published in 1946. In 1942, Horkheimer revived an old project on dialectical logic and asked members of the Institute, including Adorno, for assistance. Adorno realized that the project could not proceed purely on philosophical grounds; it had to engage with historical, social, and cultural analysis. In his view, analyzing dialectics required careful attention to history, the trajectory of modernity, and a critical approach.
This conviction grew stronger in 1943, and the following year, in Santa Monica, California, he and Horkheimer began discussions on modernity. Gretel, Adorno’s wife, took notes during these debates, and the two men revised the texts carefully. Three years later, the result was published in Amsterdam under the title Dialectic of Enlightenment. This book, a bitter and ruthless critique of modern times, instrumental reason, and the culture industry, initially sold very poorly, but in the 1960s, during the radical movements of the era, it was repeatedly reprinted and translated into many languages.
The central arguments of Adorno in this book concern modern rationality, capitalism, the flawed modern concept of progress, the dangers of science and technology, the culture industry, and his critique of humankind’s exploitative view of nature. Adorno, who had argued during his collaboration with Lazarsfeld that the study of reification, alienation, commodity fetishism, and false consciousness could not be advanced through empirical surveys or questionnaires, turned in the final years of the war to an extensive research project on the “authoritarian personality,” focusing on issues such as racial hatred and xenophobia. The results were published in a large volume titled The Authoritarian Personality.
Other works by Adorno in America include Composing for the Films, Philosophy of Modern Music, and Minima Moralia. The latter, written as a counterpart to Aristotle’s Magna Moralia, consists of short reflections and is one of Adorno’s most important works, written between 1944 and 1947. The hardships of exile are deeply reflected in this book. Its style is widely considered Adorno’s best prose, reminiscent of Nietzsche’s writings, filled with bitter irony and sharp wit. In one passage, Adorno himself wrote: “Irony is the best tool for showing the gap between ideology and reality.” The purpose of the book was to highlight precisely this gap.
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References:
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Theodor Adorno: 1903-1969.
2. Ahmadi, Babak. Memories of Darkness: On Three Thinkers of the Frankfurt School.
3. Ahmadi, Babak. Memories of Darkness: On Three Thinkers of the Frankfurt School.
4. Ahmadi, Babak. Memories of Darkness: On Three Thinkers of the Frankfurt School.
