Adorno, despite accepting American citizenship, returned to Frankfurt in 1949 after the end of World War II and along with Horkheimer (Hork -hy-mer), re-established the Society for Social Research and invited a number of young researchers to join. The most famous of them was Jürgen Habermas. Adorno remained in Frankfurt for the rest of his life, except for a few trips to Paris and a one-year trip to Los Angeles in 1952 to conduct academic research on mass culture. During those years, Adorno increasingly distanced himself from orthodox Marxism due to the conditions of the Cold War. One reason for this distance was the documentary news of the crimes committed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in the name of socialism. Adorno became very isolated during those years. His daily routine consisted of playing the piano for a few hours in his small apartment near Frankfurt University, studying in the Society’s library, teaching, and going to concerts and operas. In 1952, he published the book “In Search of Wagner”. In this book, he criticized Wagner, calling his understanding of myth, reactionary and authoritarian, and stated that in his writings one can find elements for accepting fascism. He also considered the concept of total art dangerous. In 1955, he also published a collection of articles, Manifestos, Critique of Culture and Society, which were some of his most important articles on various cultural issues. Adorno’s other books on music include “The Unpleasant” (1956), “Mahler: A Musical Anatomy” (1960), “Introduction to the Sociology of Music” (1962), and “Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Relationships” (1968). Other books by Adorno include Notes on Literature (1960) and Meta criticism of Epistemology (1956), Three Essays on Hegel (1957), and Criticism Patterns in two volumes (1963 and 1965). The most important books of Adorno in the last years of his life are Negative Dialectics (1966), a critique of Hegel and Heidegger, and Aesthetic Theory, published after his death in 1970. Adorno, who was himself one of the most important defenders of artistic modernism, argued in this book that it is impossible to present a complete, coherent, systematic, and positive theory of aesthetics in our a. He participated in numerous seminars on philosophy, sociology, and politics in the last years of his life. The most famous of these debates is his polemic with Habermas against Karl Popper on positivism.
In the last years of his life (1967–1969), Adorno, like Horkheimer (Hork -hy-mer), stands against the student movement. On one occasion, on 31 January 1969, he called on the police to help secure the university, resulting in the arrest of 76 students. Most of the students then boycotted his class. He said that he feared the false image of freedom that the students were fighting for: “When I created the critical model, I never thought that one day they would try to realize it with Molotov cocktails.”
In his last class, a young student shouted: “Adorno, you and your critical theory are dead together.” Adorno eventually died in Switzerland in August 1969 of a heart attack.
Adorno; a difficult author
Adorno is a difficult author. The complexity of his writings is partly due to the ambiguity of his tone. In many cases, it is unclear how serious he is. His satirical tone, combined with his use of sharp metaphors, is reminiscent of Nietzsche’s prose. Sometimes it is extremely bitter and hopeless, and sometimes carefree. This style of writing makes it difficult for the reader to guess the meaning of his writings. Babak Ahmadi says about Adorno’s written language: “If those like me, who do not have the fortune to read Adorno’s works in German, can discover so many different meanings in the translations of his phrases, then what pleasure do German-speaking readers get? Especially since he himself, like Heidegger, believed that there was a wonderful and enigmatic harmony between philosophical expression and the German language.” Interestingly, Habermas condemned Heidegger’s attachment to the German language and his view that philosophy could only be thought in German and Greek, and considers it evidence of the influence of Nazi thought on him, but he remains silent about Adorno. In his works, Adorno has tried to show the difference and disagreement between the object as it is in itself and as it is expressed. He always avoided giving general meanings because he considered such meanings authoritarian. He always spoke of “metaphors,” “figures,” “images,” “prisms,” and “patterns” to show that what he was saying was not complete and final.
Babak Ahmadi finds grappling with the difficulties of Adorno’s language and style many times more difficult than understanding the complexities of Hegel’s language. According to him, “Anyone who wants to clarify what Adorno said and tries to summarize his words will sometimes reach the point of despair when confronted with his writings. On the contrary, the interpreter of his thoughts, that is, someone who seeks the inner meanings of his texts and has learned this from him, will be forced to invent meanings himself in the process of understanding his writings, and will find examples in these works for expressing thought.
However, Karl Popper, who is remembered as a champion of open philosophical conversation and a defender of rational argument, condemned the followers of critical theory in an article entitled “Reason or Revolution” (1970), following a philosophical debate with Adorno and Habermas, for simply saying vulgar things, but in a loud voice. He even wrote about Habermas in that article: “Most of what he says seems to me vulgar and banal. The rest is simply wrong.”
The overall effect of the culture industry is anti-intellectualism
Adorno believed that the intellectualism’s promise of faith in scientific and rational progress and the expansion of human freedoms had become a nightmare, and science and rationality had been used to destroy human freedom. He says: “The overall effect of the culture industry is an anti-intellectualism effect, in which the intellectualism—that is, the advanced technical and technological dominance—becomes a means of demagoguery of the masses and a means of preventing consciousness. The intellectualism prevents the development of autonomous and independent individuals who consciously decide and judge for themselves. The intellectualism also prevents human efforts at liberation. Human is fully prepared for this freedom to the extent that the positive forces of this age allow.”
