Adorno in 60 Minutes E-Book

Walther Ziegler

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 77

Beschreibung

Adorno is one of the most charismatic thinkers in philosophical history. The bald-headed professor in horn-rimmed glasses gave our modern civilization a fatal diagnosis – perhaps the most fatal one conceivable: we may have raised ourselves through science, capitalism and techniques of state administration to the position of masters over Nature and brought this latter under our control; but we have, precisely thereby, also enslaved ourselves. We have become in the end manipulated victims of the mass consumer society that we ourselves created. All our lives are lived in delusions whose shell we cannot penetrate. "Wrong life cannot be lived rightly": this famous dictum of Adorno's symbolizes, still today, modern Man's uncertainties and contradictions. On the one hand we Westerners enjoy, thanks to capitalism, unprecedented medical and technical blessings; on the other, we feel we're losing ourselves, becoming slaves. Many people sell their labour-power all day and then spend the evening in front of the TV which dangles before them a happy and adventurous world that is long since lost to them. Are we all completely manipulated? Has the Enlightenment project of freeing Man, through reason and science, from superstition really, as Adorno claims, turned into its opposite? Is he right in thinking that science itself is leading us into the danger of a new barbarism? Adorno gives extremely exciting and original answers to these questions. The book "Adorno in 60 Minutes" explains, step by step, his main works, aided in this by over 50 direct quotations from them. In the last chapter "Of What Use is Adorno's Discovery for Us Today?" it is shown what burning relevance his Critical Theory has for the personal life of every one of us today. The book is published as part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Leseprobe

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Inhalt

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Adorno’s Central Idea

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Self-Repression Through Reason:The Example of Odysseus

The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sadeas a Consequence of Enlightenment

The Co-Optation of the Individualby the Culture Industry

Negative Dialectics – Overcoming Language and Liberation from the Dictatorship of the Concept

Of What Use Is Adorno’s Discovery for Us Today?

Truth Beyond Words – Can One Think Conceptually Against the Concept?

Must Enlightenment and Science Really Always End in Totalitarianism?

The Whole is Not Falsifiable – Adorno’s Critique of Popper and of Positivism

Can ‘Wrong Life Be Lived Rightly’ After All?

The Power of Negative Thinking – Negation That Finds No Rest in Any Affirmation

Bibliographical References

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) counts still today as one of the most charismatic and intellectually imposing thinkers in the whole history of philosophy. Already during his lifetime he exerted great influence on the student movements that so deeply marked the post-war German Federal Republic and indeed on the intellectual climate of this young republic in general. No other German intellectual of the period between 1959 and 1969 lectured so frequently on public radio and TV channels as did Adorno.

As did Sartre in France, Adorno became, in Germany, a charismatic point of orientation for student protestors and indeed for the New Left as a whole. He also resembled Sartre in other respects: both men were small and stocky, wore horn-rimmed glasses to correct their overstrained sight, and were known to have conducted many affairs with attractive women. His lectures, that many students from other parts of Europe and even from America travelled thousands of miles to attend, were always packed – though very few of those who attended them could honestly claim to have understood all that they heard there. The immensely complex lines of reasoning spun out at the lectern by the little bald man in horn-rimmed glasses, and such strenuously abstract books of his as the late masterpiece Negative Dialectics, are still looked on today in Germany as intellectual hurdles that only the greatest intellectual athletes can hope to clear.

His work contains, among other things, a rigorous critique of the capitalist system, so that he is often considered to have prepared the ground for the great wave of social protest that shook many countries in 1968. There is certainly some truth to this, even if he was dismayed by many aspects of this great revolt that broke out, also at his own German university, in the year before his death and refused, to the disappointment of some of his admirers, to play the role of a leader of this movement.

Adorno’s central idea is a paradoxical and provocative one. Modern capitalist society has gone entirely and fundamentally astray. Individuals in this society enjoy, indeed, unprecedented advantages in terms of mobility, technology, medical care and other forms of prosperity; but at the same time we have lost, collectively, all that makes life really worth living, namely: a sense for Nature (including, perhaps most importantly, for the natural beings that we ourselves are) and, in the end, even the ability to love:

This, modern Man’s loss of the ability to love is, Adorno believes, a direct consequence of the commodity and consumer society. Human beings become calculating and calculable because in a society based solely on “exchange value” everything and everyone has a fixed and determined price. Every commodity, and first and foremost the commodity that is an individual’s labour-power, is and has to be carried to market and sold. This leads, in the end, to human actions and relations appearing to those involved in them as external, exchangeable “things” that they themselves, as humans, have no real part in. In a society where nothing is ever done unless it is paid for, the once-natural concern for the fate of others gradually vanishes. Everyone fights for their own advantage alone. “Me Incorporated” becomes a symbol of our modern world.

What’s more, Adorno is not criticizing here just the fact that in market societies like ours everything is appraised in terms of supply and demand; he is also pointing out that consumer societies make it their job to awaken ever new artificial “needs” in the consumer, so that commodities become, in these societies, fetishes that enjoy an almost religious veneration.

For many people in today’s society, for example, a car is much more than just a means of getting around. They invest their own identity in this lifeless object to such an extent that they derive their whole sense of their value as human beings from the make and quality of car they own. Capitalism turns individuals into dependent beings, penetrating and deforming their whole character. Adorno believed so strongly in this notion of our having been wholly and entirely distorted by the world we have created that he included in his most personal work, the Minima Moralia, a pithy little thesis that turned completely on its head the famous thesis of a philosopher, Hegel, whom he greatly admired but who had taken, in the end, a positive and even apologetic stance toward the modern world around him. “The truth is the whole”, Hegel had concluded in the 1820s; just over a hundred years later, Adorno’s conclusion was:

This general suspicion cast upon modern capitalist society in its entirety earned Adorno the reputation of being the most significant of the various representatives of what is called “Critical Theory”, a body of thought which did indeed set itself the task of analysing and critiquing capitalist society not just, as Marx and the early Marxists had, in its economic basis but in all its social and cultural ramifications. Since all the thinkers associated with this current in social philosophy had been associated, in the 1920s and 30s, as teachers or researchers with the Institute for Social Research of the University of Frankfurt, “Critical Theory” is also sometimes referred to as “the Frankfurt School”.

The “Frankfurt School” thinkers included, besides Adorno, such writers famous in their own right as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm. These philosophers all sharply criticized the ossified structures of post-war capitalist societies. In practicing this critique they still made frequent reference to Marx and continued to describe themselves as philosophical “materialists”.

But in the face of the degeneration of Soviet Marxism into Stalinism and of the transformation, in the West, of the “proletarian” more and more into a “consumer”, the Critical Theorists came to consider world communist revolution as a less and less realistic prospect. They replaced Marx’s notions of the inevitability of the worldwide overthrow of the existing order and the imminent realization of a classless society with the notion of the need for a permanent critique of existing society. Hence the name “Critical Theory”.

It was in exile from his German homeland that Adorno authored, together with Max Horkheimer, his friend since their student days, the book that counts as the primary work of Critical Theory: The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The two men, like the other prominent Critical Theorists Fromm and Marcuse, had had to flee to the USA, due to their Jewish origins, when Hitler seized power in 1933. The Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the country that gave them refuge, counts still today as one of the most important standard works of sociology and social philosophy.

The book represented a watershed in social philosophy because it was the first to develop a “critique of critique”. “Enlightenment”, embodied in the works of such great early-modern thinkers as Rousseau, Voltaire, Diderot, Kant, Hume and Locke, had been, itself, a great enterprise of social critique.

These 17th and 18th century “Enlighteners” critiqued feudalism, the divine right of kings, religion and all superstition and aspired to free human beings once and for all from all the old irrational constraints passed down from the Middle Ages. “Who should rule the people if not the people themselves?” ran one of their progressive rallying cries. The Enlightenment, in other words, was the great age of critical thinking.