Free essay: Adorno, Theodor W. German

admin @ December 30, 2007

Free essay:  Theodor W. Adorno, the son of a Jewish merchant and an Italian singer, became famous as a philosopher and aesthetic theorist, not only for his many essays on literature and art, but chiefly for the critical theory he developed together with Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. His most famous work, written with Horkheimer during the years of exile in America, is the Dialektik der Aufklärung ( 1947; Dialectic of Enlightenment), which tackles the question of how the horror of National Socialism could have happened in a highly civilized country. In answering this question Horkheimer and Adorno provide a general critique of the modern age and capitalism, which reaches far beyond the narrow historical context of World War II to examine how Enlightenment thought made way for positivist philosophy as a "myth" of reality. With the resulting disintegration of reality into isolated facts, Western rationalism reaches its limit. This terminal state of affairs has had a destructive effect on the Western world itself.
Free essay:  In this work, and in his second, pessimistically tinged philosophical work, the Negative Dialektik ( 1966; Negative Dialectics), Adorno stands in opposition to his more optimistic colleague Ernst Bloch, whose Das Prinzip Hoffnung ( 1953; the Principle of Hope) he dismissed as naive. In what is known as the positivism dispute, Adorno also accused conventional philosophy ( Karl Popper and Martin Heidegger) of positing an object independent of the subject, when the object is in fact subjectively defined and equally arbitrary. This, according to Adorno, obscures the real interrelations between individual and society, subject and object, essence and appearance. He therefore calls for a fundamental redefinition of the evaluating subject in society and art. In consequence, the posthumously published Ästhetische Theorie ( 1970; Aesthetic Theory) refers mainly to the concept of art in the context of the modern age, a bias that is also apparent in the subjects of his many essays on art and literature produced from 1930 onward.
Free essay:  Both Adomo’s style of philosophy and his critique of social systems, based on the theories of Hegel, Marx, and Freud, are shaped by his predominant dialectic mode of thought. In historical reality and therefore also in philosophical thought, Adomo sees contradictions that cannot be resolved. These contradictions also give art a dual character: on the one hand art is socially determined, yet on the other the work of art is autonomous and independent of the social conditions that produced it. According to Adomo, we should not seek to resolve this contradiction but rather should accept it as it is, using the work of art as a means to achieve knowledge. He therefore criticizes the rigid, dogmatic conception of realism in art (as represented by Georg Lukács and Marxist aesthetics), which assumes that art’s only function is to reflect social injustices. On the other hand, Adorno declares himself in favor of an art of protest, an art that refuses to endorse existing social conditions. His essays give new form to the concept of the avant-garde. Especially in the period following World War II, after his return in 1949 from exile in America, Adorno produced some of his most important writings on art and literature, written in his distinctive dialectic-artistic style; these works can themselves be considered as avant-garde works of art.

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