ADORNO THE UNDERRATED

There is way too much information floating around these days, and most of it is trash. The unfortunate thing is that trash occupies the space in the reader’s attention which should otherwise belong to better pursuits. For this reason, I believe that it is a worthwhile cause, besides expressing my personal views on this or that subject, to draw my reader’s attention to this or that semi-forgotten, or totally forgotten, individual of note: Look, here’s such and such person deserving your attention. You may not agree with him or her, but at least do not ignore them on account of your ignorance of them.

It is only natural that most of the entries in my book are focused on my personal views of different things, but there are some whose primary purpose is to introduce the reader to some very estimable names, which, for some reason, have not become widely known, yet widely known they deserve to be. My desire to make the reader aware of their existence does not make such entries less personal than the other kind, of course, as the fact itself of my choosing to do so is not an objective quest to fill in some missing blanks, but a very subjective decision on my part.

The next couple of entries are therefore more generally informative than personally contemplative, which is indeed their proper function. The first covers the biography and the second, the major written work of one man very likely completely unknown to the reader, yet whose life and legacy are most certainly noteworthy in several respects. If these two entries succeed in eliciting in my reader an interest in this person, then their purpose has been achieved.

Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, alias Theodor W. Adorno, was surely one of the more important, yet somehow almost deliberately underrated thinkers of the post-World War II era. Oddly enough, although not too surprisingly, he used to be better known in Russia (where I first became acquainted with his works) and across Continental Europe than in the English-speaking world, where, regrettably, no decent translations of his works were made in my time, and even with the appearance of better English translations quite recently, a stigma of inconsequentiality is still leaving its mark on his memory, as if the ignominy of his disregard in the past has been taken as an objective historical judgment of his legacy.

The reason why I find such disregard of him (particularly, in the United States) not surprising, is that, along with being a Marxist, albeit quite unconventional by, say, official Soviet standards, he was a relentless and uncompromising critic of contemporary Western society. (See my entry The Culture Industry, that follows, where Adorno’s views are treated in more detail.) It is always easy and the least instructive to criticize what one is expected to criticize: the outcasts and rejects, the proverbial bogeymen and other demons; but there is nothing more instructive and helpful to keep things in perspective than to criticize the  idol one has erected and worshiped religiously, to the detriment of religion proper.

Aside from being a prodigious philosopher across a broad spectrum of philosophical and social issues (his challenge to Karl Popper’s philosophy of science and to Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of existence, plus his highly original contribution to epistemology and ethics among other things, are exceptionally valuable), Adorno was also famous (at least in Russia and Germany, and in a few other places, if those first two have not been enough already) as an aestheticist and a remarkable music critic, not in that absurd caricature mold that I discussed in the earlier entry Skeptics and Critics, but in the very best sense of the word critic, which was also discussed there and can be further evidenced in his meta-musicological title: Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949).

In fact, all these very different intellectual pursuits of his, coupled with great thoroughness and depth of his scholarship, point to the closest approximation to our imaginary Renaissance Man, that we can find in the post-World War II world. The great scope and originality of his influence undoubtedly stem from the interdisciplinary character of his thinking; and the kind of erudite fastidiousness, with which he studied the nuances of post-Kantian Western philosophical traditions, is only possible when the scholar possesses a truly comprehensive grasp on his subject matter, thus adding a special intensity to his critique.

The following two biographical paragraphs are taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for my reader’s reference. There is no point for me to try to find an elegant way of retelling Adorno’s life story, so, let it be this way, since it is pretty obvious that without some minimal mentioning of his basic facts of life I just cannot do.

Born on September 11, 1903, as Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund, Adorno lived in his hometown Frankfurt-am-Main for the first three decades of his life (1903-1934), and the last two (1949-1969). He was the only son of a wealthy German wine merchant father of an assimilated Jewish background and an accomplished musician mother of Corsican Catholic descent. He studied philosophy with Hans Cornelius, a neo-Kantian philosopher, and music composition with Alban Berg. He wrote his Doctorate on Kierkegaard’s aesthetics in 1931, under the supervision of the Christian socialist Paul Tillich. After two years as a Privatdozent, he was expelled by the Nazis, and in the spring of 1934 he left Germany altogether. During the Hitler regime he resided in Oxford, New York City, and southern California. There he wrote several books, for which he later became famous, including Dialektik der Aufklärung (with Max Horkheimer), Philosophie der neuen Musik, The Authoritarian Personality (a collaborative project) and Minima Moralia. Also from these years come his devastating critiques of mass culture, and the culture industry. Returning to Frankfurt in 1949, to take a position in the philosophy department, Adorno established himself as a leading German intellectual and a key figure in the Institute of Social Research. Founded in 1923, as a center for Marxist scholarship, the Institute had been led by Max Horkheimer, since 1930. It provided the hub to what became known as the Frankfurt School. Adorno became the Institute’s director in 1958. From the 1950’s come In Search of Wagner; Prisms, a collection of social and cultural studies; Against Epistemology, an anti-foundationalist critique of Husserlian phenomenology, and the first volume of Notes to Literature, a collection of essays in literary criticism.

Conflict and consolidation mark the last decade of Adorno’s life. A key figure in the positivism dispute in German sociology, he was a key player in debates about restructuring German universities and a lightning rod for both student activists and their right-wing critics. These never-ending controversies did not prevent him though from publishing numerous books of music criticism, two more volumes of Notes to Literature, works on Hegel, and on existential philosophy, and collected essays in sociology, and aesthetics. Negative Dialectics, Adorno’s magnum opus on epistemology and metaphysics, appeared in 1966. Aesthetic Theory was the other magnum opus, on which he had worked throughout the 1960’s. It appeared posthumously in 1970. He died of a heart attack on August 6, 1969, one month shy of his sixty-sixth birthday.

My next entry will focus on Adorno’s greatest contribution to modern political thought: his concept of “The Culture Industry.”