T W Adorno
Biographic Data
| ID | 3631313 |
|---|---|
| NAME | T W Adorno |
| GIVEN NAMES | T W |
| FAMILY NAME | Adorno |
| SIGNATURE | ADORNO T W |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 120 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1954 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Kierkegaard Once More
1. According to the measure of his own authorship, Kierkegaard must not triumph. He denied to the deceased Bishop Mynster, whom he loved, the name of a truth-witness [Wahrheitszeugen]. On no account would he who repeats formulaically that he speaks without authority have laid claim to it himself. Unmistakably, however, his idea of the truth-witness arose from the construction of his own existence [Existenz]. In the first of the newspaper articles…
Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959)
What today is manifestly a crisis in culture (Bildung) is not exclusively the subject matter of any particular discipline nor even of a sociology of culture. The symptoms of the decline of culture, which are recognizable everywhere, even among the highly educated, cannot be explained entirely by the inadequacies of educational systems and teaching methods which have been blamed for generations. However necessary they may be, pedagogical reforms a…
On Tradition
Tradition comes from tradere: to hand down. It recalls the continuity of generations, what is handed down by one member to another, even the heritage of handicraft. The image of handing down expresses physical proximity, immediacy — one hand should receive from another. Such immediacy is the more or less natural relation of a familial sort. The category of tradition is essentially feudal, just as [Werner] Sombart called feudal economy traditional…
Marginalia on Mahler (On the 25th Anniversary of his death, May 18, 1936)
Why Mahler wrote the “Songs on the Death of Children,” set to the Rückert poems, became clear to me when, for the first time in my life, a loved one died. This feeling — to be bent together to the breaking point in a powerful arc between tenderness for what is nearest and loss into what is most distant — does not have its measure in the individual misfortune which transports children into the realm of the dead. Yet the dead are indeed our childre…
The Aging of the New Music
This essay, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, examines the perceived aging of new music, particularly twelve-tone music, in the context of its historical development and reception. Adorno argues that the once radical and challenging aspects of new music, specifically its break from traditional tonality and its embrace of dissonance, have become increasingly conventional and predictable. He explores how the institutionalization…
Theory of the Avant-Garde
Aesthetic Theory
Aesthetic Theory
The Idea of Natural History
Allow me to preface my remarks today by saying that I am not going to give a lecture in the usual sense of communicating results or presenting a systematic statement. Rather, what I have to say will remain on the level of an essay; it is no more than an attempt to take up and further develop the problems of the so-called Frankfurt discussion. I recognize that many uncomplimentary things have been said about this discussion, but I am equally aware…
The Essay as Form
That in Germany the essay is decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a convincing tradition; that its strenuous requirements have only rarely been met: all this has been often remarked upon and censured. essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art.' But neither discontent with this situat…
Education for Autonomy
ADORNO: The requirement of autonomy or independent thinking seems self-evident in a democracy. To clarify this claim, I would like to refer to the beginning of Kant's short treatise, A Response to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? There he defines tutelage — and thus also implicitly its opposite, autonomy — as self-incurred when its causes are not a lack of understanding but a lack of the resolve and courage to use one's understanding without …
On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness
VON HASELBERG: In what sense can we speak of adequate consciousness? Adequate, that is, in relation to the time in which we live. Indeed, to what degree can we define or discuss consciousness apart from empirical subjects — regardless of whether we have naive subjects in mind or subjects as formulated by philosophy? ADORNO: There is something which might be called a historical drive within the movement of things. For their part, even subjects are…
On the Problem of Musical Analysis
This article, translated by Max Paddison, presents Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on the challenges and possibilities of musical analysis. Adorno argues against purely formalist approaches, emphasizing the importance of understanding music's social and historical context. He explores the complex relationship between musical structure and expression, advocating for a critical analysis that considers the interplay of immanent musical elements and …
Music and the New Music: In Memory of Peter Suhrkamp
In one of my last conversations with Peter Suhrkamp, he asked me in regard to the titles of several essays included in my Klangfiguren: "Why do you people still go on talking about New Music? In painting any such designation was dropped a long time ago, but in music you bend every muscle to keep this one alive?" I should like to try to answer my dead friend as well as I can. In so doing, of course, I cannot simply restrict myself to mere matters …
Resignation
We older representatives of that for which the name Frankfurt School has established itself have recently had the reproach of resignation levelled against us. We had, it is stated, developed elements of a critical theory of society, but we were not prepared to draw the practical consequences from this theory. We neither designed programs for action nor did we support the actions of those who felt themselves inspired by critical theory. I shall si…
The Metacritique of Epistemology
The attempt to discuss Husserl's pure phenomenology in a dialectical spirit is particularly open to a suspicion of arbitrariness. Husserl's program aims at an “ontic sphere of absolute origins,” fully in view of that “organized spirit of contradiction” (organisierten Widerspruchsgeist), which Hegel once characterized as his procedure in a conversation with Goethe. The dialectic, as conceived by Hegel and subsequently turned against him, despite a…
Culture and Administration
modo de vida contemporneo e a natureza. Diante dessa situao, um dos maiores desafios atuais humanidade est relacionado com o rumo e o sentido da relao entre economia e meio ambiente
On the Social Situation of Music
No matter where music is heard today, it sketches in the clearest possible lines the contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society; at the same time, music is separated from this same society by the deepest of all flaws produced by this society itself. And yet, society is unable to absorb more of this music than its ruins and external remains. The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value i…
The Actuality of Philosophy
Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope t…
Music and Technique
The meaning of the Greek word techne from which both “technique” and “technology” are derived offers an indication of the unity of this concept with art. If art is the external representation of something internal, the concept of technique embraces everything which pertains to the realization of that interior substance. In the case of music, not only the realization of spiritual substance in notes is involved, but the transformation which makes t…
Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959)
Neutralization of culture—the words have the ring of a philosophical concept. They posit as a more or less general reflection that intellectual constructs have forfeited their intrinsic meanings because they have lost any possible relation to social praxis and have become that which aesthetics retrospectively claims they are—objects of pure observation, of mere contemplation. As such they ultimately lose even their own aesthetic import; their aes…
Negative Dialectics
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Negative Dialectics. By T. W. Adorno. Translated by E. B. Ashton. ( R.K.P. 1973. Pp. xxii + 416. Price £4.95) J . A. Bradley J . A. Bradley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 101, October 1975, Pages 368–370, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218987 Published: 01 October 1975
Lyric Poetry and Society
The announcement of a lecture on lyric poetry and society will make a good many of you uncomfortable. You will expect a sociological study of the sort which can take any subject it wants under consideration—just as fifty years ago we had psychologies, thirty years ago phenomenologies of every conceivable thing. You will fear that a discussion of conditions under which works of art have come into being, and their subsequent effects, must impertine…
The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column
The group of studies to which the content analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column belongs, sets as its aim the investigation of the nature and motivations of some large-scale social phenomena involving irrational elements in a peculiar way—fused with what may be dubbed pseudo-rationality. Various mass movements spread all over the world in which people seem to act against their own rational interests of self-preservation and the "pursu…
Theses Against Occultism
I. The attraction to the occult is a symptom of the retrogression of consciousness. Consciousness has lost the strength to think the absolute and to bear the conditional. Rather than conceptually determining both in terms of unity and difference, consciousness mixes them indiscriminately. The absolute becomes a fact, the conditional becomes unmediated being [wesenhaft]. Monotheism disintegrates into a second mythology. In a social psychological s…
The Idea of Natural History
Allow me to preface my remarks today by saying that I am not going to give a lecture in the usual sense of communicating results or presenting a systematic statement. Rather, what I have to say will remain on the level of an essay; it is no more than an attempt to take up and further develop the problems of the so-called Frankfurt discussion. I recognize that many uncomplimentary things have been said about this discussion, but I am equally aware…
The Essay as Form
That in Germany the essay is decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a convincing tradition; that its strenuous requirements have only rarely been met: all this has been often remarked upon and censured. essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art.' But neither discontent with this situat…
The Actuality of Philosophy
Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope t…
Lyric Poetry and Society
The announcement of a lecture on lyric poetry and society will make a good many of you uncomfortable. You will expect a sociological study of the sort which can take any subject it wants under consideration—just as fifty years ago we had psychologies, thirty years ago phenomenologies of every conceivable thing. You will fear that a discussion of conditions under which works of art have come into being, and their subsequent effects, must impertine…
The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column
The group of studies to which the content analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column belongs, sets as its aim the investigation of the nature and motivations of some large-scale social phenomena involving irrational elements in a peculiar way—fused with what may be dubbed pseudo-rationality. Various mass movements spread all over the world in which people seem to act against their own rational interests of self-preservation and the "pursu…
On the Social Situation of Music
No matter where music is heard today, it sketches in the clearest possible lines the contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society; at the same time, music is separated from this same society by the deepest of all flaws produced by this society itself. And yet, society is unable to absorb more of this music than its ruins and external remains. The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value i…
Theory of Pseudo-Culture (1959)
What today is manifestly a crisis in culture (Bildung) is not exclusively the subject matter of any particular discipline nor even of a sociology of culture. The symptoms of the decline of culture, which are recognizable everywhere, even among the highly educated, cannot be explained entirely by the inadequacies of educational systems and teaching methods which have been blamed for generations. However necessary they may be, pedagogical reforms a…
Culture and Administration
modo de vida contemporneo e a natureza. Diante dessa situao, um dos maiores desafios atuais humanidade est relacionado com o rumo e o sentido da relao entre economia e meio ambiente
Resignation
We older representatives of that for which the name Frankfurt School has established itself have recently had the reproach of resignation levelled against us. We had, it is stated, developed elements of a critical theory of society, but we were not prepared to draw the practical consequences from this theory. We neither designed programs for action nor did we support the actions of those who felt themselves inspired by critical theory. I shall si…
Theses Against Occultism
I. The attraction to the occult is a symptom of the retrogression of consciousness. Consciousness has lost the strength to think the absolute and to bear the conditional. Rather than conceptually determining both in terms of unity and difference, consciousness mixes them indiscriminately. The absolute becomes a fact, the conditional becomes unmediated being [wesenhaft]. Monotheism disintegrates into a second mythology. In a social psychological s…
On Tradition
Tradition comes from tradere: to hand down. It recalls the continuity of generations, what is handed down by one member to another, even the heritage of handicraft. The image of handing down expresses physical proximity, immediacy — one hand should receive from another. Such immediacy is the more or less natural relation of a familial sort. The category of tradition is essentially feudal, just as [Werner] Sombart called feudal economy traditional…
Education for Autonomy
ADORNO: The requirement of autonomy or independent thinking seems self-evident in a democracy. To clarify this claim, I would like to refer to the beginning of Kant's short treatise, A Response to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? There he defines tutelage — and thus also implicitly its opposite, autonomy — as self-incurred when its causes are not a lack of understanding but a lack of the resolve and courage to use one's understanding without …
On the Problem of Musical Analysis
This article, translated by Max Paddison, presents Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on the challenges and possibilities of musical analysis. Adorno argues against purely formalist approaches, emphasizing the importance of understanding music's social and historical context. He explores the complex relationship between musical structure and expression, advocating for a critical analysis that considers the interplay of immanent musical elements and …
Music and Technique
The meaning of the Greek word techne from which both “technique” and “technology” are derived offers an indication of the unity of this concept with art. If art is the external representation of something internal, the concept of technique embraces everything which pertains to the realization of that interior substance. In the case of music, not only the realization of spiritual substance in notes is involved, but the transformation which makes t…
Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959)
Neutralization of culture—the words have the ring of a philosophical concept. They posit as a more or less general reflection that intellectual constructs have forfeited their intrinsic meanings because they have lost any possible relation to social praxis and have become that which aesthetics retrospectively claims they are—objects of pure observation, of mere contemplation. As such they ultimately lose even their own aesthetic import; their aes…
The Aging of the New Music
This essay, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, examines the perceived aging of new music, particularly twelve-tone music, in the context of its historical development and reception. Adorno argues that the once radical and challenging aspects of new music, specifically its break from traditional tonality and its embrace of dissonance, have become increasingly conventional and predictable. He explores how the institutionalization…
Aesthetic Theory
Music and the New Music: In Memory of Peter Suhrkamp
In one of my last conversations with Peter Suhrkamp, he asked me in regard to the titles of several essays included in my Klangfiguren: "Why do you people still go on talking about New Music? In painting any such designation was dropped a long time ago, but in music you bend every muscle to keep this one alive?" I should like to try to answer my dead friend as well as I can. In so doing, of course, I cannot simply restrict myself to mere matters …
The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950
Versuch über Wagner
Sociologica II. Reden und Vorträge
Lyric Poetry and Society
The announcement of a lecture on lyric poetry and society will make a good many of you uncomfortable. You will expect a sociological study of the sort which can take any subject it wants under consideration—just as fifty years ago we had psychologies, thirty years ago phenomenologies of every conceivable thing. You will fear that a discussion of conditions under which works of art have come into being, and their subsequent effects, must impertine…
The Stars Down to Earth: The Los Angeles Times Astrology Column
The group of studies to which the content analysis of the Los Angeles Times astrology column belongs, sets as its aim the investigation of the nature and motivations of some large-scale social phenomena involving irrational elements in a peculiar way—fused with what may be dubbed pseudo-rationality. Various mass movements spread all over the world in which people seem to act against their own rational interests of self-preservation and the "pursu…
Theses Against Occultism
I. The attraction to the occult is a symptom of the retrogression of consciousness. Consciousness has lost the strength to think the absolute and to bear the conditional. Rather than conceptually determining both in terms of unity and difference, consciousness mixes them indiscriminately. The absolute becomes a fact, the conditional becomes unmediated being [wesenhaft]. Monotheism disintegrates into a second mythology. In a social psychological s…
The Dialectical Imagination. A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923-1950
Negative Dialectics
Journal Article Book Reviews Get access Negative Dialectics. By T. W. Adorno. Translated by E. B. Ashton. ( R.K.P. 1973. Pp. xxii + 416. Price £4.95) J . A. Bradley J . A. Bradley Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 25, Issue 101, October 1975, Pages 368–370, https://doi.org/10.2307/2218987 Published: 01 October 1975
Alienated Masterpiece: The Missa Solemnis (1959)
Neutralization of culture—the words have the ring of a philosophical concept. They posit as a more or less general reflection that intellectual constructs have forfeited their intrinsic meanings because they have lost any possible relation to social praxis and have become that which aesthetics retrospectively claims they are—objects of pure observation, of mere contemplation. As such they ultimately lose even their own aesthetic import; their aes…
The Actuality of Philosophy
Whoever chooses philosophy as a profession today must first reject the illusion that earlier philosophical enterprises began with: that the power of thought is sufficient to grasp the totality of the real. No justifying reason could rediscover itself in a reality whose order and form suppresses every claim to reason; only polemically does reason present itself to the knower as total reality, while only in traces and ruins is it prepared to hope t…
Music and Technique
The meaning of the Greek word techne from which both “technique” and “technology” are derived offers an indication of the unity of this concept with art. If art is the external representation of something internal, the concept of technique embraces everything which pertains to the realization of that interior substance. In the case of music, not only the realization of spiritual substance in notes is involved, but the transformation which makes t…
Resignation
We older representatives of that for which the name Frankfurt School has established itself have recently had the reproach of resignation levelled against us. We had, it is stated, developed elements of a critical theory of society, but we were not prepared to draw the practical consequences from this theory. We neither designed programs for action nor did we support the actions of those who felt themselves inspired by critical theory. I shall si…
The Metacritique of Epistemology
The attempt to discuss Husserl's pure phenomenology in a dialectical spirit is particularly open to a suspicion of arbitrariness. Husserl's program aims at an “ontic sphere of absolute origins,” fully in view of that “organized spirit of contradiction” (organisierten Widerspruchsgeist), which Hegel once characterized as his procedure in a conversation with Goethe. The dialectic, as conceived by Hegel and subsequently turned against him, despite a…
Culture and Administration
modo de vida contemporneo e a natureza. Diante dessa situao, um dos maiores desafios atuais humanidade est relacionado com o rumo e o sentido da relao entre economia e meio ambiente
On the Social Situation of Music
No matter where music is heard today, it sketches in the clearest possible lines the contradictions and flaws which cut through present-day society; at the same time, music is separated from this same society by the deepest of all flaws produced by this society itself. And yet, society is unable to absorb more of this music than its ruins and external remains. The role of music in the social process is exclusively that of a commodity; its value i…
Music and the New Music: In Memory of Peter Suhrkamp
In one of my last conversations with Peter Suhrkamp, he asked me in regard to the titles of several essays included in my Klangfiguren: "Why do you people still go on talking about New Music? In painting any such designation was dropped a long time ago, but in music you bend every muscle to keep this one alive?" I should like to try to answer my dead friend as well as I can. In so doing, of course, I cannot simply restrict myself to mere matters …
On the Problem of Musical Analysis
This article, translated by Max Paddison, presents Theodor W. Adorno's reflections on the challenges and possibilities of musical analysis. Adorno argues against purely formalist approaches, emphasizing the importance of understanding music's social and historical context. He explores the complex relationship between musical structure and expression, advocating for a critical analysis that considers the interplay of immanent musical elements and …
Education for Autonomy
ADORNO: The requirement of autonomy or independent thinking seems self-evident in a democracy. To clarify this claim, I would like to refer to the beginning of Kant's short treatise, A Response to the Question: What Is Enlightenment? There he defines tutelage — and thus also implicitly its opposite, autonomy — as self-incurred when its causes are not a lack of understanding but a lack of the resolve and courage to use one's understanding without …
On the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness
VON HASELBERG: In what sense can we speak of adequate consciousness? Adequate, that is, in relation to the time in which we live. Indeed, to what degree can we define or discuss consciousness apart from empirical subjects — regardless of whether we have naive subjects in mind or subjects as formulated by philosophy? ADORNO: There is something which might be called a historical drive within the movement of things. For their part, even subjects are…
The Idea of Natural History
Allow me to preface my remarks today by saying that I am not going to give a lecture in the usual sense of communicating results or presenting a systematic statement. Rather, what I have to say will remain on the level of an essay; it is no more than an attempt to take up and further develop the problems of the so-called Frankfurt discussion. I recognize that many uncomplimentary things have been said about this discussion, but I am equally aware…
The Essay as Form
That in Germany the essay is decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a convincing tradition; that its strenuous requirements have only rarely been met: all this has been often remarked upon and censured. essay form has not yet, today, travelled the road to independence which its sister, poetry, covered long ago; the road of development from a primitive, undifferentiated unity with science, ethics, and art.' But neither discontent with this situat…
Theory of the Avant-Garde
Aesthetic Theory
Aesthetic Theory
The Aging of the New Music
This essay, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, examines the perceived aging of new music, particularly twelve-tone music, in the context of its historical development and reception. Adorno argues that the once radical and challenging aspects of new music, specifically its break from traditional tonality and its embrace of dissonance, have become increasingly conventional and predictable. He explores how the institutionalization…
Marginalia on Mahler (On the 25th Anniversary of his death, May 18, 1936)
Why Mahler wrote the “Songs on the Death of Children,” set to the Rückert poems, became clear to me when, for the first time in my life, a loved one died. This feeling — to be bent together to the breaking point in a powerful arc between tenderness for what is nearest and loss into what is most distant — does not have its measure in the individual misfortune which transports children into the realm of the dead. Yet the dead are indeed our childre…
Philosophy (23 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Art (11 works) · Aesthetics (9 works) · Sociology (9 works) · Psychology (8 works) · Law (7 works) · Law (7 works) · Political science (7 works)