Page "Theodor W. Adorno" Paragraph 32

Adorno's critique of the dominant climate of post-war Germany was also directed against the pathos that had grown up around Heideggerianism, as practiced by writers like Karl Jaspers and Otto Friedrich Bollow, and which had subsequently seeped into public discourse.

His 1964 publication of The Jargon of Authenticity took aim at the halo such writers had attached to words like " angst ", " decision " and " leap ".

After seven years of work, Adorno completed Negative Dialectics in 1966, after which, during the summer semester of 1967 and the winter semester of 1967-8, he offered regular philosophy seminars to discuss the book chapter by chapter.

Among the students at these seminars were the Americans Angela Davis and Irving Wohlfarth.

One objection which would soon take on ever greater importance, was that critical thought must adopt the standpoint of the oppressed, to which Adorno replied that negative dialectics was concerned " with the dissolution of standpoint thinking itself.