In these articles, Adorno championed avant-garde music at the same time as he critiqued the failings of musical modernity, as in the case of Stravinsky ’ s The Soldier ’ s Tale, which he called in 1923 a “ dismal Bohemian prank .” In these early writings, he was unequivocal in his condemnation of performances which either sought or pretended to achieve a transcendence which Adorno, in line with many intellectuals of the time, regarded as impossible: “ No cathedral ,” he wrote, “ can be built if no community desires one .” In the summer of 1924, Adorno received his doctorate with a study of Edmund Husserl under the direction of the unorthodox neo-Kantian Hans Cornelius.

At this time, Adorno was in intense correspondence with Walter Benjamin on the subject of the latter ’ s Arcades Project.

Yet Adorno ’ s work continued with studies of Beethoven and Richard Wagner ( published in 1939 as " Fragments on Wagner "), drafts of which he read to Benjamin during their final meeting, in December on the Italian Riviera.

Soon after settling into his new home on Riverside Drive, Adorno met with Lazarsfeld in Newark to discuss the Project ’ s plans for investigating the impact of broadcast music.

Expected to make use of devices with which listeners could press a button to indicate whether they liked or disliked a particular piece of music, Adorno bristled with distaste and astonishment: “ I reflected that culture was simply the condition that precluded a mentality that tried to measure it .” Thus Adorno suggested using individual interviews to determine listener reactions and, only three months after meeting Lasarzfeld, completed a 160-page memorandum on the Project ’ s topic, “ Music in Radio .” Adorno was primarily interested in how the musical material was affected by its distribution through the medium of radio and thought it imperative to understand how music was affected by its becoming part of daily life.

“ The meaning of a Beethoven symphony ,” he wrote, “ heard while the listener is walking around or lying in bed is very likely to differ from its effect in a concert-hall where people sit as if they were in church .” In essays published by the Institute ’ s Zeitschrift, Adorno dealt with that atrophy of musical culture which had become instrumental in accelerating tendencies-towards conformism, trivialization and standardization-already present in the larger culture.

Unsurprisingly, Adorno ’ s studies found little resonance among members of the project.

Yet during the two years during which he worked on the Project, Adorno was nevertheless prolific, publishing “ The Radio Sympthony ,” “ A Social Critique of Radio Music ” and “ On Popular Music ,” texts which, along with the draft memorandum and other unpublished writings, which are now found in Robert Hullot-Kentor ’ s recent translation, Current of Music.

Alarmed by reports from Europe, where Adorno ’ s parents suffered increasing discrimination and Benjamin was interned in Colombes, their joint study could entertain few delusions about its practical effects.

" Horkheimer ’ s contributions to this debate, in the form of the essays " The Authoritarian State ," " The End of Reason " and " The Jews and Europe " served as a foundation for what he and Adorno planned to do in their book on dialectical logic.

Fascist propaganda of this sort, Adorno wrote, " simply takes people for what they are: genuine children of today ’ s standardized mass culture who have been robbed to a great extent of their autonomy and spontaneity " The result of these labors, the 1950 study The Authoritarian Personality was pioneering in its combination of quantitative and qualitative methods of collecting and evaluating data as well as its development of the F-scale.

In addition to the aphorisms which conclude Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno put together a collection of aphorisms in honor of Horkheimer ’ s fiftieth birthday that would later be published as Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life.

“ Would you be willing ," Mann wrote, " to think through with me how the work-I mean Leverkuhn ’ s work-might look ; how you would do it if you were in league with the Devil ?” At the end of October 1949, Adorno left America for Europe just as The Authoritarian Personality was being published.

Adorno resumed his teaching duties at the university soon after his arrival, with seminars on " Kant ’ s Transcendental Dialectic ," aesthetics, Hegel, “ Contemporary Problems in the Theory of Knowledge ” and “ The Concept of Knowledge .” Adorno ’ s surprise at his students ' passionate interest in intellectual matters did not, however, blind him to continuing problems within Germany: The literary climate was dominated by writers who had remained in Germany during Hitler's rule, the government re-employed people who had been active in the Nazi apparatus and people were generally loath to own up to their own collaboration or the guilt they thus incurred.

At the same time, however, Adorno renewed his musical work: with talks at the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft, another in connection with a production of Ernst Krenek ’ s opera Leben des Orest, and a seminar on “ Criteria of New Music ” at the Fifth International Summer Course for New Music at Kranichstein.

Adorno started writing it during World War II, in 1944, while he lived as an exile in America, and completed it in 1949.

Prior to his graduation at the top of his class, Adorno was already swept up by the revolutionary mood of the time, as is evidenced by his reading of Georg Lukacs's The Theory of the Novel that year, as well as by his fascination with Ernst Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, of which he would later write:

Hofmann 2005 ) from philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that " to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric " ( Adorno 1981, 34 ).

Adorno had included Stravinsky among the targets of his anti-Gebrauchsmusik diatribes, and though the terminology and classification-system under present consideration is clearly and primarily German, the impulse of composers to write and officials to commission music for specific or ceremonial use is quite obviously universal.

Adorno began writing an introduction to a collection of poetry by Rudolf Borchardt, which was connected with a talk entitled " Charmed Language ," delivered in Zurich, followed by a talk on aesthetics in Paris where he met Beckett again.

And, though his poetry was never " theory-driven ", the interpretation and exegesis of some of his more difficult poems has given rise to profound philosophical speculation by thinkers as divergent as Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and Theodor Adorno.

According to the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, in Chinese poetry Mahler found what he had formerly sought in the genre of German folk song: a mask or costume for the sense of rootlessness or " otherness " attending his identity as a Jew.

Rescued by two Neapolitan barons who had sided for Louis, Raimondello Orsini and Tommaso di Sanseverino, after six months of siege he succeeded in making his escape to Genoa with six galleys sent him by doge Antoniotto Adorno.

The eldest daughter of the Karplus family, Margarete, or Gretel, moved in the intellectual circles of Berlin, where she was acquainted with Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Ernst Bloch, each of whom Adorno would become familiar with during the mid-20s ; after fourteen years, Gretel and Theodor were married in 1937.

Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization which had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences.

Soon after his return to Europe, Gretel moved to Britain, where she and Adorno were married on September 8, 1937 ; a little over a month later, Horkheimer telegrammed from New York with news of a position Adorno could take up with the Princeton Radio Project, then under the directorship of the Austrian sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld.

Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help.

Until his death in 1969, twenty years after his return, Adorno contributed to the intellectual foundations of the Federal Republic, as a professor at Frankfurt University, critic of the vogue enjoyed by Heideggerian philosophy, partisan of critical sociology and teacher of music at the Darmstadt International Summer Courses for New Music.

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.

After a group of students marched to the lectern, unfurling a banner that read " Berlin ’ s left-wing fascists greet Teddy the Classicist ," a number of those present left the lecture in protest after Adorno refused to abandon his talk in favor of discussing his attitude on the current political situation.

But at the first lecture Adorno's attempt to open up the lecture and invite questions whenever they arose degenerated into a disruption from which he quickly fled: after a student wrote on the blackboard " If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease ," three women students approached the lectern, bared their breasts and scattered flower petals over his head.

One example of the clash of intellectual culture and Adorno's methods can be found in Paul Lazarsfeld, the American sociologist for whom Adorno worked in the middle 1930s after fleeing Hitler.

Perhaps the culmination of the school took place at Darmstadt almost immediately after WWII, at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, wherein Schoenberg — who was invited but too ill to travel — was ultimately usurped in musical ideology by the music of his pupil, Webern, as composers and performers from the Second Viennese School ( e. g. Leibowitz, Rufer, Adorno, Kolisch, Stadlen, Stuckenschmidt, Scherchen ) converged with the new serialists ( e. g. Boulez, Stockhausen, Maderna, Nono, et al.

In 1950, Theodor W. Adorno published an essay entitled " Spengler after the Downfall " ( in German: Spengler nach dem Untergang ) to commemorate what would have been Oswald Spengler's 70th birthday.

Adorno reassessed Spengler's thesis three decades after it had been put forth, in light of the catastrophic collapse of Nazi Germany ( although Spengler had not meant " Untergang " in a cataclysmic sense, this was how most authors after WWII interpreted it ).

Like many of his students, Adorno too opposed the emergency laws, as well as the war in Vietnam, which, he said, proved the continued existence of the " world of torture that had begun in Auschwitz ” The situation only deteriorated with the police shooting of Benno Ohnesorg at a protest against the Shah's visit.

Thinkers influenced by Adorno believe that today's society has evolved in a direction foreseen by him, especially in regard to the past ( Auschwitz ), morals or the Culture Industry.

Alexander Garcia Düttman's Das Gedächtnis des Denkens: Versuch über Heidegger und Adorno ( The Memory of Thought: an Essay on Heidegger and Adorno, translated by Nicholas Walker ) attempts to treat the philosophical value of these seemingly opposed and certainly incompatible terms " Auschwitz " and " Germania " in the philosophy of both men in a manner that is not simply comparative.

Theodor Adorno claimed in 1969 “ It is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident .” Artists, philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists and programmers all use the notion of art in their respective fields, and give it operational definitions that vary considerably.

One of the distinguishing characteristics of critical theory, as Adorno and Horkheimer elaborated in their Dialectic of Enlightenment ( 1947 ), is a certain ambivalence concerning the ultimate source or foundation of social domination, an ambivalence which gave rise to the “ pessimism ” of the new critical theory over the possibility of human emancipation and freedom.

As the work proceeded — and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism is revealed to be a mere interiorization — Adorno excitedly remarks in a letter to Berg that he is writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work.

In it, Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier, but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: " For the mind ," Adorno announced, " is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality.

“ In view of what is now threatening to engulf Europe ,” Horkheimer wrote, “ our present work is essentially destined to pass things down through the night that is approaching: a kind of message in a bottle ” As Adorno continued his work in New York with radio talks on music and a lecture on Soren Kierkegaard's doctrine of love, Benjamin fled Paris and attempted to make an illegal border crossing.

In talks, interviews and round-table discussions broadcast on Hessen Radio, South-West Radio and Radio Bremen, Adorno discussed topics as diverse as “ The Administered World ” ( September 1950 ), “ What is the Meaning of ‘ Working Through the Past ?”’ ( February 1960 ) to “ The Teaching Profession and its Taboos ” ( August 1965 ).

" In this sense, the principle of self-preservation, Adorno writes in Negative Dialectics, is nothing but " the law of doom thus far obeyed by history.

In his early essays for the Vienna-based journal Anbruch, Adorno claimed that musical progress is proportional to the composer's ability to constructively deal with the possibilities and limitations contained within what Adorno called the " musical material.

As a pioneer of a self-reflexive sociology who prefigured Bourdieu's ability to factor in the effect of reflection on the societal object, Adorno realized that some criticism ( including deliberate disruption of his classes in the 1960s ) could never be answered in a dialogue between equals if, as he seems to have believed, what the naive ethnographer or sociologist thinks of a human essence is always changing over time.

Because Adorno believed that sociology needs to be self-reflective and self-critical, he believed that the language the sociologist uses, like the language of the ordinary person, is a political construct in large measure that uses, often unreflectingly, concepts installed by dominant classes and social structures ( such as our notion of " deviance " which includes both genuinely deviant individual and " hustlers " operating below social norms because they lack the capital to operate above: for an analysis of this phenomenon, cf.

The most prominent philosophers with which the so-called ' Frankfurt School ' is associated were Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas and Max Horkheimer.

The philosopher Theodor Adorno criticised Husserl's concept of phenomenological epistemology in his metacritique Against Epistemology, which is anti-foundationalist in its stance.

Adorno perceived this in terms of what he called the " culture industry ", where the art is controlled and formulated by the needs of the market and given to a passive population which accepts it — what is marketed is art that is non-challenging and formally incoherent, but which serves its purpose of giving the audience leisure and something to watch or observe.