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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.
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Adorno and teaching
Yet Adorno continued to resist blanket condemnations of the protest movement which would have only strengthened the reactionary thesis according to which political irrationalism was the result of Adorno's teaching.
Surviving through a number of difficult financial years, ICS revised its organizational model more on the lines of the Frankfurt School, a research and teaching center in Germany devoted to Neo-Marxism, that was home to a string of illustrious philosophers Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and today Jürgen Habermas.
As Adorno writes in the Dedication, the " sorrowful science " ( a pun on Nietzsche's The Gay Science ) with which the book is concerned is " the teaching of the good life ", a central theme of both the Greek and Hebrew sources of Western philosophy.
Adorno and at
While at Mondovì, he came to the attention of Francesco Adorno, the local Jesuit Provincial Superior, who sent him to the University of Padua.
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:
At the end of his schooldays, Adorno not only benefited from the rich concert offerings of Frankfurt-in which one could hear performances of works by Schoenberg, Schreker, Stravinsky, Bartók, Busoni, Delius and Hindemith-but also began studying music composition at the Hoch Conservatory while taking private lessons with well-respected composers Bernhard Sekles and Eduard Jung.
Leaving gymnasium to study philosophy, psychology and sociology at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, Adorno continued his readings with Kracauer, turning now to Hegel and Kierkegaard, and began publishing concert reviews and pieces of music for distinguished journals like the Zeitschrift für Musik, the Neue Blätter für Kunst und Literatur and later for the Musikblätter des Anbruch.
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.
7 premiered in Frankfurt, at which time Adorno introduced himself to Berg and both agreed the young philosopher and composer would study with Berg in Vienna.
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.
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.
" In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments which should be conducted " until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish.
At the same time, however, and owing to both the presence of another prominent sociologist at the Institute, Karl Mannheim, as well as the methodological problem posed by treating objects-like " musical material "-as ciphers of social contradictions, Adorno was compelled to abandon any notion of " value-free " sociology in favor of a form of ideology critique which held on to an idea of truth.
With the help of the Academic Assistance Council, Adorno registered as an advanced student at Merton College, Oxford, in June 1934.
During the next four years at Oxford, Adorno made repeated trips to Germany to see both his parents and Gretel, who was still working in Berlin.
While at Oxford, Adorno suffered two great losses: his Aunt Agathe died in June 1935, while Alban Berg died in December of the same year.
In light of this situation, Horkheimer soon found a permanent post for Adorno at the Institute.
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 stopping in Paris, where he met Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler, Michel Leiris and Rene Leibowitz, Adorno delivered a lecture entitled " The Present State of Empirical Social Research in Germany " at a conference on opinion research.
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 and university
With Horkheimer as dean of the Arts Faculty, then rector of the university, responsibilities for the Institute's work fell upon Adorno.
But as 1968 progressed, Adorno became increasingly critical of the students ' disruptions to university life.
During the winter semester of 1968-9 Adorno was on sabbatical leave from the university and thus able to dedicate himself to the completion of his book of aesthetics.
Leading Jewish intellectuals on university faculties included physicist Albert Einstein ; sociologists Karl Mannheim, Erich Fromm, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse ; philosophers Ernst Cassirer and Edmund Husserl ; political theorists Arthur Rosenberg and Gustav Meyer ; and many others.
Ehlers became interested in aesthetic theory, particularly the work of Theodor Adorno, as a university student in Frankfurt.
Adorno and soon
In addition to helping with the Zeitschrift Adorno was expected to be the Institute's liaison with Benjamin, who soon passed on to New York the study of Charles Baudelaire he hoped would serve as a model of the larger Arcades Project.
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.
Adorno and after
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.
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.
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.
Additionally, Adorno assisted Thomas Mann on his novel Doctor Faustus after the latter asked for his help.
Adorno ’ s 1949 dictum —" To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric "— posed the question of what German culture could mean after Auschwitz ; his own continual revision of this dictum — in Negative Dialectics, for example, he wrote that " Perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream "; while in “ Commitment ,” he wrote in 1962 that the dictum " expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature "— was part of post-war Germany ’ s struggle with history and culture.
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 ).
Hofmann 2005 ) from philosopher Theodor W. Adorno that " to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric " ( Adorno 1981, 34 ).
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