Adorno in 60 Minutes: Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

My thanks go to Rudolf Aichner for his tireless critical editing; Silke Ruthenberg for the fine graphics; Lydia Pointvogl, Eva Amberger, Christiane Hüttner, and Dr. Martin Engler for their excellent work as manuscript readers and sub-editors; Prof. Guntram Knapp, who first inspired me with enthusiasm for philosophy; and Angela Schumitz, who handled in the most professional manner, as chief editorial reader, the production of both the German and the English editions of this series of books.

My special thanks go to my translator

Dr Alexander Reynolds.

Himself a philosopher, he not only translated the original German text into English with great care and precision but also, in passages where this was required in order to ensure clear understanding, supplemented this text with certain formulations adapted specifically to the needs of English-language readers.

Inhalt

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Adorno’s Central Idea

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Self-Repression Through Reason:The Example of Odysseus

The Philosophy of the Marquis de Sadeas a Consequence of Enlightenment

The Co-Optation of the Individualby the Culture Industry

Negative Dialectics – Overcoming Language and Liberation from the Dictatorship of the Concept

Of What Use Is Adorno’s Discovery for Us Today?

Truth Beyond Words – Can One Think Conceptually Against the Concept?

Must Enlightenment and Science Really Always End in Totalitarianism?

The Whole is Not Falsifiable – Adorno’s Critique of Popper and of Positivism

Can ‘Wrong Life Be Lived Rightly’ After All?

The Power of Negative Thinking – Negation That Finds No Rest in Any Affirmation

Bibliographical References

Adorno’s Great Discovery

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) counts still today as one of the most charismatic and intellectually imposing thinkers in the whole history of philosophy. Already during his lifetime he exerted great influence on the student movements that so deeply marked the post-war German Federal Republic and indeed on the intellectual climate of this young republic in general. No other German intellectual of the period between 1959 and 1969 lectured so frequently on public radio and TV channels as did Adorno.

As did Sartre in France, Adorno became, in Germany, a charismatic point of orientation for student protestors and indeed for the New Left as a whole. He also resembled Sartre in other respects: both men were small and stocky, wore horn-rimmed glasses to correct their overstrained sight, and were known to have conducted many affairs with attractive women. His lectures, that many students from other parts of Europe and even from America travelled thousands of miles to attend, were always packed – though very few of those who attended them could honestly claim to have understood all that they heard there. The immensely complex lines of reasoning spun out at the lectern by the little bald man in horn-rimmed glasses, and such strenuously abstract books of his as the late masterpiece Negative Dialectics, are still looked on today in Germany as intellectual hurdles that only the greatest intellectual athletes can hope to clear.

His work contains, among other things, a rigorous critique of the capitalist system, so that he is often considered to have prepared the ground for the great wave of social protest that shook many countries in 1968. There is certainly some truth to this, even if he was dismayed by many aspects of this great revolt that broke out, also at his own German university, in the year before his death and refused, to the disappointment of some of his admirers, to play the role of a leader of this movement.

Adorno’s central idea is a paradoxical and provocative one. Modern capitalist society has gone entirely and fundamentally astray. Individuals in this society enjoy, indeed, unprecedented advantages in terms of mobility, technology, medical care and other forms of prosperity; but at the same time we have lost, collectively, all that makes life really worth living, namely: a sense for Nature (including, perhaps most importantly, for the natural beings that we ourselves are) and, in the end, even the ability to love:

This, modern Man’s loss of the ability to love is, Adorno believes, a direct consequence of the commodity and consumer society. Human beings become calculating and calculable because in a society based solely on exchange value everything and everyone has a fixed and determined price. Every commodity, and first and foremost the commodity that is an individual’s labour-power, is and has to be carried to market and sold. This leads, in the end, to human actions and relations appearing to those involved in them as external, exchangeable things that they themselves, as humans, have no real part in. In a society where nothing is ever done unless it is paid for, the once-natural concern for the fate of others gradually vanishes. Everyone fights for their own