Theodor W. Adorno: biography of this German philosopher.

A biography of the philosopher Theodor Adorno, representative of the Frankfurt School.

Theodor W. Adorno has been one of the great German philosophers, trainer of great thinkers such as Jürgen Habermas and a leading figure of the German Institute for Social Research.

In addition to studying philosophy and sociology, he always had a great interest in musicology, gaining considerable fame by uniting these three disciplines in some of his works.

Adorno's life was not an easy one since, being of Jewish descent, he had to deal with anti-Semitic threats and Nazi persecution. In the following we will take a closer look at his story through a biography of Theodor W. Adorno to learn more about his career. to learn more about his trajectory.

Brief biography of Theodor W. Adorno

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born on September 11, 1903 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, into a well-to-do bourgeois family.in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, into a well-to-do bourgeois family.

His father, Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, was a German-Jewish wine merchant and his mother, Maria Calvelli-Adorno, was a Corsican-Genovese lyric soprano. He was interested in music from an early age, as his sister Agatha, a talented pianist, and his mother provided him with extensive musical training in his childhood.

Academic training

He attended the Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium, where he excelled as an excellent student.. In his youth he met Siegfried Kracauer, with whom he became close friends, even though they were fourteen years apart. Together they read Immanuel Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason", an experience that greatly marked the young Adorno in his intellectual formation.

During the 1920s Adorno composed his first musical works.. They were avant-garde and atonal chamber music. After graduating with merit from the Gymnasium, Theodor Adorno enrolled at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt, where he studied philosophy, sociology, psychology and music. In 1924 he earned his degree by submitting a dissertation on Edmund Husserl: "Die Transzendenz des Dinglichen und Noematischen in Husserls Phänomenologie."

At that time the young Adorno considered turning to music as a composer and writing several essays in music criticism. It is for this reason that in 1925 he went to Vienna where he studied composition with Alban Berg and would spend time with other key composers of the Second Viennese School, such as Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg.

In essays on music, Adorno linked musical form with complex concepts drawn from philosophy. His musical works were not easy reading, with a very high intellectual involvement. The conceptual implications of the new music were not shared by the traditional Viennese School, which is why Adorno decided to return to Frankfurt and abandon his musical career.For this reason Adorno decided to return to Frankfurt and abandon his musical career.

However, before leaving Austria Theodor Adorno had the opportunity to become intimate with other intellectuals outside of musical circles. He attended lectures by Karl Kraus, the famous Viennese satirist, and also met Georg Lukács whose theory of the novel had had an impact on Adorno while at university.

On his return to Frankfurt he worked on his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Hans Cornelius. Subsequently, in 1931, he obtained his "venia legendi", a diploma accrediting him as a professor with his work Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen (Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic).

Exile

In 1932 he joined the German Institute for Social Research, a Marxist-inspired institution. attached to the University of Frankfurt. Given his ideas and the fact that there were Jews among its ranks, the rise of the Nazi party and the creation of the National Socialist regime meant that the institution was eventually dismantled. The government withdrew Adorno's venia legendi and, seeing his life in danger, he ended up leaving the country.

He first traveled to Paris, but since France was approaching a fate similar to that which had befallen Germany, Adorno would eventually travel to Oxford, England. He would remain in the English city until 1938, moving to New York, where the German Institute for Social Research had set up its headquarters in exile.

In 1941 he moved to California to continue collaborating with another member of the Institute, Max Horkheimer, writing "Dialectics of Social Research".writing "Dialectics of Enlightenment. Philosophical Fragments".

Return to Germany

After the fall of the Third Reich and the end of World War II, Theodor W. Adorno returned to his native country in 1949 together with Horkheimer. In the same year he became director of the Institute for Social Research, which was re-established in Frankfurt am Main..

It was at this time that the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory was founded, a philosophical current that would have great importance in such important 20th century minds as Jürgen Habermas, who would also be a disciple of Adorno.

Final years

During the sixties, he dedicated himself to the direction of the Institute, in addition to teaching at the University of Frankfurt. He took the opportunity to establish an intense relationship with the avant-garde artists of the time, such as the writer Samuel BeckettHe also established close relations with avant-garde artists such as the writer Samuel Beckett, the composer John Cage and the filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni.

During this period Adorno was equal parts critic and inspirer of youth protest movements. On many occasions they found inspiration and motivation in his particular vision of Marxism and rejection of reason as the ultimate goal. However, in the aftermath of the events of May 1968, after the events of May 1968 in France, Theodor W. Adorno criticized "actionism," i.e., the privileging of protest action over critical argumentation.. This made him the subject of student protests, including the takeover of his own classroom.

Perhaps a bit fed up with so much tension, Adorno decided to take a well-deserved vacation in the summer of 1969 by mountaineering in Switzerland, where he suffered from arrhythmia attacks and palpitations. Although his doctors advised him against hiking and exertion, Adorno simply ignored them and decided to go on a mountaineering trip, from which he would never recover. He died a few days later, on August 6, 1969 in Visp, Switzerland, of an acute myocardial infarction. He was 66 years old.

At the time of his death, Adorno was working on his Aesthetic Theoryof which he had already written two versions and was about to carry out the last revision of the text. This posthumous work would be published in 1970.

Works of this philosopher

Adorno never lost interest in musicology. In fact, he was a prolific author of works related to this discipline.

The fact that he had established a relationship with the Viennese musical avant-garde and rubbed shoulders with figures such as Arnold Schönberg, Eduard Steuermann and Alban Berg led him to publish several important works in this field, such as Philosophy of New Music (1949), Versuch über Wagner (1952), Dissonances. Music of an administered world (1956), Mahler (1960) y Der getreue Korrepetitor (1963).

But he not only published his own works in musicology, but also helped other figures in the field to compose their works. One case is that of Thomas Mann, who used Adorno's advice for the musicological part of his novel Doctor Faustus (1947), which is in tune with the theses of the philosophy of new music.

In the field of sociology the two main themes of Adorno's critical reflection are, on the one hand, the prevailing trends in modern reality and, on the other hand, the utopian tension towards the dimension of another present, reified and alienated. His dialectical-Hegelian and Marxist background makes Adorno consider negation as an important tool for the critique of society. of society. In "Dialectic of Enlightenment" Adorno offers an analysis of modern mass society, drawn directly from his views on postwar American culture.

He designs a vision of how contemporary man behaves, debased by the cultural industry of his time and a firm believer in the myth of scientific rationality. contemporary man, debased by the cultural industry of his time and a firm believer in the myth of scientific rationality, from its origins in the 18th century Enlightenment to the present day.from its origins in the Enlightenment of the 18th century to the present day. He will also develop this theme in other works, such as Minima moralia (1951), The authoritarian personality (1950), Negative Dialectics (1966) y Stichworte. Kritische Modelle (1969).

On the philosophical side, he reread Hegel's work in his Three Studies on Hegel (1963). He abandons the abstract intellectualism of the Enlightenment without rejecting the idealization of dialectical reason. Adorno's intervention in this work is characterized by his repudiation of phenomenology. Adorno carries out a critique of culture in his interventions especially focused on literature as art, collected mainly in Prisms. Cultural and Social Criticism (1955) and in Notes on Literaturepublished in four volumes between 1958 and 1974.

Shortly before his death, Adorno finished his Aesthetic Theoryalthough he still had one revision to do. In it he reaffirmed the urgency, for art itself, of the nexus between criticism and utopia.. Art can only be justified as a reminder of the sufferings that have accumulated throughout history, which demand the rescue of that "offended" life, making art a kind of act of reparation for the personal grievance.

It must be said that many of Theodor W. Adorno's works are difficult to encompass clearly within the field of philosophy or sociology, since the limits between both disciplines are very blurred in his thought. He even touches on aspects of psychology, as in the case of his collaboration with Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, who conducted fundamental research on the psychology of anti-Semitism, The authoritarian personality (1950). Adorno contributed in this work by elaborating scales of measurement of fascistic tendencies..

He made a critique of positivist sociology in Sociology (1956) in collaboration with Max Horkheimer. For Adorno, positivism had lost sight of social reality, losing its focus on primal needs.losing focus on the primary needs of existence. At Soziologische Schriften (1972), Adorno stresses the need to apply the dialectical method to the knowledge of contemporary society.

How to cite this article:

• Ruiza, M., Fernández, T. and Tamaro, E. (2004). Biography of Theodor Adorno. In Biographies and Lives. The online biographical encyclopedia. Barcelona (Spain). Retrieved from https://www.biografiasyvidas.com/biografia/a/adorno.htm on July 15, 2020.
• Adorno, Theodor (2009). Dissonances. Introducción a la sociología de la música, Akal, Madrid.
• Hernández Iraizoz, Daniel. (2013). Theodor Adorno, elements for a sociology of music. Sociológica (Mexico), 28(80), 123-154. Retrieved July 16, 2020, from http://www.scielo.org.mx/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0187-01732013000300004&lng=es&tlng=es.