Beauty today can have no other measure except the depth to which a work resolves contradictions. A work must cut through the contradictions and overcome them, not by covering them up, but by pursuing them.
theodor W. Adornoquotes
1903 - 1969
Concerned primarily with the issue of human suffering, German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) significantly influenced German scholars and intellectuals after WWII. He earned his degree in Philosophy and spent two years studying music in Vienna. His early musical writings (The Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of the Listeners) were the first to reveal his long-term disdain for what he dubbed the “culture industry,” which makes people passive consumers instead of active participants.
While not Jewish himself, Adorno was forced to flee Germany for England and the U.S. during the Nazi occupation. Fascism and totalitarianism became strong themes in his writing as he critiqued civilization’s tendency toward self-destruction, and pondered the dark side of rationalizing humanity. Co-authored with his friend, Horkheimer, Adorno’s best-known work, Dialectic of Enlightenment, further developed the idea that rationalism had become irrational.
In Minima Moralia, he contemplated the dehumanization of civilization caused by the industrial era, and wrote that there was no chance to lead a good, honest life anymore. Mankind had become cogs in a machine, either playing the producer or the consumer, but neither one being free.
He argued that reason was a tool used to control people. Human emancipation, he said, could only be found through creativity and the pursuit of individual autonomy and happiness.
When he returned to Germany in 1949, he and his friend, Horkheimer, rebuilt the Institute for Social Research and the Frankfurt School of critical theory. His endeavors were central to Germany’s intellectual revival post-World War II.
Pleasure always means not to think about anything, to forget suffering even where it is shown. Basically it is helplessness. It is flight; not, as is asserted, flight from a wretched reality, but from the last remaining thought of resistance.
It is not the office of art to spotlight alternatives, but to resist by its form alone the course of the world, which permanently puts a pistol to men’s heads.
There is no love that is not an echo.
The forms of art reflect the history of man more truthfully than do documents themselves.
The thought that murders the wish that fathered it will be overtaken by the revenge of stupidity.
The sublime is only a step removed from the ridiculous.
The darkening of the world makes the irrationality of art rational: radically darkened art.
In the innermost recesses of humanism, as its very soul, there rages a frantic prisoner who, as a Fascist, turns the world into a prison.
True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.