Thought as such… is an act of negation, of resistance to that which is forced upon it; this is what thought has inherited from its archetype, the relation between labor and material. Today, when ideologues tend more than ever to encourage thought to be positive, they cleverly note that positivity runs precisely counter to thought, and that it takes friendly persuasion by social authority to accustom thought to positivity.
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.
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.
What can oppose the decline of the west is not a resurrected culture but the utopia that is silently contained in the image of its decline.
In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which it deceitfully projects.
Laughing in the cultural industry is mockery of happiness.
Writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.
As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.
He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest. While he gropingly forms his own life in the frail image of a true existence, he should never forget its frailty, nor how little the image is a substitute for true life. Against such awareness, however, pulls the momentum of the bourgeois within him.
It would be advisable to think of progress in the crudest, most basic terms: that no one should go hungry anymore, that there should be no more torture, no more Auschwitz. Only then will the idea of progress be free from lies.
One must have tradition in oneself, to hate it properly.