Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund (1903–69)

Philosopher, musicologist and social theorist, Theodor Adorno was the

philosophical architect of the first generation of Critical Theory
emanating from the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt,
Germany. Departing from the perspective of more orthodox Marxists,
Adorno believed the twin dilemmas of modernity – injustice and
nihilism – derived from the abstractive character of Enlightenment
rationality. In consequence, he argued that the critique of political
economy must give way to a critique of Enlightenment, instrumental
reason.

Identity thinking, as Adorno termed instrumental rationality,

abstracts from the sensory, linguistic and social mediations which
connect knowing subjects to objects known. In so doing, it represses
what is contingent, sensuous and particular in persons and nature.
Adorno’s method of negative dialectics was designed to rescue these
elements from the claims of instrumental reason. Adorno conceded,
however, that all this method could demonstrate was that an abstract
concept did not exhaust its object. For a model of an alternative
grammar of reason and cognition Adorno turned to the
accomplishments of artistic modernism. There, where each new work
tests and transforms the very idea of something being a work of art,
Adorno saw a model for the kind of dynamic interdependence
between mind and its objects that was required for a renewed
conception of knowing and acting.

1 Life

Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno (Wiesengrund, his father’s name,

shrank to the initial W. during his exile in California in 1943) was born
in 1903 in Frankfurt. From his mother and sister the young Adorno
derived his lifelong passion for music. Near the end of the First World
War, Adorno began spending his Saturday afternoons studying Kant’s

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Critique of Pure Reason with the social critic and film theorist Siegfried
Kracauer. Under Kracauer’s guidance, Adorno came to experience the
first Critique not as mere epistemology, but ‘as a kind of coded text
from which the historical situation of spirit could be read’ (1992: vol.
2, 58). This method of reading and thinking, entwining epistemology
with social physiognomy, became the constitutive gesture of Adorno’s
philosophy.

After completing a dissertation on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology,

Adorno received his doctorate from the Johann Wolfgang Goethe
University in 1924. In the following year, he travelled to Vienna to
study composition with Alban Berg and involve himself with the circle
of composers and musicians gathered around Arnold Schoenberg. His
Vienna interlude was to have a lasting impact; not only did he become
a leading advocate of the ‘new music’, but his philosophical style can
be traced to the ‘atonal’ compositional techniques of Schoenberg and
Berg.

Returning to his studies in Frankfurt, Adorno took his habilitation with

a thesis published as Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ä sthetischen
(Kierkegaard: The Construction of the Aesthetic) (1933). In this
difficult work, three themes that were to remain decisive emerge: (1)
the criticism of existentialism as betraying its desire for concreteness
by transforming existential elements into abstract categories, such as
that of subjectivity in Kierkegaard (Adorno continued to make an
analogous criticism of Heidegger’s notion of ‘being’); (2) a reading of
the social world as reified, that is, a world in which institutions
indifferent to the claims of subjectivity dominate over persons; (3)
the attempt to provide a historical and materialist concretization of
theological ideas.

Adorno fled Hitler’s Germany in 1934 to Merton College, Oxford.

During his three and a half years in England, Adorno wrote articles for
the house journal of the Institut fü r Sozialforschung (Institute for
Social Research), which was then under the direction of his friend Max
Horkheimer (see Frankfurt School), and worked on a book on Husserl,
which was eventually published in 1956. Adorno spent the war years
in the USA. During that time he collaborated with Horkheimer on
Dialektik der Aufklä rung (Dialectic of Enlightenment) (1947), often
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regarded (not altogether accurately) as the statement of
first-generation critical theory (see Critical theory).

After the war, Adorno returned to Frankfurt to help rebuild the

Institute. Over the next twenty years he produced a stream of works
of musical and literary criticism, social theory and philosophy. His
1957 article ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’ is now regarded as
the initiator of the ‘positivist dispute’ that raged in Germany in the
1960s, with Adorno and Karl Popper as the main combatants.
Adorno’s two major philosophical works, Negative Dialektik (Negative
Dialectics) (1966) and Ä sthetische Theorie (Aesthetic Theory) (1970),
were written during this period, the latter published a year after
Adorno’s death.

2 For and against Marx

Adorno’s philosophy is a response to his understanding of the social

world he inhabited. Adorno never doubted that advanced, Western
societies were structured by capitalist relations of production as
analysed by Marx. In particular, he accepted Marx’s account of
commodity fetishism and the domination of use values by exchange
value. Adorno also accepted the proposal that the same mechanisms
structuring the economy were effective in structuring cultural
practices. While domination and poverty (broadly speaking, injustice)
are the central consequences of capital’s rationalization of the
economy, alienation and meaninglessness (broadly speaking, nihilism)
are the central consequences of its rationalization of culture (see
Alienation; Nihilism).

However, against the background of the rise of fascism in Europe and

the dissolution of workers’ movements, later augmented by the
events of the Holocaust, Adorno came to doubt that there really were
significantly progressive tendencies latent in the economic and social
fabric of the modern world. On the contrary, he came to believe that
the rationalization of modern societies was all but complete, and
hence came to view Marx’s theory of history, with its commitment to
an intrinsically progressive developmental sequence of social
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formations, as drawing on the same structures of rationality as those
governing capitalist processes of production. If it is those structures of
reason and rationality that are at the roots of the deepest dilemmas of
modernity, then the crisis of modernity is primarily a crisis of reason.
What is thus required before all else is a critical diagnosis of modern
reason; in criticizing this formation of reason Adorno is
simultaneously criticizing the world it engenders and providing the
terms for a radical transformation of that world.

3 A genealogy of reason

It is modern scientific rationality, with its commitment to the primacy

of method, analysis, subsumption, universality and logical
systematicity, that Adorno believes is at the centre of the modern
crisis of reason. He contends that knowing and its objects become
deformed or distorted when reason is defined in terms radically
independent of the objects to which it applies, where by ‘objects’
Adorno means not just objects known, but equally the sensory images
of those objects, the articulation of those images in language, the
entanglement of natural languages in social practices and the
complex histories of those practices. Each of these items could be
regarded as a systematic source of error (and in the course of the
emergence of modern, enlightened rationality was so regarded), from
sceptical worries about the deliverances of the senses to concern
about collective prejudices sedimented in linguistic and social practice
(see Descartes, R.; Bacon, F.). With respect to the theory of
rationality, anxieties about these sources of error led to the view that
reason must be fully autonomous, and not determined by anything
external to it. It is this thought that underlies the primacy of method.
In the theory of language, the same project is pursued in the attempt
to eliminate opacity, indeterminacy and vagueness from the meaning
of concepts; this is the project of positivism and the analytic tradition
generally.

Dialectic of Enlightenment aims to provide a genealogy of enlightened

rationality. Enlightenment opposes myth, the enchantment of the
natural world through the projection onto it of human fears and hopes.
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The presumed superiority of reason over myth is hence its freedom
from anthropomorphic projections; reason depicts the world
objectively rather than through subjective projections. Horkheimer
and Adorno contend that this flattering self-image of reason is both
formally and substantively fallacious. Both myth and reason emerge
in the course of humankind’s struggle to free itself from bondage to
mythic powers (themselves projections of primordial fear of the
natural world in which humankind was immersed) and to gain control
over the natural world in order to satisfy human needs and desires.
Both myth and reason employ the principle of immanence, the
explanation of every event as the repetition of a given pattern or law
(what Adorno elsewhere calls ‘identity thinking’), in order to combat
fear of the natural world by bringing it into an explicable order.
Repetition, ‘the new is the old’, originally provides for conceptual
control over the natural world by revealing an intelligible order and
eventually, through the technological application of modern science,
for actual control over the natural world. Hence the formal features
which provide for the supposed autonomy of enlightened reason are
in fact grounded in the anthropogenesis of human reason in its
struggle with nature. Enlightened reason is not objective, but
subservient to the human desire to control nature; such reason can be
construed as the discursive embodiment of the human drive for
self-preservation, and hence as instrumental.

4 Nonidentity and negative dialectics

Enlightened reason is premised on a false inference: because some

false beliefs (myths, superstitutions and the like) are subjective
projections, then the medium of those projections (sensory images,
language, social practices and history) must themselves be
systematic sources of error. Complete independence from these
mediums is thus taken to be a condition for true knowledge. This drive
for independence is most fully elaborated in the writings of the
German Idealists, above all Kant and Fichte, where the autonomy of
reason and the meaning-independence of concepts become explicitly
identified with the spontaneity of the ‘transcendental’ subject.
Unknown to itself, this subject and the philosophical concept of
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system it subtends are still in the throe of the drive to
self-preservation, their abstract conceptuality still harbouring both
fear and rage against their objects. The conception of idealism as
rationalized rage is Adorno’s appropriation and transformation of
Nietzsche’s notion of ressentiment. Idealist rage is directed at
anything that refuses to fit or, in Adorno’s terminology, is nonidentical
with the demands of autonomous reason. Because the autonomy of
reason is secured through the meaning-independence of concepts
from concrete experience and its mediums, then what is
incommensurable with this reason is whatever is irredeemably
particular and contingent. The goal of Adorno’s philosophy is the
‘rescue’ of nonidentity – the thing in itself in its concrete, historically
mediated sensuous particularity.

Adorno’s method of rescue is the use of dialectic. The point of

dialectical analysis is to demonstrate that the rationalized concept of
an object does not exhaust the thing conceived. It attains this end by
showing that what were conceived to be extrinsic encumbrances on
reason (sensory images and so on) that could be stripped away in its
attainment of autonomy are in fact the necessary mediations through
which knowing subjects come into relation to objects known. Adorno
borrowed this conception of dialectic from Hegel. Adorno construes
his dialectic as ‘negative’, in opposition to Hegel, because, on the one
hand, he believes that Hegel’s ‘system’ collapses back into the kind of
identity thinking that dialectic opposes; and, on the other hand,
because he believes that dialectical analysis only works under
conditions in which the mediations it elaborates are systematically, in
theory and in practice, denied.

Because an alternative conception of reason is not currently available,

despite being a real historical possibility, Adorno’s philosophy is
utopian. Cognitively and practically, utopia is conceived of by Adorno
‘as above identity and above contradiction; it would be a togetherness
of diversity’ ([1966] 1973: 150). An image of such ‘togetherness of
diversity’ is provided by modernist works of art.

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5 Aesthetic theory

Adorno argues that distinctly modernist works of art exemplify the

possibility of an alternative grammar of reason and cognition. He
focuses on modernist works – atonal music, abstract painting,
‘absurdist’ literature (particularly Kafka and Beckett) – because these
works self-consciously attempt to establish their aesthetic validity,
and hence their objectivity, in explicit opposition to all existing norms
for artistic production and all established criteria in accordance with
which art works have been judged. Existing norms and established
criteria are the equivalents in art to the demands of method in science.
Enlightened reason has it that such norms and criteria, in science and
art, are spontaneous products of reason itself. Success for a
modernist work is for it to be compelling, demanding aesthetic
attention and assent, in excess of established criteria of aesthetic
value and, even more radically, in excess of all criteria which
heretofore have constituted what it is for an item to be a work of art.

‘The falsehood opposed by art,’ Adorno argues, ‘is not rationality per
se but the fixed opposition of rationality to particularity’ ([1970] 1997:
144). The binding of rationality to what occurs in particular cases
refutes the thesis of the meaning-independence of concepts from
their objects and the autonomy of reason, and hence the principle of
immanence. That this refutation occurs in art works entails that such
binding is only a semblance or image of an alternative grammar of
reason, since in modernity art is no longer a rationally legitimated
vehicle of representation; art works now are ‘meaningful’ wholes
without external purpose. That what happens in art can none the less
matter to rationality generally derives from the hypothesis that the
language of art and the discourse of rationality outside the artworld
are not mutually indifferent language games. Rather, art picks up the
debris of nonidentity left over from rationalization processes outside
art; it is the refuge of the nonidentical. Further, art is driven to its
modernist extremes of atonality, abstraction and absurdity in order to
sustain itself as art, unique works of contemplation, in opposition to
the recurrent demands of the principle of immanence.

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Adorno’s philosophical practice explicitly binds itself to the practices
and fate of artistic modernism, and in this he is being self-consistent.
Adorno aims to expose philosophy, the attempt to ground rationality
and cognition, to its nonidentical other, forcing philosophy to
surrender its claim to autonomy and meaning-independence. This is
an avowedly peculiar terminus for a radical philosopher: defending
the claims of the victims of history by forging an alliance between
philosophy and high modernist art.

This state of affairs links together with the three dominant lines of
criticism of Adorno’s thought: (1) it is unduly pessimistic about the
emancipatory potential of modern liberal societies; (2) it turns its face
against the call for praxis indigenous to the Marxist tradition; (3) it
provides only an aesthetic alternative to current problems and
conceptions of reason. Although it will remain a matter of dispute, it
can be argued that these objections simply bypass Adorno’s original
insight, namely that the dilemmas of injustice and nihilism have a
common root in the abstractive achievements of autonomous reason.
Traditional Marxism focuses on the question of injustice, while
ignoring the problem of nihilism; conversely, existentialists such as
Nietzsche and Heidegger aim to overcome nihilism while they remain
insensitive to the claims of justice. If Adorno is correct in maintaining
that these dilemmas are interconnected, then his philosophy has
something to say to us. The fragile hope of his philosophizing lies in
the belief that the claims of justice are best served through the
defence of the claims of the rationality inherent in modernist works of
art.

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