Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno
Theodor W. Adornowas a German philosopher, sociologist, and composer known for his critical theory of society...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth11 September 1903
CountryGermany
jew rumours anti-semitism
Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.
decay blind satire
All satire is blind to the forces liberated by decay. Which is why total decay has absorbed the forces of satire.
distance people elimination
Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people.
violence domination delegates
Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.
soul world prison
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.
order advice helping
Those who cannot help ought also not advise: in an order where every mousehole has been plugged, mere advice exactly equals condemnation.
heritage body way
The body's habituation to walking as normal stems from the good olddays. It was the bourgeois form of locomotion: physicaldemythologization, free of the spell of hieratic pacing, rooflesswandering, breathless flight. Human dignity insisted on the right towalk, a rhythm not extorted from the body by command or terror. Thewalk, the stroll, were private ways of passing time, the heritage ofthe feudal promenade in the nineteenth century.
writing self long
Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after the holocaust is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation.
discovery self individual
Freud made the discovery- quite genuinely, simply through working on his own material- that the more deeply one explores the phenomena of human individuation, the more unreservedly one grasps the individual as a self-contained and dynamic entity, the closer one draws to that in the individual which is really no longer individual.
philosophy light perspective
The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.
people want knows
People know what they want because they know what other people want.
sibling sickness reason
The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.
culture conformity consciousness
The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness
evil-people people evil
Very evil people cannot really be imagined dying.