Theodor W. Adorno

1903-1969 · German · Critical Theory, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Music, Sociology, Moral Philosophy

Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.

Theodor Adorno trained as a composer in Schoenberg's Vienna circle before he became a philosopher, and he never stopped hearing the modern world as a kind of music gone wrong. Born in Frankfurt in 1903 to a Jewish wine merchant and a Catholic singer, he fled the Nazis for Oxford, then New York, then Los Angeles, where in the unlikely sunlight of wartime exile he wrote some of the bleakest pages of twentieth-century thought.

Topics Theodor W. Adorno addresses

• negative dialectics
• non-identity
• identity thinking
• the dialectic of enlightenment
• the culture industry
• constellation
• the priority of the object
• immanent critique
• mimesis
• the authoritarian personality
• the jargon of authenticity
• aesthetic autonomy
• the new music
• the aging of the new music
• musical material
• the dialectical composer
• the culture industry thesis
• administered world
• damaged life
• the new categorical imperative
• suffering and moral philosophy
• the preponderance of the object
• natural history
• second reflection

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