This Day in Philosophy — 6 August: the death of Theodor Adorno

Theodor W. Adorno died on 6 August 1969 in Switzerland, of a heart attack suffered while on holiday. He was sixty-five.

The culture industry#

Adorno's most widely circulated concept is the culture industry, from Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), written with Max Horkheimer.

The starting point is simple and unsettling: mass culture does not arise spontaneously from the people; it is produced like an industrial product, standardised and distributed. Cinema, radio and popular music appear to offer different products while in fact repeating the same scheme. The problem, for Adorno, is not poor quality but that the consumer believes they are choosing when the options have already been determined.

The Enlightenment turning on itself#

The main thesis of Dialectic of Enlightenment is more uncomfortable still: the Enlightenment taught the domination of nature in order to free the human being from myth; but that dominating reason turned in the end on the human being too. Reason ceased to be a faculty that argues about ends and became an operation that merely calculates the most efficient means.

The book was written in exile in 1944, in the shadow of Nazism and the war. Its authors' question was this: how could one of the most "enlightened" countries in Europe arrive at barbarism?

Negative dialectics#

Adorno's Negative Dialectics (1966) is an objection to Hegel's dialectic. In Hegel, contradictions are resolved in a higher unity. Adorno refuses that resolution: the concept never fully coincides with what it grasps; a remainder always survives. The task of philosophy is not to erase that remainder — what does not fit the concept — but to preserve it.

The famous sentence follows: "The whole is the untrue."

His last year#

Months before his death there had been a sharp break with the student movement in Frankfurt. The founder of critical theory, who kept his distance from calls to activism, became a target for the younger generation; his lectures were disrupted. That tension was an early scene in an argument about the relation between theoretical thought and political action that continues today.

The same day: Malebranche#

On 6 August 1638 the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche, among the most original figures of the Cartesian tradition, was born. His answer to the problem of interaction between mind and body — occasionalism — became one of the most argued-over positions in seventeenth-century metaphysics: causal power belongs properly to God, and the states of body and mind are merely "occasions".