Biography of Theodor w. Adorno

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11 September 1903 6 August 1969 Sociologist, musicologist and German philosopher, Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was born on 11 September 1903 in Frankfurt am Main. The only child of a Jewish wine merchant, signing its first written with the surname of his mother, Maria Adorno, a Catholic singer of some Corsican origins and, before that, the Genoese. The Hebrew name of the father is so abbreviated in a w. introduced by mother to the study of music and by Siegfried Kracauer, a family friend very cultured and erudite, to classical German philosophy, Adorno, he graduated in philosophy in 1924 with a dissertation on the phenomenology of Husserl. The first article of the young philosopher is dedicated to Expressionism, abruptly seduced by violent and intense language of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, one of the most prominent exponents of that artistic movement. Adorno goes then to Vienna to study with him, making himself a "follower" of his circle, the same one that bear the famous "Second Viennese School". The main aim of these artists was to tear up the underlying tonal music rules (i.e. the rules that inform the entire Western music), in the conviction that the chromatism exasperated that had arrived earlier composers (an "inclined plane" triggered by Wagner), had led to the shores that were exceeded. In some ways, a process which in their view was "natural" and not revolutionary, as you generally tends to believe even today (and it would go to reread, to convince you of this, the writings of Webern). The major contribution to this exceedance will be just what made by Schoenberg that initially reached a kind of writing "a-tonal," arrives at the dialing method called "Dodecaphonic", a sort of "Communism of the twelve sounds" or "emancipation of the dissonance," to use expressions of the same composer. Adorno, in his non-fiction production and controversy, will always be strong supporter of this new music, totally opposed by the public and by many critics at the time. Paradigm, in this sense, the text of the 1949 called "the philosophy of new music". Adorno is that tragic cultural climate that marks the transition from the old conception of the world to mass society, the same one that was started by its autonomous tables of values, the fundamental rules of the languages of the no doubt anchored passato, but simplified to the utmost and emptied of all their content. In 1931 Adorno becomes a professor at the University of Frankfurt, where he taught until forced-because of the rise of Nazism-to emigrate to Paris, England and finally to the United States. In 1950 he returned to Frankfurt where he teaches philosophy and sociology and directs the Institute for social research. Multifaceted personality, with many cultural interests, left a very original contribution in all fields in which he pursued his dialectical capacity and speculative. The philosophy and music are in summary the fundamental passions, passions that condense in the wonderful "dialectic of enlightenment," written in 1947 in conjunction with the other great exponent of so-called "Frankfurt School", namely Horkheimer. The two miserable here to point the finest criticism of Western culture of the twentieth century, by making a reflection about the way Western society has transformed its potential for emancipation and devoting a substantial part of the work to a theoretical study on the "anti-Semitic" question (expression that they preferred to that confusing about "Jewish question"). The sharpness of this philosophical look would be such that in the community of exiled Germans will try to translate into an empirical investigation this analysis that wove Freudianism and Marxism. Thus the publication of a series of collective volumes entitled "Studies on prejudice". Equally fundamental in the field of aesthetics are the unfinished "aesthetic theory" and the "negative dialectic". The first text highlights the subtle dialectic relationship between art and social reality, while the latter is a stimulating attempt to update the Hegelian legacy. The spectacular smartness of Adorno also practiced sagacious aphorisms, published in that real "cult" that bears the title "Minima moralia" (1947), the debtor, for the paradoxical and brilliant vein running through it, to the distinguished history of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. But along with "beauty" Nietzschean, in that text that lays down with force in history before and after the great Nazi slaughter, shines through the mourning for the tragic events of Europe at the time. Anxious to resume teaching German students, the philosopher is as mentioned in the last few years back in Germany, convinced that the mother tongue is the most suitable instrument to express his thoughts. Attentive to the democratic reconstruction of the country, puts aside anti-bourgeois youth tones and removes from circulation his writings more influenced by Marxism. When it explodes the sixty-eight he referred, trim if they see annoyed, amply rewarded afterwards by obtuse "revolutionaries". The following year, after yet another claim, turns away from the University. Dies of a broken heart after a few days in Visp, Switzerland, August 6, 1969.

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