Theodor Adorno Quotes on Philosophy

58 quotes

2. 'Jazz is the false liquidation of art - instead of utopia becoming reality it disappears from the picture.'

5. 'If one is to take Lulu's twelve-tone chord as the integral totality of complementary harmony, then Berg's allegorical genius proves itself within a historical perspective which makes the brain reel: just as Lulu in the world of total illusion longs for nothing but her murderer and finally finds him in that sound, so does all harmony of unrequited happiness long for its fatal chord as the cipher of fulfillment--twelve-tone music is not to be separated from dissonance. Fatal: because all dynamics come to a standstill within it wihout finding release. The law of complementary harmony already implies the end of the musical experience of time, as this was heralded in the dissociation of time according to Expressionistic extremes.'

7. 'A pencil and rubber are of more use to thought than a battalion of assistants. To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it.'

9. 'All morality has been modelled on immorality and to this day has reinstated it at every level. The slave morality is indeed bad: it is still the master morality.'

11. 'An emancipated society, on the other hand, would not be a unitary state, but the realization of universality in the reconciliation of differences.'

13. 'Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.'

17. 'But he who dies in despair has lived his whole life in vain.'

18. 'Dialectic thought is an attempt to break through the coercion of logic by its own means.'

21. 'Every undistorted relationship, perhaps indeed the conciliation that is part of organic life itself, is a gift. He who through consequential logic becomes incapable of it, makes himself a thing and freezes.'

29. 'Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices.'

30. 'Genuine things are those to which commodities and other means of exchange can be reduced, particularly gold. But like gold, genuineness, abstracted as the proportion of fine metal, becomes a fetish.'

34. 'He who integrates is lost.'

36. 'He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He alone keeps faith who says: I was happy. The only relation of consciousness to happiness is gratitude: in which lies its incomparable dignity.'

37. 'He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest.'

39. 'Horror is beyond the reach of psychology.'

45. 'In the abstract conception of universal wrong, all concrete responsibility vanishes.'

47. 'In the clock's over-loud ticking we hear the mockery of light-years for the span of our existence.'

52. 'Intelligence is a moral category.'

53. 'It is not man's lapse into luxurious indolence that is to be feared, but the savage spread of the social under the mask of universal nature, the collective as a blind fury of activity.'

55. 'Life has become the ideology of its own absence.'

57. 'Love is the power to see similarity in the dissimilar.'

59. 'Metaphysical categories are not merely an ideology concealing the social system; at the same time they express its nature, the truth about, and in their changes are precipitated those in its most central experiences.'

60. 'Mind arose out of existence, as an organ for keeping alive. In reflecting existence, however, it becomes at the same time something else. The existent negates itself as thought upon itself. Such negation is mind's element.'

61. 'Modernity is a qualitative, not a chronological, category.'

62. 'No emancipation without that of society.'

63. 'No harm comes to man from outside alone: dumbness is the objective spirit.'

64. 'None of the abstract concepts comes closer to fulfilled utopia than that of eternal peace.'

65. 'Normality is death.'

66. 'Not only is the self entwined in society; it owes society its existence in the most literal sense.'

67. 'Once the last trace of emotion has been eradicated, nothing remains of thought but absolute tautology.'

70. 'Perhaps the true society will grow tired of development and, out of freedom, leave possibilities unused, instead of storming under a confused compulsion to the conquest of strange stars.'

72. 'Psychology repeats in the case of properties what was done to property. It expropriates the individual by allocating him its happiness.'

77. 'Society is integral even before it undergoes totalitarian rule. Its organization also embraces those at war with it by co-ordinating their consciousness to its own.'

79. 'Taste is the ability to keep in balance the contradiction in art between the made and the apparent not-having-become; true works of art, however, never at one with taste, are those which push this contradiction to the extreme, and realize themselves in their resultant downfall.'

82. 'The almost insoluble task is to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.'

84. 'The capacity for fear and for happiness are the same, the unrestricted openness to experience amounting to self-abandonment in which the vanquished rediscovers himself.'

85. 'The culture industry not so much adapts to the reactions of its customers as it counterfeits them.'

87. 'The dialectic cannot stop short before the conceptsof health and sickness, nor indeed before their siblings reason and unreason.'

92. 'The good man is he who rules himself as he does his own property: his autonomous being is modelled on material power.'

96. 'The ideology of cultural conservatism which sees enlightenment and art as simple antitheses is false, among other reasons, in overlooking the moment of enlightenment in the genesis of beauty. Enlightenment does not merely dissolve all the qualities that beauty adheres to, but posits the quality of beauty in the first place.'

97. 'The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.'

99. 'The joke of our time is the suicide of intention.'

105. 'The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.'

106. 'The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity.'

110. 'The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality.'

115. 'The whole is the false.'

116. 'The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular.'

117. 'There is no love that is not an echo.'

120. 'Thinking no longer means anymore than checking at each moment whether one can indeed think.'

122. 'To hate destructiveness, one must hate life as well: only death is an image of undistorted life... organic life is an illness peculiar to our unlovely planet.'

125. 'Today self-consciousness no longer means anything but reflection on the ego as embarrassment, as realization of impotence: knowing that one is nothing.'

126. 'True thoughts are those alone which do not understand themselves.'

127. 'Truth is inseperable from the illusory belief that from the figures of the unreal one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come.'

131. 'Whatever the intellectual does, is wrong. He experiences drastically and vitally the ignominious choice that late capitalism secretly presents to all its dependants: to become one more grown-up, or to remain a child.'

132. 'When all actions are mathematically calculated, they also take on a stupid quality.'

133. 'Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized.'

134. 'When intellectual formulations are treated simply by relegating them to the past and permitting the simple passage of time to substitute for development, the suspicion is justified that such formulations have not really been mastered, but rather they are being suppressed.'

136. 'Kafka: the solipcist without ipseity.'

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