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Lighthearted television is inherently
dangerous, says Adorno, because it
distorts the world and imbues us with
stereotypes and biases that we begin
to take on as our own.THE MODERN WORLD
Adorno was a member of the
Frankfurt School, a group of
philosophers who were interested
in the development of capitalism.
He condemned forms of mass
communication such as television
and radio, claiming that these
have led to the erosion of both
intelligence and feeling, and to a
decline in the ability to make moral
choices and judgements. If we
choose to switch off our brains
by watching blockbuster movies
(insofar as we can choose at all,
given the prevailing cultural
conditions in which we live), for
Adorno, this is a moral choice.
Popular culture, he believes, not
only makes us stupid; it also
makes us unable to act morally.
Essential emotions
Adorno believes that the opposite
error to that of imagining that there
might be such a thing as a holy fool
is imagining that we can judge on
intelligence alone, without emotion.
This might happen in a court of
law; judges have been known to
instruct the jury to put all emotion
to one side, so that they can come
to a cool and measured decision.
The power of judgement
is measured by the
cohesion of self.
Theodor AdornoBut in Adorno’s view, we can no
more make wise judgements by
abandoning emotion than we can
by abandoning intelligence.
When the last trace of emotion
has been driven out of our thinking,
Adorno writes, we are left with
nothing to think about, and the idea
that intelligence might benefit “from
the decay of the emotions” is simply
mistaken. For this reason Adorno
believes that the sciences, which
are a form of knowledge that do not
make reference to our emotions,
have, like popular culture, had a
dehumanizing effect upon us.
Unexpectedly, it may in fact be
the sciences that will ultimately
demonstrate the wisdom of
Adorno’s central concerns about
the severing of intelligence and
feeling. Since the 1990s, scientists
such as Antonio Damasio have
studied emotions and the brain,
providing increasing evidence of
the many mechanisms by which
emotions guide decision-making.
So if we are to judge wisely or even
to judge at all, we must employ both
emotion and intelligence. ■Theodor Adorno
Born in 1903 in Frankfurt,
Theodor Adorno’s two
passions from an early age
were philosophy and music;
his mother and aunt were
both accomplished musicians.
At university Adorno studied
musicology and philosophy,
graduating in 1924. He had
ambitions to be a composer,
but setbacks in his musical
career led him increasingly
toward philosophy. One area
in which Adorno’s interests
converged was in his criticism
of the industry surrounding
popular culture, demonstrated
in his notorious essay On
Jazz, published in 1936.
In 1938, during the rise of
Nazism in Germany, Adorno
emigrated to New York, and
then moved to Los Angeles,
where he taught at the
University of California. He
returned to Germany after
the end of World War II, and
took up a professorship at
Frankfurt. Adorno died at the
age of 66 while on holiday in
Switzerland in 1969.Key works1949 Philosophy of New Music
1951 Minima Moralia
1966 Negative Dialectics
1970 Aesthetic TheorySee also: René Descartes 116–23 ■ Georg Hegel 178–85 ■ Karl Marx 196–203 ■
Slavoj Žižek 326