Theodor Adorno Quotes about Philosophy

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By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

By abstaining from all definite content, whether as formal logic and theory of science or as the legend of Being beyond all beings, philosophy declared its bankruptcy regarding concrete social goals.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Goal, Legends

Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.6, Columbia University Press

Philosophy ... must not bargain away anything of the emphatic concept of truth.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Bargains, Concepts

Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.38, Univ of California Press

It is incumbent upon philosophy ... to provide a refuge for freedom. Not that there is any hope that it could break the political tendencies that are throttling freedom throughout the world both from within and without and whose violence permeates the very fabric of philosophical argumentation.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Philosophical, Political

Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.10, Columbia University Press

If philosophy is still necessary, it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as resistance to the expanding heteronomy, even if only as thought's powerless attempt to remain its own master and to convict of untruth, by their own criteria, both a fabricated mythology and a conniving, resigned acquiescence.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Acquiescence, Way

Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.22, Univ of California Press

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, that reveal its fissures and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will one day appear in the Messianic light.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Light, Perspective

In the general tendency toward specialization, philosophy too has established itself as a specialized discipline, one purified of all specific content. In so doing, philosophy has denied its own constitutive concept: the intellectual freedom that does not obey the dictates of specialized knowledge.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Discipline, Intellectual

Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.6, Columbia University Press

Philosophy that satisfies its own intention, and does not childishly skip behind its own history and the real one, has its lifeblood in the resistance against the common practices of today and what they serve, against the justification of what happens to be the case.

Theodor Adorno

Philosophy, Real, Practice

Theodor W. Adorno (2012). “Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords”, p.6, Columbia University Press