Adorno [antikvár]

Introduction 'Wahr sind nur die Gedanken, die sich selber nicht verstehen." THEODOR W. ADORNO Adorno, let it be admitted at the outset, would have been appalled at a book of this kind devoted to him. The reason would not have been any reluctance on his part to assume the title of 'modern master'; excessive modesty was not one of his more noteworthy personal failings. Rather, Adorno would have had a principled objection to any attempt to render his thought painlessly accessible to a wide audience. True philosophy, he was fond of insisting, is the type of thinking that resists paraphrase. When his friend Siegfried Kracauer once complained of a feeling of dizziness produced by reading one of Adorno's works, he was testily told that only by absorbing all of them could the meaning of any one be genuinely grasped. Like the music of Arnold Schoenberg, which, so Adorno approvingly claimed, demanded of the listener 'not mere contemplation but praxis',^ his own writing was deliberately designed to thwart an effortless reception by passive readers. In accordance with his dictum, 'the splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass',' Adorno refused to present his complicated and nuanced ideas in simplified fashion. Charging the advocates of easy com-municability with undermining the critical substance of what they claimed to communicate, he vigorously defied the imperative to reduce difficult thoughts into the conversational style of everyday language. What he once complained about in Heidegger could perhaps as a result 11