| This dissertation consists of two parts. The first examines the German-Jewish philosopher Theodor W. Adorno's intellectual development in relation to the cataclysms of twentieth century European history and to the broad generational patterns of intellectual experience within that history. The second part provides a philosophical and cultural introduction to Adorno's 1966 Negative Dialectics, interpreting it as the particular synthesis of philosophical and sociological ideas that Adorno thought viable and appropriate for modern society and subjectivity after Auschwitz. The purpose of this two-part presentation is to allow the tension between life and work, experience and knowledge to be an illuminating and demystifying one. The dissertation's biographical presentation seeks to debunk the myth of Adorno as an ivory-tower elitist who spurned popular culture and feared democracy. It documents Adorno's public engagement and philosophically-inflected cultural analysis as a decades-long learning process through which he was able to play a major role in the re-establishment of a public and critical culture in the Bundesrepublik. By viewing this activity through his Negative Dialectics, whose decade-long composition served as the touchstone for his engagement in the diverse fields of philosophy, sociology, psychology, politics, literature and aesthetics, I show how Adorno used philosophy to mediate between disciplinary and political modes of engagement. Interpreting his post-war writings within the many traditions of German philosophy in which he worked---philosophy in its idealist, materialist, phenomenological, pragmatic, and positivist dimensions---casts light on both Negative Dialectics's historical meaning and its ongoing relevance. Adorno's philosophy provided, I argue, a theory not only of interdisciplinarity within the organized branches of knowledge, but of the social nature of knowledge and experience within a modern life in which culture and knowledge, culture and society had increased their claims to totality, while becoming ever more detached from one another. In its attempt to preserve the integrity of different forms of knowledge, while recognizing their general mediation through history and culture, Adorno's Negative Dialectics remains a useful tool for conceptualizing the bounds and limits of knowledge, rationality, and experience. |
