66 quotes
The jargon of authenticity ... is a trademark of societalized chosenness, ... sub-language as superior language.
Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
The error in positivism is that it takes as its standard of truth the contingently given division of labor, that between the science and social praxis as well as that within science itself, and allows no theory that could reveal the division of labor to be itself derivative and mediated and thus strip it of its false authority.
Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)
Who, in the end, is to take it amiss if even the freest of the free spirits no longer write for an imaginary posterity, ... but only for the dead God?
Minima Moralia (1951)
Wrong life cannot be lived rightly.
Minima Moralia (1951)
Elements of empirical language are manipulated in their rigidity, as if they were elements of a true and revealed language. The empirical usability of the sacred ceremonial words makes both the speaker and listener believe in their corporeal presence.
Jargon der Eigentlichkeit [Jargon of Authenticity (1964)
All the world's not a stage.
Minima Moralia (1951)
The importance of the culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself pragmatic.
Culture Industry Reconsidered (1963)
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.
Music for entertainment ... seems to complement the reduction of people to silence, the dying out of speech as expression, the inability to communicate at all. It inhabits the pockets of silence that develop between people molded by anxiety, work and undemanding docility.
On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)
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.
Michael Bull (2000)
What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.
The logical figure of the absurd, which presents as stringent the contradictory opposite of stringency, negates all the meaningfulness logic seems to provide in order to convict logic of its own absurdity: to convict it of using subject, predicate, and copula to lay out the nonidentical as though it were identical, as though it could be accommodated with forms.
Can One Live After Auschwitz? (2003)
The thesis of the identity of concept and thing is in general the vital nerve of idealist thought, and indeed traditional thought in general. ... Negative dialectics as critique means above all criticism of precisely this claim to identity.
Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965)
Humanity had to inflict terrible injuries on itself before the self, the identical, purpose-directed, masculine character of human beings was created, and something of this process is repeated in every childhood.
Dialektik der Aufklärung [Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944)
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.
Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)
It suffices to remember how many sorrows he is spared who no longer thinks too many thoughts, how much more "in accordance with reality" a person behaves when he affirms that the real is the right, how much more capacity to use the machinery falls to the person who integrates himself with it uncomplainingly.
On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening (1938)
In both positivism and Heidegger—at least in his later work—speculation is the target of attack. In both cases the thought that autonomously raises itself above the facts through interpreting them and that cannot be reclaimed by them without leaving a surplus is condemned for being empty and vain concept-mongering.
Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)
In a world that has been thoroughly permeated by the structures of the social order, a world that so overpowers every individual that scarcely any option remains but to accept it on its own terms, such naiveté reproduces itself incessantly and disastrously. What people have forced upon them by a boundless apparatus, which they themselves constitute and which they are locked into, virtually eliminates all natural elements and becomes “nature” to them.
Wozu noch Philosophie? [Why still philosophy? (1963)
In America I was liberated from a certain naïve belief in culture. ... The fact that this was not a foregone conclusion, I learned in America, where no reverential silence in the presence of everything intellectual prevailed.
The conflicts that tear society apart resemble the distinction between the concept and the particular facts subordinated to it. ... Whatever refuses to abide by the unity imposed by the principle of dominion manifests itself not as something indifferent to that principle, but as an infringement of logic: as a contradiction.
Lectures on Negative Dialectics (1965)