PHILOSOPHY ETHICS

Philosophy Ethics

Theodor Adorno was one of the foremost philosophers of the twentieth century. Although he wrote on a wide range of subjects, his fundamental concern was human suffering - especially modern societies' effects upon the human condition. He was influenced most notably by Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche. He was associated with The Institute for Social Research, in the Frankfurt School, which was a social science and cultural intellectual hub for promoting socialism and overthrowing capitalism. It was responsible for the creation of the philosophical form called critical theory, which takes the stand that oppression, is created through politics, economics, culture, and materialism, but is maintained most significantly through consciousness. Therefore the focus of action must come from consciousness. The Institute of Social Research deviated from orthodox Marxism in its argument that social and cultural factors played as important a role as economics in oppression (Theodor, 1966b).

Adorno - an outstanding figure of the short 20th Century, the last citizen, one last genius childhood in the late middle centuries of the school during World War II, the intellectual socialization in the Weimar Republic, the experience of National Socialism and the Second World War, the exile in the United States of New Deal to return to Germany, the Adenauer era, and the Student Protest - Adorno is the individual point in which the "century of extremes" condensed example. Detlev Claussen sees Adorno as an artist, whose wide-ranging - philosophical, sociological, musical - interests are to be understood as a unit.

There is no comparable work in the philosophical literature in the 20th Century: Minima Moralia by Theodor W. Adorno is a collection of 153 Reflections from Damaged Life (as the subtitle) that has set in the cultural and social criticism and new standards.

The world as it is "like the middle of the twentieth century" presents us today with all the burden of injustice and suffering. To the horrors of totalitarianism, concentration camps and the atomic bomb, is compounded by the continuing poverty, genocide, the daily deaths, precariousness, exclusion on the ground. As then, today also live the consequences of this world of false needs and inclusive rationality, as then, that the world is legitimized in the form of thought, in the straightjacket of the concepts that affirm everlasting. Adorno's relevance in our time is that the thoughts expressed in his works (particularly in the Negative Dialectics) continue to inquire of the day. His thoughts may accompany our steps and paths in the new light of social leadership.

Since the end of World War II, the world economy has been transformed from a devastated and fragmented assortment of national economies primarily engaged in producing a low level of basic commodities for local consumption into a unified set of product, factor, and financial markets of global dimensions generating a tremendous volume and variety of goods and services supporting a much higher level of living for the world's population. The combination of high population growth, a brisk pace in capital formation, ever widening markets, and accelerating ...