Adorno believed entwinement in worldly duties brings more peace than isolated private existence.

Evidence

But if we follow our impulses we will be able to arrange things, when you have the rectorship business behind you, so that we have time left to think and to live, and the two are the same. I am basically convinced, though it sounds paradoxical, that we will find more peace and quiet in Frankfurt, with all its duties and all its entwinement in life, than in a form of existence which only contains the negative aspect of loneliness: isolation. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1954

Categorization

• XREF: Adorno’s commitment to return to Frankfurt rather than withdraw into private life connects to the broader exile-tension thread of the Frankfurt School’s institutional history in earlier chapters.