to the question of ground in Critical Theory, most clearly evident in Adorno’s version of it. It is worth recalling that Adorno, as Susan Buck-Morss first argued, was likely to have learned of Rosenzweig’s “New Thinking” in Jewish theology in the 1920s.51 Neither he nor Horkheimer were, to be sure, ever in the Frankfurt Lehrhaus circle, unlike Löwenthal and Fromm, but he certainly knew of Rosenzweig through Benjamin and Scholem. And, although Adorno did not follow Rosenzweig in explicitly repudiating Hegel, he might well have absorbed some of his reservations about an identitarian dialectic in which all otherness was absorbed into a rational totality.52 After his return to Germany, Adorno would, in fact, acknowledge that “in [Schelling’s] approach from the standpoint of identity philosophy many themes can be found that I reached coming from completely different premises.”53 Here he was referring in particular to Schelling’s Lectures on the Method of Academic Study, a work that Benjamin had also appreciated.54 Habermas would in fact remark on the continuing influence of this book at the Institute even in the 1950s: “What Schelling had developed in the summer term, 1802, in his Jena lectures to serve as a method of academic studies as an idea of the German university, namely to ‘construct the whole of one’s science out of oneself and to present it with inner and lively visualization,’ this is what Adorno practiced in this summer term in Frankfurt.”55
There was also a substantive debt to Schelling in Adorno’s suspicion of seeking firm ground for philosophical critique. In his 1931 lecture “The Idea of Natural History,” he mediated history by nature and nature by history without seeking a higher level sublimation of the two terms. Although Schelling is not explicitly mentioned, one can discern his shadow in Adorno’s resistance to a purely historicist model in which “second nature” is identified solely with Lukács’s idea of a reification that must be overcome by the power of a collective subjective constitution of the historical world. As one commentator put it, “Arguably Ages [of the World] invents this history of nature which will inform Benjamin’s and Adorno’s reformulation of ‘natural history’ as history subject to nature: ‘the self-cognition of the spirit as nature in disunion with itself ’. ”56 Indeed, the essay may even have provided a nuanced critique of Benjamin, to which it is in many ways indebted, for as Hullot-Kentor has noted: “Benjamin’s study of the Baroque is a research of origins, which Adorno distantly criticizes.”57 The same impulse courses through Dialectic of Enlightenment, written in the 1940s. As Andrew Bowie puts it, “Schelling makes, throughout his career, many of the moves which are the basis of Horkheimer and Adorno’s conception of a ‘dialectic of enlightenment,” in which reason deceives itself about its relationship with nature, and thereby turns into its dialectical opposite.”58 The melancholic tone suffusing much of Schelling’s work also bears comparing with the “melancholy science” Adorno practiced so diligently.59
In his 1959 lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Adorno would continue to denounce the “mania for foundations” (Funderiungswahn) that had led Kant and other philosophers to seek firm ground for their arguments. “This is the belief,” he wrote, “that everything which exists must be derived from something else, something older or more primordial. It is a delusion built on the idealist assumption that every conceivable existent thing can be reduced to mind, or, I almost said, to Being … You should liberate yourselves from this ‘mania for foundations’ and … you should not always feel the need to begin at the very beginning.”60 In Negative Dialectics, he positively cited Ages of the World as an antidote to rationalist consciousness philosophy, noting that “urge, according to Schelling’s insight, is the mind’s preliminary form.”61 Although resisting Schelling’s privileging of intuition above reason, an inclination that Hegel had found particularly disturbing, Adorno did seek a balance between noetic and dianoetic roads to the truth. As Herbert Schnädelbach once noted, Adorno was a “noetic of the non-identical. He always stressed, above all in his remarks on formal logic, that the goal of dianoetic operations was noetic.”62 Accordingly, in his Aesthetic Theory, his debts to Schelling—who, more than any other German idealist, granted a special privilege to the work of art as able to express, indeed to perform, nonidentity in a way that purely discursive (that is, dianoetic) philosophy cannot—have not been hard to find.63
In short, the Frankfurt School’s willingness to live with the abyss—or, more correctly, at its edge—meant that it avoided the problematic reliance on an “expressive” concept of totality, which Hegelian Marxists like Lukács had defended.64 It reflected their recognition that nature could not be subsumed under the rubric of history and that the world of natural objects could not be seen as the projection of a constitutive subject. It allowed them to free critical thought from its dependence on an ur-moment of legitimating empowerment prior to the imperfect present.
Their hesitation before a Hegelian rationalist immanentism that would fold prerational ground into the totality did not, to be sure, mean that they followed Schelling in the direction that Heidegger and others wanted to take him, a direction that could end by celebrating the irrational.65 Not only Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution, but also works like Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason testify to their dogged insistence on the critical potential in rationalism. Even when Habermas could jettison the emphatic, still metaphysical concept of reason that had animated the first generation of Critical Theorists, he would warn that “whenever the one is thought of as absolute negativity, as withdrawal and absence, as resistance against propositional speech in general, the ground (Grund) of rationality reveals itself as an abyss (Abgrund) of the irrational.”66 For Habermas, the reliance on a pre-propositional, world-disclosing intuition of the absolute paradoxically led to abandoning the one version of “Grund” that he could support: ground as the giving of reasons. Yet by acknowledging the limits of reason in its more emphatic sense and accepting the legitimate claims of something else—aesthetic experience, mimesis, the unconscious desires of the libido, even the hopes expressed in the idiom of religion—the Frankfurt School understood that living on the edge of the abyss would not be without its benefits.
There is, in short, an unexpected congruence—perhaps better put as a symbolic affinity—between the lack of a secure foundation in the institutional history of the Frankfurt School and its openness to the theoretical lessons of an unexpected influence like Schelling. This is not to say that either can be called the true “origin” of Critical Theory’s suspicion of origins, for to do so would be to undermine precisely the force of their resistance to a firm and stable Grund from which to support critique itself. The Institute’s “founding fathers” seem to have understood that the only viable point d’appui of critique was in the imagination of a possible future rather than a recollected past, a utopian hope rather than a past moment of originary legitimation.
To clarify this point, one might perhaps compare their practice with that of the American founding fathers as interpreted by another German émigré luminary, Hannah Arendt, in On Revolution.67 In this work, Arendt contrasts the attempt to begin ex nihilo in the French Revolution, deriving legitimacy from a Rousseauist sovereign general will, with the American Revolutionaries’ tacit reliance on prior compacts, covenants and precedents. Aligning it more with the Roman Republic, which drew its authority from the earlier founding of Troy, than with the act of creation ex nihilo by the Hebrew God, she argued that the American Revolution did not seek a monolithic foundation, a moment of decisionist legitimation before legality. Power, she argues, “was not only prior to the Revolution, it was in a sense prior to the colonization of the continent. The Mayflower compact was drawn up on the ship and signed upon landing.”68 By placing the act of legitimation in a receding train of possible founding moments, prior even to the colonial settlement out of which the new republic was fashioned, the American experience was one in which the potential for future perfection was as much grounds for critique as any past episode of actual founding.
It is, to be sure, a long way from the Pilgrims’ landing at Plymouth Rock to the founding of the Institut für Sozialforschung, and perhaps an even longer journey between the Enlightenment
