most fruitful, even though it too ultimately met with failure.
Before passing on to the methodological implications of Critical Theory, the contributions of other Institut members to its formulation should be made clear. Although Lowenthal and Pollock were concerned primarily with other matters, both intellectual and institutional, they still actively participated in the discussions of the articles submitted for publication in the Zeitschrift. More influential, however, were Adorno and Marcuse, both of whom wrote extensively on theoretical issues under their own names. By examining their work individually, we can perhaps further clarify the Instituas philosophical stance. We will do so, however, without commenting on the validity of their analyses of other thinkers; the object is to illuminate Critical Theory, rather than to outline an alternative interpretation.
Insofar as his Institut contributions were concerned, Adorno was occupied in the 1930’s almost entirely with the sociology of music. Outside of the Zeitschrift, however, he published one long philosophical study and worked at great length on another.104 In both, his closeness to Horkheimer’s position was manifestly revealed. Although the two men did not write collaboratively until the i94o’s, there was a remarkable similarity in their views from the first. Evidence of this exists in a letter Adorno wrote to Lowenthal from London in 1934, discussing his response to the recently published Dämmerung:
I have read the book several times with the utmost precision and have an extraordinary impression of it. I already knew most of the pieces; nonetheless, in this form everything appears entirely different; above all, a certain broadness of presentation, which earlier had annoyed me in single aphorisms, now seems obvious as a means of expression—exactly appropriate to the agonizing development of the capitalist total situation whose horrors exist so essentially in the precision of the mechanism of mediation. . . . As far as my position is concerned, I believe I can almost completely identify with it—so completely that it is difficult for me to point to differences. As new and especially essential to me, I would like to mention the interpretation of the problem of personal contingency against the thesis of radical justice, and in general, the critique of static anthropology in all the pieces. Something to discuss would perhaps be the general relation to the Enlightenment.105
Here perhaps for the first time Adorno hinted at that more sweeping critique of the Enlightenment which he and Horkheimer together would carry out many years later.
Adorno’s earliest major philosophical critique was Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, written in 1929–1930 and submitted as a Habilitationsschrift for Paul Tillich in 1931. Its date of publication ironically fell on the day Hitler took power in 1933. Siegfried Kracauer, with whom Adorno had studied Kant, was the recipient of its dedication; the impact of another close friend, Walter Benjamin, was also evident in Adorno’s arguments. Both Benjamin and Tillich were among the book’s favorable reviewers.106 Kierkegaard was, however, not a critical or popular success. While partly due to its unapologetically abstruse style and demandingly complex analysis, its minimal effect was also produced by what Adorno was later to call its being “overshadowed from the beginning by political evil.”107
Whatever its difficulties—all of Adorno’s work was uncompromisingly exacting for even the most sophisticated reader—the book did contain many of the themes that were to be characteristic of Critical Theory. The choice of a subject through which Adorno hoped to explore these issues was not surprising in the light of his own artistic inclinations. From the beginning of the book, however, he made it clear that by aesthetics he meant more than simply a theory of art; the word signified to him, as to Hegel, a certain type of relation between subject and object. Kierkegaard had also understood it in a specifically philosophical way. In Either/Or, he had defined the aesthetic sphere as “that through which man immediately is what he is; the ethical is that through which he becomes what he becomes.”108 But as Adorno noted in his first of many criticisms of Kierkegaard, “the ethical subsequently withdrew behind his teaching of paradox-religion. In view of the leap’ of faith, the aesthetic was deprecatingly transformed from a stage in the dialectical process, namely that of the nondecisive, into simple creature-like (kreatürliche) immediacy.”109 To Adorno, immediacy, that is, the search for primary truths, was anathema. Like Horkheimer’s, his thought was always rooted in a kind of cosmic irony, a refusal to rest somewhere and say finally, Here is where truth lies. Both men rejected Hegel’s basic premise of the identity of subject and object.
Ostensibly, Kierkegaard had rejected it as well. Yet to Adorno, Kierkegaard’s renowned celebration of subjectivity unwittingly contained an identity theory. “The intention of his philosophy,” Adorno wrote, “does not aim towards the determination of subjectivity but of ontology; and subjectivity appears not as its content but as its stage (Schauplatz)”110 Behind all his talk of the concrete, existential individual, there lurked a covert yearning for transcendent truth; “Hegel is turned inward: what for him is world history, for Kierkegaard is the individual man.”111
Moreover, the ontology posited by Kierkegaard was that of hell, not heaven; despair rather than hope was at the center of his vision. The withdrawal into inwardness that Kierkegaard advocated was really a retreat into a mythical, demonic repetition that denied historical change. “Inwardness,” Adorno wrote, “is the historical prison of prehistorical humanity.”112 By rejecting the historical world, Kierkegaard had become an accomplice of the reification he so often denounced; his dialectics were without a material object and were thus a return to the idealism he claimed to have left behind. By denying real history, he had withdrawn into a pure anthropology based on “historicity (Geschichtlichtkeit): the abstract possibility of existence in time.”113 Related to this was his concept of Gleichzeitigkeit,114 time without change, which was the correlate of the absolutized self. Here Adorno was making a criticism similar to that leveled by Horkheimer a few years later against Bergson’s idea of durée, as discussed above.
Along with his analysis of the philosophical implications of inwardness, Adorno included a sociological probe of what he referred to as the bourgeois intérieur in Kierkegaard’s time. Subjective inwardness, he argued, was not unrelated to the position of rentier who was outside the production process, a position held by Kierkegaard himself. In this role he shared the typical petit-bourgeois sense of impotence, which he carried to an extreme by ascetically rejecting the natural self in its entirety: “His moral rigor was derived from the absolute claim of the isolated person. He criticized all eudaemonism as contingent in contrast with the objectless self.”115 It was thus no accident that sacrifice was at the center of his theology; the absolutely spiritual man ended by annihilating his natural self: “Kierkegaard’s spiritualism is above all hostility to nature.”116 Here and elsewhere in his book Adorno expressed a desire to overcome man’s hostility to nature, a theme that would play an increasing role in the Institut’s later work.
Although he wrote an occasional article on Kierkegaard in later years,117 Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic was really Adorno’s Abschied (farewell)118 to the Danish philosopher. In 1934 he left the Continent for England, where he studied at Merton College, Oxford. Except for occasional trips back to Germany, he remained in England for the next three and a half years. While continuing his interest in music and producing articles for the Zeitschrift on related topics, he found the time to begin a long study of Edmund Husserl, in whose work he had been interested since his doctoral dissertation in 1924. By the time it appeared in 1956, its tone was scarcely less critical than that of his earlier treatment of Kierkegaard. In this work, too, many of the ideas that Horkheimer and Marcuse were simultaneously developing can be found. Although certain sections of the work—the third chapter and the introduction—were not written until the fifties, an examination of Towards a Metacritique of Epistemology does give some insight into Critical Theory’s attitude towards phenomenology in the thirties.
In his first book, Adorno had singled out Husserl as someone who shared Kierkegaard’s
