Towards a Theory of Aesthetics 123collect the material and put his first thoughts down on paper, than he
took off for the summer holidays with Gretel Karplus. He celebrated
his twenty-sixth birthday with her in the Hotel Genazzini in Bellagio on
Lake Como.
Why did Adorno fix on Kierkegaard’s philosophy as the subject of
his dissertation? He had been interested in Kierkegaard’s ideas since
his youth, and, to quote his own words, he had ‘for years ridden around
on Kierkegaardian ideas’ about ‘the problem of personality and the
inwardness of the individual’.^10 And a letter from Kracauer to Löwenthal
as long ago as December 1923 reveals that Adorno had even studied
Kierkegaard intensively while he was still at the Gymnasium. ‘If Teddie
ever decides to make a declaration of love so as to escape from the
sinful state of bachelorhood... , he will be sure to phrase it so obscurely
that the young lady concerned... will be unable to understand what he
is saying unless she has read the complete works of Kierkegaard.’^11 At
the start of the 1920s, there was indeed a widespread interest in the
discussion of terms such as ‘anxiety’, ‘inwardness’, ‘decision’ and ‘leap’.
This entire aspect of existentialist philosophy exerted a powerful fas-
cination, chiefly as the antithesis of idealism and Hegel’s philosophy
of history. A clue to Adorno’s personal interest in Kierkegaard can be
gleaned from his preface to the book, in which he remarks that
Kierkegaard provides the attractive opportunity of confronting a philo-
sophy based primarily on existential and theological questions and
reading it against the grain so as to set aside its religious, theological
contents and lay bare its ideas on the problems of aesthetics.
In Adorno’s eyes, Kierkegaard, the ‘grandfather of all existential philo-
sophy’,^12 was (alongside Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) a major thinker
because of his critique of the academic philosophy of his time. He was
reacting to the fact that ‘the academic discipline of philosophy had
ceased to have anything to do with people.’^13 These were ideas to which
Adorno was strongly attracted, but from which, precisely because of
this attraction, he felt the need to distance himself (in the same way as
from Husserl and Heidegger).
Adorno thought of Kierkegaard as a highly distinctive philosopher
of the aesthetic. He used his philosophy as a foil to enable him to
develop in more concrete form his own ideas about art. What fascinated
Adorno was Kierkegaard’s refined literary style with its ironical turns of
phrase, what Kierkegaard had called ‘aesthetic writing’. Adorno had
independently played with the idea of an aesthetic existence, a mode
of life that Kierkegaard had designed for himself as a counter-model
to the way of life of the petty bourgeoisie as well as to the collective life
of the masses, a counter-model that even he had difficulty in sustain-
ing. But what Adorno was able to latch on to was Kierkegaard’s ideas
about the self as the fundamental structure of the modern subject,
the anti-systematic tendencies in his thought and Kierkegaard’s love of
paradox.