128 Part II: A Change of Scene
Adorno needed barely more than a year to write and complete this
dissertation, with its highly idiosyncratic ideas and methods and a
plethora of ingenious formulations. How did he manage to master the
enormous daily burden of work required for this task? It was possible
only because he was inspired by a feeling of enthusiasm that grew
almost by the day. He was convinced that, in criticizing Kierkegaard, he
was also aiming an annihilating blow at Heidegger. To Berg, Adorno
wrote that his struggle with Kierkegaard was ‘new and original’ since,
on this occasion, he had written without looking over his shoulder at the
faculty professors who would examine his work. Does this explain why
they objected so strongly to what he had produced? In his letter, Adorno
dismissed their criticisms as insignificant, saying that they sounded very
like the objections to modern music.
In the event, the two examiners’ reports, by Professors Paul Tillich
and Max Horkheimer, proved to be positive. Tillich stressed the pro-
spect of a new view of Kierkegaard that had been opened up by Adorno’s
critical interrogation of existential philosophy. He also praised the
‘combination of the highest abstraction and vivid concreteness’ and the
‘insertion of a concept into the constellation of related and opposing
concepts’, as well as the programmatic hints of a philosophy ‘whose
truth is to be found in the interpretation of the microscopic events of a
historical moment.’^35 According to Tillich, Wiesengrund’s thinking was
‘not topological, but fabric-like’; the argument ‘is spun out essentially
without breaks from one end to the other.’ In the main, Horkheimer
agreed with Tillich’s assessment. But he drew attention to the fact that
the concepts of ‘hope and reconciliation’ were essential parts of the
dissertation and that they were derived from theological convictions
which were quite alien to his own way of thinking. ‘Nevertheless,
I know full well that this study is the product not just of a strong philo-
sophical desire to uncover truth, but also of a mind with the power to
advance philosophy at important points.’^36
Those of Adorno’s friends who were not integrated into the machin-
ery of the university, Kracauer and Benjamin in particular, had rather
different reactions to The Construction of the Aesthetic. Benjamin, when
he saw the page proofs of the book, responded enthusiastically in a
letter of December 1932: ‘Whether I turn to your presentation of
baroque motif in Kierkegaard, to the ground-breaking analysis of the
“intérieur”, to the marvellous quotations which you supply from the
philosopher’s technical treasure trove of allegories, to the exposition of
Kierkegaard’s economic circumstances, to the interpretation of inward-
ness as citadel or of spiritualism as the ultimate defining limit of spiritism
- I am constantly struck in all of this by the wealth of insight, as well as
by the penetrating character of your evaluation.’^37 Benjamin was well
aware that the Kierkegaard book owed a debt to his own ideas and his
methods of interpretation as these were expressed in his essays and
books, especially the essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and theOrigin