The Institute of Social Research 137type ‘succumbed to a kind of universal relativism’, abandoning such
categories as class and ideology in favour of general concepts of a purely
formal nature, such as social relations, social formation, social distinc-
tion, social group, social organization.
In the inaugural lecture, he refers to sociologists – and Horkheimer
will undoubtedly have been irritated by it – as ‘cat burglars’
(Fassadenkletterer, literally, façade climbers), a concept evidently bor-
rowed from Martin Heidegger. As a cat burglar, the sociologist tries to
salvage the valuable remnants of a building erected by one of the great
architects of philosophy, but now abandoned as derelict. At the time
of the inaugural lecture Adorno was not unfamiliar with sociological
ways of thinking. On the contrary, he was conversant with the principal
modern trends of the discipline. Nevertheless, sociology in his view had
to take second place to his primary philosophical objective of rendering
the world visible as an enigma by interpreting individual phenomena.
What was meant by this?
His initial premise had been to insist that we must abandon the illu-
sion that thought alone will enable us to grasp the whole of reality as
a meaningful world. For this reason, all attempts to comprehend empir-
ical reality by refining our philosophical systems are doomed. Because
reality remains enigmatic in principle, the philosophical theoretician
faces the task of solving one riddle after another. As long as philoso-
phers rise to the challenge of interpreting ‘the riddles of existence’,^20
philosophy will remain relevant even in the modern world which has
been demystified by the rationalism of the individual sciences. To at-
tempt to solve such riddles by interpretative processes, however, does
not mean that Adorno is trying to track down truths through some
occult knowledge, to discern beings hidden behind the world of phe-
nomena, beings that explain everything because they are at the root
of everything that exists. On the contrary, the ‘function of riddle-
solving... is to illuminate the puzzle in a flash.’^21 Such moments of
perception are given to the interpretative mind because the questions
arising in response to the riddles are gradually surrounded by possible
answers that propose tentative solutions.
This point in Adorno’s argument is of central importance for his
own model of knowledge. He states that the models of philosophical
interpretation must be introduced into ‘changing constellations’. Such
‘changing experiments’ should continue to be conducted ‘until they
arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the ques-
tions themselves vanish.’^22 For Adorno, who at this point brought
a notion of dialectic into play, knowledge means that the particular
nature of one interpretation comes into conflict with another one. The
truth content, which is always provisional, appears in a sudden flash
illuminating what has previously been thought. In the same way, philo-
sophical interpretations can claim validity to the degree that they lead
to better insights.