140 Part II: A Change of Scene
attacking as it did all the dominant philosophical fashions.... Moreover,
in addition to the lecture, what we witnessed was the production of
a verbal work of art by a skilled performer. There was no hint of a shy
young scholar; on the contrary, the man who left the podium like a
celebrated soloist was an enthusiast who knew how to get the best out
of his text.’^31 Was Adorno’s enthusiasm in his own cause the reason for
the reservations of some of his audience? There can be no doubt that
this was partly the case, since Adorno had made it perfectly clear how
far removed he was from the ordinary style of professional academic
philosophy, which even at that early date he thought purely formal and
lacking in substance, as ‘a department, a specialized discipline beyond
the other specialized disciplines’.^32 Anyone who was so critical of aca-
demic philosophy, and who declared his opinion so openly, was of course
under an obligation to produce what he regarded as an alternative ap-
proach to the traditional one. How well did he succeed in implementing
his implied alternative methods in his own teaching?
Even before his inaugural lecture, Adorno had been charged by Tillich
with the task of giving seminars at the university. This meant, whether
he liked it or not, that he was increasingly drawn into the academic
routine. Peter von Haselberg has also left an account of these early
philosophy seminars. According to him, these classes had an air of ex-
clusivity and ‘something of the atmosphere of a confidence trick’. In the
first seminar on aesthetics Adorno had among other things given a free
paraphrase of Kierkegaard’s philosophy.^33 The aesthetics seminar of the
winter semester 1931–2, which was the first course that Adorno con-
ducted on his own, focused on Johannes Volkelt’s System of Aesthetics,
a three-volume work published in 1905, containing a now-forgotten sys-
tematic account of the philosophy of art. The 27-year-old Adorno had
carefully prepared this seminar, as can be seen from the notes which
have been preserved.^34 For every session he prepared a detailed and
systematic manuscript. His intention was to develop his critique of the
aesthetic system internally, by demonstrating that a pure aesthetics found-
ers on its own abstractness. According to his own judgement, ‘aesthetic
objects and problems can be seen to have been historically produced.
The mark of the authenticity of all aesthetic problems is the fact that
they have their origins in history.’^35
These notes give us at least a rough idea of some of the important
principles governing Adorno’s own thinking as these were expressed
partly at least in his writings on music or his Habilitation thesis. An
example is the idea that works of art are constructed, that they embody
valid formal laws, that artistic illusion anticipates reconciliation and that
progress in the arts is expressed in the way their material is shaped. He
objected to classifying modern art as abstract and referred to ‘the ambi-
guity of the concept of the sensuous foundation of art, which is under-
stood sometimes as concerned with the senses in isolation and sometimes,
correctly, as constructing the object-world.’^36 He also rejected the idea