144 Part II: A Change of Scene
Adorno also took an aggressive role in the seminar that followed
Horkheimer’s lectures in the winter of 1931–2. This was a select sem-
inar, restricted to advanced students, doctoral students and assistants
who were there by invitation. In addition to Horkheimer and Adorno,
the participants in these weekly seminars included Peter von Haselberg,
Leo Löwenthal, Carl Dreyfus, Willy Strzelewicz and Kurt Mandelbaum.^47
In these discussions Adorno kept coming back to two questions. First,
what is true knowledge in the sciences? And second, what is the value
of social theory for our understanding of the present? Taking the vari-
ous competing philosophies in turn, he inquired which could provide
the best explanation for the crisis in the sciences. The sciences were
themselves to blame for the crisis because of their constantly increasing
abstractness. On the other hand, the failures of the sciences should also
be sought in the degree to which they were co-opted by society and
subjected to society’s supervision and control. According to Adorno,
the integration of science into society led to the increasing division of
labour, rendering it incapable of providing ‘an overview of the total
reality’. Science confined itself to ‘specialist knowledge without relation
to the whole of our existence’. The validity of a unified modern science
had become questionable because a scrutiny of its origins made it plain
that the preconditions of knowledge were set by society itself.
During the seminar, Adorno went a step further in trying to explain
the state of science in terms of the state of society. The more clearly it
was perceived that the state of society is a precondition of knowledge,
the clearer it would become that science’s claim to autonomy was an
illusion. This perception should not be used, however, as a pretext to
abandon the demand for freedom. Adorno explicitly warned of the
danger of ‘transforming the materialist dialectic into a kind of objective
spirit’.
Adorno’s contributions to the debates show that he was enough of an
expert to move about with confidence among the conflicting schools of
philosophy. In the course of a critical account of idealism, he was able
to discuss the explanatory power of alternative modes of thinking, such
as historical materialism. In this context he illustrated his personal
understanding of materialism with reference to technique in music.
Musical composition involved a progressive process of problem-solving
based on pre-given material. The solution to such problems depended,
he said, on the socio-historical stage of technical mastery. The relations
between modes of composition and society should not be conceived
either as a pre-established harmony or as a simple analogy. Instead,
‘the problem was to show that the most minute facts, for example, of a
new artistic or scientific technique, contained social elements.’^48 Adorno
proposed the reconstruction of the history of philosophy with this idea
in mind, so as to show that at different times different philosophical
solutions reflected changes in society. For example, Marx’s view of the
relations between existence and consciousness, base and superstructure,