Adorno

The Institute of Social Research 145

could only be interpreted properly if they were seen as belonging to a
dialectical process, rather than an automatic mechanism.
What emerges from these records of the debates of the period is
that Adorno was attracted by historical materialism as a method of
acquiring knowledge. In this respect he thought it quite different from
a mere world-view. And, like Horkheimer, he refused to think of materi-
alism simply as the opposite of idealism. His critique of idealism was
directed at a philosophy ‘that either ascribes existence merely to spirit,
or else subordinates all non-spiritual existence to the spirit.’ What
emerges, further, from the shorthand records of these ten discussions is
the picture of an active participant with a high profile, one who takes
the lead in debate and takes it upon himself to pass judgement on the
scope and the limitations of philosophies as varied as those of Kant,
Fichte, Hegel and on down to Marx and Freud. These discussions were
clearly extremely highbrow and abstract, and it must be admitted that
they were not free from a wish to impress verbally. Even so, there can
be no doubting the intellectual seriousness of the participants. While
Horkheimer could lay claim to a certain interpretative authority,
Adorno’s role was that of a stimulating and creative mind; it was he
who drove the debates forward and kept coming up with the novel
ideas.

A Privatdozent in the shadow of Walter Benjamin

Records also survive of the two seminars on aesthetics that Adorno
gave independently in the summer semester of 1931 and the winter
semester of 1931–2.^49 These seminars were devoted to Walter Benjamin’s
The Origin of German Tragic Drama. The records give us a rough idea
of the topics on which discussion focused in the twelve seminars which
Kurt Mautz incorporated into the novel referred to above.
What were the topics that attracted Adorno in the book on tragic
drama, as well as Benjamin’s essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities?
The ‘Epistemo-Critical Prologue’ from the tragedy book discusses the
question of truth. In Benjamin’s view, language is the medium in which
the truth is made manifest. He distinguishes between a scientific truth
which is based on the idea that the world of phenomena is transparent,
and a truth that is based on a language of judgement, a truth aimed at
the representation of ideas incorporated in the world of phenomena.
The first truth, scientific knowledge, is a matter of ‘possession’, one
‘that must be taken possession of – even if in a transcendental sense – in
the consciousness.’ The second truth, philosophical truth, is a matter
of ‘self-representation’.^50 With this distinction Benjamin aims to show
that ‘the object of knowledge is not identical with the truth’.^51 Truth,
according to him, is ‘an intentionless state of being, made up of ideas’.^52
This definition of truth as a matter of ideas raises the suspicion that