The City of Frankfurt and its University 71the degree of specialization that affected both teaching and research
even in those days. However that may be, he identified this division of
labour as the cause of the institutionalized drawbacks that he associated
with the tendency towards excessive specialization.
His enduring dislike of the university’s neglect of education in favour
of training may explain why Adorno came to focus his studies increas-
ingly on the figure of Hans Cornelius, the professor of philosophy.
Cornelius was very far from being a narrow-minded specialist. He had
an enormous sensitivity to art. Alongside his work in the university, he
was active as a painter, sculptor and pianist. Cornelius was a somewhat
unorthodox or, as Adorno put it, an ‘ingenious’ exponent of neo-Kantian
philosophy, a philosophical trend with various strands, such as the
Marburg school and the South-West school. What the different strands
had in common was, on the one hand, their opposition to speculative
metaphysics, and to the so-called Lebensphilosophie [of Wilhelm Dilthey,
Rudolf Eucken and others], and, on the other hand, their defence of
Kant’s critical standpoint along with the strict relation to empirical real-
ity. Cornelius was by no means one of the outstanding philosophers of
the day, even though his book Psychology as Empirical Science, which
had appeared in 1897, had provoked a polemical response from no less
a thinker than Edmund Husserl. His chief work, the Transcendental
System of 1916, and his Introduction to Philosophy had only a modest
impact, even though the latter went through a number of editions.^6
Nevertheless, Adorno read the books by his supervisor and studied
them to such good effect that he was fully conversant with his teacher’s
philosophical programme. That applies both to his writings on the ped-
agogy of art and to his contributions on the epistemological foundations
of gestalt psychology.^7
In the year in which Adorno obtained his doctorate, the early sum-
mer of 1924, a second, improved and enlarged, edition of Contemporary
Philosophy in its own Words was published by Felix Meiner in Leipzig.
Cornelius’s own contribution to this volume contains an instructive
account of his own life and thought.^8 Adorno’s supervisor, with whom
he originally intended to study for the Habilitation, the second doctor-
ate, was evidently just as versatile as his pupil. Notwithstanding his
marked interest in art, in particular the Italian Renaissance, Cornelius
had begun his academic career as a natural scientist. But once he had
read Schopenhauer, philosophy would not let him go. The World as Will
and Representation had proved to him that an idealist position was the
only sure foundation for a knowledge of nature that is free from meta-
physics. Once he had successfully completed his Habilitation disserta-
tion in philosophy and the aforementioned work of 1897, on psychology
as an empirical science, he was surprised to receive an invitation to
accept the chair in philosophy at the University of Halle – it came just
as he was ‘engaged in copying a Tintoretto in Venice’.^9 But for a variety
of reasons unconnected with Tintoretto he was reluctant to accept this