72 Part II: A Change of Scene
invitation, and instead he finally decided to opt for an alternative, very
attractive offer from Mayor Adickes of a chair in the future University
of Frankfurt. Here he was very happy, since it was not long before
‘enthusiastic students of philosophy would meet of an evening in his
country house in the Taunus Hills in order to discuss problems of the
theory of knowledge.’^10 They were soon joined by the representatives of
gestalt psychology who would later becomes famous: Friedrich Schumann
and Adhémar Gelb, as well as an exclusive circle of doctoral students,
among them Horkheimer and Adorno.
Even if we discount this somewhat anecdotal account of his career,
it is nevertheless illuminating to see what Cornelius has to say about
his own philosophy.^11 For it contains ideas that overlap with Adorno’s
thought and are all the more striking for their being few in number.
Pride of place goes to Cornelius’s critical attitude towards a purely
defining procedure in the arts and the social sciences. According to
Cornelius, the danger of an infinite regress can only be avoided if you
define the subject whose meaning is to be grasped with the assistance of
conceptually anchored reflections. Adorno may well have appropriated
in his own way Cornelius’s claim that the validity of a subject has to be
tested in the context of its origins, and vice versa, as well as his convic-
tion that judgements on matters of fact contain more than can be read
off from individual perceptions. In opposition to Husserl’s ‘Erschauen’
[seeing, viewing], Cornelius insisted on the importance of reflecting
on the knowledge that came into being from synthesizing the contents
of consciousness as an a priori precondition of statements about experi-
ence. In his view, our act of thinking always adds a noumenon to the
phenomenon. Cornelius’s other claim, however, that ‘the development
of our stock of knowledge.. .consists in progressively subordinating
phenomena to new laws’,^12 was one that Adorno came eventually to
reject, though he did not do so at the outset. It is also unlikely that he
was convinced by the social aspects of Cornelius’s teachings. Cornelius
argued that maintaining the social conditions of freedom was a rational
duty. However, this duty depended for its fulfilment on the organization
of power and justice by the state. ‘What mankind lacks nowadays is an
education in consideration for others, and clear objectivity, instead of
the constant urgings of personal gain and vanity.’^13 No doubt the young
doctoral student would have shared the critical attack on the ‘wretched-
ness of our age’. But even then he would have thought it a fallacy to
seek the cause of social pathologies in the ‘short-sightedness’ of selfish
people. For, from his very first years as a student, he was familiar with a
sociological perspective that focuses on human subjects in the context
of their social relationships. The ideas he formulated in the Minima
Moralia two decades later were already present in a rudimentary form
then – in particular, the belief that conservative cultural criticism is
mistaken when it blames individual human beings for the decline of the
individual and the crisis of culture.