The City of Frankfurt and its University 77natural sciences.’^27 The same thing can be said of Horkheimer’s Habil-
itation thesis of 1925 on Kant’s Critique of Judgement as a Link between
Theoretical and Practical Philosophy, as well as for his first lecture course,
which he gave in the winter semester of 1925 – 6. As before, he argued
with Kant against Kant in order to show that the congruence between
theoretical and practical reason was not accidental. If there were a dif-
ference in principle between the two forms of reason, this was to be
explained by circumstances arising from the nature of consciousness.
He also remained within the confines of identity-philosophy in his early
notes on the concept of totality. Totality, he noted, goes back to a struc-
ture of existence that the subjective mind perceives directly, resulting in
a unity of object and knowledge.^28 In his years as a Privatdozent, there
was as yet no insuperable abyss between Horkheimer’s way of thinking
and modern positivism. On the contrary, positivism’s critique of meta-
physics and its logical reduction of linguistic utterances to empirical
experience came close to his own views.
Adorno experienced the relation between his personal inclinations
and the nature of academic philosophy in much the same way as
Horkheimer. Privately, he was fascinated by critically minded, anti-
bourgeois writers such as Georg Lukács in his The Theory of the Novel
and Ernst Bloch in his Spirit of Utopia. In his university studies, by
contrast, as in his thesis on Husserl in 1924 and even the first draft of
his Habilitation dissertation on The Concept of the Unconscious in the
Transcendental Doctrine of the Soul of 1927, he remained within the
self-enclosed world of academic philosophy. ‘The epistemological stand-
point that we presuppose.. .is the one adopted by Hans Cornelius in
his books... .This standpoint is generally assumed and it is therefore
not necessary to make explicit reference to it.’^29 Similar statements can
be found in the dissertation that Adorno had finished in summer 1924
and for which he received the mark ‘summa cum laude’. In a letter of
July 1924, Adorno gave Leo Löwenthal an account of this hastily writ-
ten dissertation: ‘I spent the latter half of April in Amorbach.. .working
on Husserl. By the middle of May, I had planned my dissertation and
on the 26th I presented the plan to Cornelius, who duly accepted it. By
6 June, the dissertation was finished; it was dictated on the 11th and
handed in on the 14th.’^30 There were unforeseen formal difficulties with
the final examination, however, because the discipline of sociology was
not recognized by the Arts Faculty as a legitimate subject. Adorno told
Löwenthal that the reason for this was to be sought in ‘anti-Semitic
rancour towards Oppenheimer and Salomon’. A further factor was that
the regulations required him to choose a science subject as a minor
element in the examination. Adorno’s choice fell reluctantly on ‘Profes-
sor Schumann’s psychology, which is actually even drearier than
Salomon’s sociology, productive only as a source below the kitsch thresh-
old.’^31 In order to learn in short order as much psychology as he would
need for the examination, he sought help from Horkheimer, who was