78 Part II: A Change of Scene
conversant with the methods of gestalt psychology that were dominant
in Frankfurt at the time. However, with assistance or without, once the
dissertation had been awarded the mark of ‘summa cum laude’, nothing
much could go wrong in the oral examination, which was held on 28 June
- And even if Adorno was rather presumptuous in his views on the
state of sociology and psychology in the university, his own dissertation
was far from containing a manifesto of original deviations from the
main currents of thought in Frankfurt.
What was the subject of his doctoral dissertation? It was an analysis
of contradictory elements in Husserl’s theory of things and knowledge.
He focused, first, on his concept of the noematic, that is, the pheno-
menological description of the object, the thing that gives a percept its
meaningful unity; and, second, on the Kantian concept of the ‘thing-
in-itself ’ that he thought ambiguous in Husserl’s interpretation. He
focused on the problem of what he saw as a dubious contrast between
reality and consciousness, between the contingent world and the abso-
lute self. He thought that Husserl had failed to make clear whether
objects could be grasped by reducing them to what was given, or whether
they existed as ‘absolute transcendent things’, independent of conscious-
ness. In a crucial passage of his account he asked: what is the relation
between existence as consciousness and existence as reality? Husserl
assumed, so he maintained, that intuition was the only valid form of
knowledge. Adorno rejected this premise because it is in conflict with
Husserl’s distinction between the idea of a thing and the sensuously
perceptible individual objects. Furthermore, Husserl was said to have
overlooked the fundamental importance of gestalt qualities for con-
sciousness. Entirely in the spirit of Cornelius, Adorno continued: ‘With-
out gestalt qualities the laws governing the functions of cognition and
expectation simply become a miracle that can do no more than posit the
existence of a world of objects independent of consciousness, and to
which experiences are related as if to something “transcendental”.’^32
Adorno rejected the concept of intuition in phenomenology because it
assumes that the ultimate explanation for the truth of judgements about
things is contained in what is immediately given, ‘an object to be appre-
hended by its different characteristics. No infinite transcendence stands
behind the phenomena. They are constituted solely in accordance with
the laws governing our consciousness.’^33 To talk about a thing’s identity
only has meaning, he claims, if it can be conceived of as both ideal and
empirical, ‘if a thing can be thought of as one and the same thing in
a plurality of experiences; only where there is a plurality of events can
we speak of the identity of an object, and the plurality of events in
which the identity of a thing becomes manifest are the facts of our
consciousness.’^34
When Adorno speaks of ‘us’ and ‘our’, which he did frequently, what
he had in mind was himself and his teacher. For Cornelius a thing was
something ‘ideal’, but ‘not in a vague way like Husserl’s concept of a