The City of Frankfurt and its University 79thing, but as something well defined as part of a nexus of phenomena
governed by laws. As such it is subject to correction by experience.’^35
Guided by Cornelius’s point of view, the twenty-year-old Adorno
engaged with Husserl’s philosophy, setting up a confrontation between
transcendental idealism on the one hand and Husserl’s Logical Invest-
igations on the other, as well as his Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomeno-
logy and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. As a doctoral student, then,
he practised what he was to call ‘standpoint philosophy’, an approach
he later rejected. The dissertation was divided into three succinct chap-
ters and contained lengthy quotations from Husserl’s writings, but other-
wise referred only to Cornelius and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.
A glance at both Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s early writings shows
that the two disciples of Cornelius distinguished between their political
opinions and their philosophical positions. It is unlikely that they were
unaware of the difference. What then motivated them to turn away
from the neo-Kantian strand of transcendental philosophy?
As a young man, Horkheimer had a strong sense of social justice and
solidarity. We can see this clearly in his early efforts as a writer. During
the revolutionary events at the end of the First World War, when the
soviet republic was proclaimed in Munich and the proletarian masses
went out onto the streets, his profoundly moral view of the world
became increasingly politicized. During this brief phase, Munich became
a laboratory for anti-bourgeois lifestyles and revolutionary politics.
Horkheimer was even caught up in these political struggles for a time.
He was briefly arrested in Bavaria after the police mistook him for the
writer and revolutionary Ernst Toller.
Characteristic of the age was the fact that in Germany anti-Semitism
went hand in hand with the hatred felt by right-wing fanatics for all
socialist ideas. Horkheimer reacted to this by moving gradually from
Ernst Toller’s expressionist advocacy of human brotherhood, via Arthur
Schopenhauer’s philosophy of compassion, to Karl Marx’s critique of
ideology, and ultimately to Marx’s idea of a practice that would change
the world. In what Horkheimer described as his desire to find out about
the world, Marx’s theory provided ‘the best critical account of history’ .He
hoped that he would be able to use the theory of historical materialism
to develop a historically based model for changing society.^36 Towards
the end of the 1920s, the process of philosophical clarification started to
be reflected in his activities as a university lecturer.
How did Adorno change from a neo-Kantian to a Marxist? Unlike
the slightly older generation to which Horkheimer belonged, he was
spared any direct experience of the First World War. For him the hor-
ror of the war must have consisted primarily in the fact of nine million
dead in Europe and the absolute meaninglessness of many individual
human lives.
Adorno was as aware as many other sensitive contemporaries that
the bourgeois world now lay in ruins and that capitalism was discredited.