104 Part II: A Change of Scene
letters to Berg he played down the whole episode, but it had bitter
consequences for him nevertheless, since eighteen months’ work had
gone for nothing. And anyway, how are we to explain Cornelius’s out-
right rejection of the thesis?
The text was 200 pages long and divided into three lengthy chapters.
If we look back at it now, we can see that, despite many redundancies,
it was closely argued. There can be no doubt that it contains independ-
ent work. It can certainly stand comparison with other Habilitation dis-
sertations, among them Horkheimer’s thesis of 1925, Kant’s Critique of
Judgement as a Link between Theoretical and Practical Philosophy. His
epistemological interpretation of psychoanalysis still makes for stimu-
lating reading today. It is by no means far-fetched to suppose that he
was attempting to grapple with a problem that Horkheimer had formu-
lated in the last sentence of his own Habilitation dissertation: ‘What
must be clarified is the doctrine of the original division of the rational
human being into a contradictory juxtaposition of will and knowledge.’^35
Adorno’s approach took its lead from the widely read popular
philosophies of the day that focused on the concept of the unconscious.
In this connection, he briefly reviewed Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer,
Nietzsche and Bergson. He drew a distinction between their vague meta-
physical use of the term and the concept of the unconscious in Freud’s
theory, at least to the point Freud had developed it in the Introductory
Lectures on Psychoanalysis of 1916–17. To clarify this, he employed
Cornelius’s transcendental philosophy, whose starting-point, as Adorno
emphasized, was the principle that consciousness alone was the basis of
all knowledge. The link between idealism and empiricism derives from
a discussion of Kantian transcendentalism. More specifically, it arises
from a critique of the concept of the transcendental thing-in-itself, the
so-called intelligible world, of the concept of subjective spontaneity,
and also of the relation of parts to the whole. Against this background,
Adorno believed he was in a position to reject all attempts to salvage
metaphysics by endorsing any doctrine of existence or essence that tran-
scends consciousness. In the same way, he criticizes philosophical trends
which set out ‘to preserve the transcendental nature of the object, as
opposed to its phenomenal appearance, by identifying the thing-in-itself
with the unconscious.’^36
Adorno goes on to argue that, although within the Kantian frame-
work the unconscious cannot be separated from the phenomenal self,
the transcendental method must nevertheless be retained. Cornelius
should really have been delighted with this conclusion. For, Adorno’s
line of thought continues, from the standpoint of transcendental
philosophy, we may describe as unconscious all things that are neither
perceived in the present nor recollected as past, nor are to be found in
space, but which must be said to exist according to the laws governing
consciousness, even if they exist independently of a present perception.
This conclusion is entirely in the spirit of Cornelius’s own system!