1 1 T. W. Adorno was appointed Assistant Professor of Philosophy and Sociology in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt in 1953; four years later he became Full Professor, a position which he held until his death in 1969. 2 2 Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) had been Professor of Social Philosophy at the University of Frankfurt between 1930 and 1933. After his return from exile in the USA he held the post of Professor of Philosophy and Sociology from 1949 until 1959. 3 3 In his lecture course Introduction to Sociology delivered in the summer semester of 1968, however, Adorno specifically says that ‘the career prospects for sociologists are not good.’ He continues:It would be highly misleading to gloss over this fact. And far from improving, as might have been expected, these prospects have actually got worse. One reason is a slow but steady increase in the number of graduates; the other is that, in the current economic situation [Adorno is referring to the period of recession in 1966 and 1967], the profession’s ability to absorb sociology graduates has declined. I should mention something that I was not aware of earlier, and have only found out since becoming closely involved in these matters. It is that even in America, which is sometimes called the sociological paradise, and where sociology does, at least, enjoy equal rights within the republic of learning, it is by no means the case that its graduates can effortlessly find jobs anywhere. So that if Germany were to develop in the same direction as America in this respect, as I prognosticated ten years ago, it would not make a significant difference. (NaS IV.15, p. 9; Introduction to Sociology, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 1–2) 4 4 See Adorno’s essay ‘On Statics and Dynamics as Sociological Categories’ (GS 8, pp. 217–37), which was first published in this form in 1962, although an earlier version of the piece had appeared in 1956 under the title ‘Observations on Statics and Dynamics’ (See Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie, 8/2 [1956], pp. 321–8). 5 5 Reading ‘nicht’ for ‘wach’. 6 6 Adorno’s essay ‘Sociology and Empirical Research’ was originally published in Klaus Ziegler (ed.), Wesen und Wirklichkeit des Menschen: Festschrift für Helmuth Plessner, Göttingen, 1957, pp. 245–60. In a note to that essay Adorno says: ‘The text which is published here is a revised and expanded version of theses which were originally presented in a discussion between German social scientists which took place on 1 March 1957 at the Institute for Social Research at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt’ (ibid., p. 245). The text can now be found in GS 8, pp. 196–216; see the Editor’s Afterword in GS 9.2, p. 407. 7 7 See Helmut Schelsky, Ortsbestimmung der deutschen Soziologie, Düsseldorf, 1959. In this book Schelsky (1912–1984) engages in detail with Adorno‘s critique of empirical social research (see, in particular, pp. 28f., 50–2, 67–89; see also NaS IV.15, p. 81; Introduction to Sociology, Jephcott, p. 105). 8 8 See René König, ‘On Some Recent Developments in the Relation between Theory and Research’, in Transactions of the Fourth World Congress of Sociology, Vol. II, London, pp. 275–89. Adorno’s personal library included an offprint of this essay (Nachlaßbibliothek Adorno 5694). See also the letter from König (1906–1992) to Adorno of 7 January 1959 and Adorno’s letter to König of 29 September 1959 (René König, Schriften: Ausgabe letzter Hand, ed. Heine von Alemann et al., vol. 19: Briefwechsel, vol. 1, ed. Mario König and Oliver König, Opladen, 2000, pp. 506 and 512). 9 9 See the opening section of the ‘Introduction’ to the Critique of Pure Reason: ‘On the Distinction between Pure and Empirical Knowledge’ (Immanuel Kant, Werke in sechs Bänden, ed. Wilhelm Weischedl, Wiesbaden, 1956, vol. II: Kritik der reinen Vernunft, pp. 45f. (B 1–3); Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, Macmillan, 1933, pp. 41–3). 10 10 In his lectures on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, delivered in the summer semester of 1959, Adorno discusses this ‘problem of constitution’ in detail and notes that ‘quotidian existence, factuality, is just as much a precondition of the possibility of thinking about mere forms as is its claim that without these forms the contents of experience could not come about at all’ (NaS IV.4, p. 239; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Polity, 2001, p. 157). This recognition leads Adorno at the end of the lecture to proposea variation of the famous Kantian project of ‘the critical path that alone is open’. We shall indeed adopt this Kantian project of the critical path. What I have been doing was very consciously carried out in the spirit of an immanent critique of the Critique of Pure Reason. My arguments have been moving within the conceptual apparatus and the lines of thought developed by Kant. At the same time, their aim was to break out of the prison of the so-called problem of what constitutes what. They terminate in the proposition that the dialectical path alone is open. (Ibid., p. 241; Livingstone, p. 159) 11 11 Adorno ascribes the concepts of the ‘constituting’ and the ‘constituted’ to Kant in other places too (Drei Studien zu Hegel, GS 5, pp. 258–69, and Negative Dialektik, GS 6, p. 239; see Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA, 1993, pp. 9–22, and Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, Routledge, 1973, p. 241). In fact, these specific terms are not actually used by Kant himself. Adorno discusses the concepts in question and the problem he takes to be involved here in lecture 14 of the aforementioned course on the first Critique (NaS IV.4., pp. 226–41; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 149–59). 12 12 Reading ‘nicht diskursiven’ for ‘den kursiven’. 13 13 Edmund Husserl (1859–1938) distinguished between ‘sensuous intuition’ and what he called ‘categorial intuition’. See Husserliana: Gesammelte Werke, ed. H. L. von Breda et al., The Hague, 1956–, Vol. XIX.2, Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band. Untersuchungen zur Phänomenologie und Theorie der Erkenntnis. Zweiter Teil, ed. Ursula Panzer, pp. 657–963; Logical Investigations, Vol. II, trans. J. N. Findlay, Routledge, 2001, pp. 271–92. Adorno also refers to this issue in his Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie:We may perhaps surmise that this is one of the causes for Husserl’s effect. His philosophy codifies an objectively historical experience without deciphering it, viz. the withering away of argument. Consciousness finds itself at a crossroads. Though the call to insight [Schau] and the scorn of discursive thought may furnish the pretext for a commandeered world view and blind subordination, it also exhibits the instant in which the correctness of argument and counter-argument disappears, and in which the activity of thought consists only in calling what is by its name. Namely, what everyone already knows, so no more arguments are needed, and what no one wants to know, so no counter-argument need be heard. … Husserlian analyses, and even the paradoxical construction of categorial intuition, remain, in Hegelian terms, completely mired in mere reflection. (GS 5, pp. 212f.; Against Epistemology: A Metacritique, trans. Willis Domingo, Cambridge, MA, 2013, pp. 209–10) 14 14 See Adorno’s remarks in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie:The notion of the double character of Dasein, as ontic and ontological, expels Dasein from itself. This is Heidegger’s disguised idealism. For the dialectic in the subject between the existent and the concept becomes being of a higher order; and the dialectic is brought to a halt. Whatever praises itself for reaching behind the concepts of reflection – subject and object – in order to grasp something substantial, does nothing but reify the irresolvability of the concepts of reflection. It reifies the impossibility of reducing one into the other, into the in-itself. This is the standard philosophical form of underhanded activity, which thereupon occurs constantly in the jargon. It vindicates without authority and without theology, maintaining that what is of essence is real, and, by the same token, that the existent is essential, meaningful, and justified. (GS 6, pp. 493f.; The Jargon of Authenticity, trans. Knut Tarnowski and Frederic Will, London, 1973, pp. 120–1) 15 15 In the following winter semester of 1960/61 Adorno did indeed offer a lecture course entitled ‘Ontologie und Dialektik’ (NaS IV.7; Ontology and Dialectics, trans. Nicholas Walker, Cambridge, 2019). 16 16 The quotation comes from scene 2 of Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold, where Fricka addresses her spouse Wotan in the following words: ‘Concern for my husband’s fidelity, / drives me to ponder in sadness / how yet I might bind him to me / when he is drawn to roam
