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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 afar: / a glorious dwelling, / splendidly furnished / was meant to hold you here / in tranquil repose’ (Richard Wagner, Sämtliche Schriften und Dichtungen, Leipzig, 1911, vol. 5, p. 215).

17 17 In a series of lectures delivered in the winter semester of 1929/30 Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) had declared that atransformation of seeing and questioning is always the decisive thing in science. The greatness and vitality of a science is revealed in the power of its capacity for such transformation. Yet this transformation of seeing and questioning is misunderstood when it is taken as a change of standpoint or shift in the sociological conditions of science. It is true that this is the sort of thing which mainly or exclusively interests many people in science today – its psychologically and sociologically conditioned character – but this is just a facade. Sociology of this kind relates to real science and its philosophical comprehension in the same way in which one who clambers up a facade relates to the architect or, to take a less elevated example, to a conscientious craftsman. (Martin Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, ed. Friedrich Wilhelm von Hermann, Frankfurt, 2004, p. 379; The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude, trans. Nicholas Walker and William McNeill, Bloomington, IN, 1995, p. 261)Adorno could not have had direct knowledge of these lectures (which were first published in 1983) but probably heard these remarks on sociology going the rounds.

18 18 See Max Weber, Soziologische Grundbegriffe, Tübingen, 1960 (an offprint from: Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, 4th edn, ed. Johannes Winckelman, 1956, pp. 1–30). This opening chapter from Economy and Society is included in Max Weber, The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, ed. Talcott Parsons, New York, 1964, pp. 87–157.

19 19 On the introduction of the term ‘sociology’ by Auguste Comte (1798–1857), see Adorno’s footnote in the opening chapter of Soziologische Exkurse:The term ‘sociology’ can be found in Comte in his letter to Valat of December 25, 1824 (Lettres d’Auguste Comte à Monsieur Valat, Paris, 1870, p. 158). The term was made public in 1838 in the fourth volume of Comte’s chief work. Up to that point he had designated the science at which he was aiming ‘physique sociale’. He justified the introduction of the new term as follows: ‘I believe that at the present point I must risk this new term, physique sociale, in order to be able to designate by a single word this complementary part of natural philosophy which bears on the postivie study of the totality of fundamental laws proper to social phenomena.’ (Soziologische Exkurse, ed. Theodor Adorno and Walter Dirks, Frankfurt, 1956, p. 18; Aspects of Sociology, by The Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, trans. John Viertel, London, 1973, pp. 11–12)

20 20 Claude-Henri de Rouvoy, Comte de Saint-Simon (1760–1825), is generally regarded as one of the founding fathers of sociology as a specific discipline. From 1817 to 1824 Saint-Simon was Comte’s student, secretary and confidante.

21 21 Claude Adrien Helvétius (1715–1771) and Paul Thiry d’Holbach (1723–1789) both regarded themselves as followers of John Locke (1632–1704). Like Locke, they espoused the theory of innate ideas and regarded human beings as essentially the products of their environment. In the essay referred to in the previous note, Adorno says thatThus the left-wing encyclopedists Helvetius and Holbach proclaim that prejudices of the sort which Bacon attributed to man universally have their definite social function. They serve the maintenance of unjust conditions and stand in opposition to the realization of happiness and the establishment of a rational society. … To be sure, the Encyclopedist too did not as yet attain a comprehensive insight into the objective origin of ideologies and the objectivity of their social function. For the most part prejudices and false consciousness are traced back to the machinations of the mighty. In Holbach it is said: ‘Authority generally considers it in its interest to maintain received opinions [les opinions recues]: the prejudices and errors which it considers necessary for the secure maintenance of its power are perpetuated by this power, which never reasons [qui jamais ne raisonne]’ At approximately the same time, however, Helvetius, perhaps the thinker among the Encyclopedists endowed with the greatest intellectual power, had already recognized the objective necessity of what was attributed by others to the ill will of camarillas: ‘Our ideas are the necessary consequence of the society in which we live.’ (Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse, pp. 164f.; Aspects of Sociology, pp. 184–5)The quotation is from d’Holbach’s Système de la nature ou des lois du monde physique et du monde moral and is cited in German translation by Hans Barth in his book Wahrheit und Ideologie, Zurich, 1945, p. 69. In the same essay Adorno quotes a passage from Helvétius, De l’esprit, also in Barth’s German translation, p. 62. In this connection, see also Adorno’s Beitrag zur Ideologienlehre, GS 8, pp. 457–77.

22 22 The concept of ‘ideology’ can be traced back to Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836). He used the term in his work Eléments d’idéologie (Paris, 1801–15) to describe the exact theory of ideas (in the sense of mental ‘representations’). This Enlightenment theory was expressly taken over by the philosophical ‘School of the Ideologists’ and exerted considerable influence in the French educational system until the doctrine was attacked and discredited by Napoleon Bonaparte. In a passage from the Soziologische Exkurse we read that:Although his dictatorship was itself linked in so many respects to the bourgeois emancipation, Napoleon, in a passage which Pareto cites, already raised the accusation of subversion against the ideologues, even if he did so in a more subtle manner, an accusation which ever since has attached itself like a shadow to the social analysis of consciousness. In this reproach he emphasized the irrational moments – in a language with Rousseauean colorations – to which a continual appeal was made subsequently, against the so-called intellectualism of the critique of ideology … Napoleon’s denunciation charges: ‘It is to the doctrine of the ideologues – to this diffuse metaphysics, which in a contrived manner seeks to find the primary causes and on this foundation would erect the legislation of the peoples, instead of adapting the laws to a knowledge of the human heart and to the lessons of history – to which one must attribute all the misfortunes which have befallen our beautiful France. Their errors had to – and indeed this was the case – bring about the regime of the men of terror. Indeed, who was it who proclaimed the principle of insurrection as a duty? Who misled the people by elevating them to a sovereignty which they were incapable of exercising? Who has destroyed the sanctity of the laws and all respect for them, by no longer deriving them from the sacred principles of justice, the essence of things, and the civil order of rights, but exclusively from the arbitrary volition of the people’s representatives, composed of men without knowledge of the civil, criminal, administrative, political, and military law? If one is called upon to renew a state, then one must follow principles which are in constant opposition to each other [des principes constamment opposés]. History displays the history of the human heart; it is in history that one must seek to gain knowledge of the advantages and the evils of the various kinds of legislation.’ … The later usage too, which employs the expression ‘unworldly ideologues’ against allegedly abstract utopians in the name of ‘Realpolitik,’ is discernible in Napoleon’s pronouncements. But he failed to realize that the ideologues’ analysis of consciousness was by no means so irreconcilable with the interests of the rulers. Already then a technical manipulative moment was associated with it. (Institut für Sozialforschung, Soziologische Exkurse, pp. 166f.; Aspects of Sociology, pp. 187–8)

23 23 The other ‘force’ was the rationalism defended by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) and Christian Wolff (1679–1754) as an alternative to British empiricism. Kant sought to overcome both of these schools with his philosophy of transcendental idealism, which claimed that knowledge depended upon both sensible experience and the ‘concepts of the understanding’. For Kant, the opposition between rationalism and empiricism was equivalent to that between dogmatism and scepticism; he was concerned principally with the question concerning the possibility of metaphysics as a science, an idea which dogmatism simply affirmed and empiricism denied. For Kant, genuine metaphysical knowledge is simply knowledge that holds independently of experience and comes about through the formation of pure synthetic a priori judgements. In his view, ‘the dogmatists’ were never able to explain how the formation of such judgements is even possible. See NaS IV.4, p. 89; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Livingstone, p. 56.

24 24 The description of empiricist philosophy and psychology as the ‘analysis of consciousness’ can already be found in Hegel:Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in recent times have still derived least profit from the more general cultivation of the mind and the deeper concept of reason. It is still in an extremely poor condition. The turn effected by the Kantian philosophy has indeed attached greater importance to it, even claiming that it should (and that in its empirical condition) constitute the foundation of metaphysics, a science which is to consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension and analysis of the facts of human consciousness, merely as facts, just as they are given. (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Michael Markus, Frankfurt, 1969–, vol. 10: Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Dritter Teil: Philosophie des Geistes, p. 238; Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller, rev. Michael Inwood, Oxford, 2010, §444, p. 171)See also aphorism 39, ‘Ego is Id’, from Minima Moralia (GS 4, pp. 70–2; Minima Moralia, trans. Edmund Jephcott, London, 1974, pp. 63–4).

25 25 In his lecture ‘The Virginity Taboo’, delivered in 1917, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) had spoken for the first time of ‘the narcissism of small differences’ (S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, London, 1940–, vol. XII, p. 169; Pelican Freud Library, vol. 7, Harmondsworth, 1977, p. 272.) In his late text Civilization and its Discontents of 1939, Freud returned to this form of narcissism:I once discussed the phenomenon that it is precisely communities with adjoining territories, and related to each other in other ways as well, who are engaged in constant feuds and in ridiculing each other – like the Spaniards and Portuguese, for instance, the North Germans and South Germans, the English and Scotch, and so on. I gave this phenomenon the name of ‘the narcissism of small differences’, a name which does not do much to explain it. We can now see that it is a convenient and relatively harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion between the members of the community is made easier. In this respect the Jewish people, scattered everywhere, have rendered most useful services to the civilizations of the countries that have been their hosts; but unfortunately all the massacres of the Jews in the Middle Ages did not suffice to make that period more peaceful and secure for their Christian fellows. (S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, vol. XIV, pp. 473f.; Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. XXI, London, 2001, p. 114)

26 26 In §46 of his Prolegomena, Kant says that ‘in all substances the subject proper, that which remains after the accidents (as predicates) are abstracted, hence the substantial itself, remains unknown’; and a little further on he continues:Now we appear to have this substance in the consciousness of ourselves (in the thinking subject), and indeed in an immediate intuition; for all the predicates of an internal sense refer to the ego, as a subject, and I cannot conceive myself as the predicate of any other subject. Hence completeness in the reference of the given concepts as predicates to a subject – not merely an idea, but an object – that is, the absolute subject itself, seems to be given in experience. But this expectation is disappointed. For the ego is not a concept, but only the indication of the object of the internal sense, so far as we cognize it by no further predicate. Consequently, it cannot be itself a predicate of any other thing; but just as little can it be a determinate concept of an absolute subject, but is, as in all other cases, only the reference of the internal phenomena to their unknown subject. (Kant, Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. III: Schriften zur Logik und Metaphysik, pp. 204–5; Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. Paul Carus, rev. James W. Ellington, Indianapolis, 1977, p. 75)

27 27 See Kant’s discussion of ‘The Original Synthetic Unity of Apperception’, in §16 of the Critique of Pure Reason (B 131–6; Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, London, 1970, pp. 152–5).

28 28 ‘The Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding’ is the title of chapter 2 of Book 1 of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kemp Smith, pp. 129–75).

29 29 In §16 of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant writes:It must be possible for the ‘I think’ to accompany all my representations; for otherwise something would be represented in me which could not be thought at all, and that is equivalent to saying that the representation would be impossible, or at least would be nothing to me. That representation which can be given prior to all thought is entitled intuition. All the manifold of intuition has, therefore, a necessary relation to the ‘I think’ in the same subject in which this manifold is found. (Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Kemp Smith, pp. 152–3)In Negative Dialectics Adorno provides a critique of the constitutive function of the pure ‘I think’ (GS 6, pp. 63f., 98, 184f., 213, and 228f.; Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton, London, 1973, pp. 53, 91, 182f., 213, 229).

30 30 Reading ‘Einheit’ for ‘Eigenheit’.

31 31 In the Prolegomena Kant writes:The uniting of representations in a consciousness is judgment. Thinking therefore is the same as judging, or referring representations to judgments in general. Hence judgments are either merely subjective when representations are referred to a consciousness in one subject only and are united in it, or they are objective when they are united in a consciousness in general, that is, necessarily. The logical moments of all judgments are so many possible ways of uniting representations in consciousness. But if they serve as concepts, they are concepts of the necessary unification of representations in a consciousness and so are principles of objectively valid judgments. (Werke in sechs Bänden, vol. III, p. 171 (A 88); Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. Paul Carus, rev. James W. Ellington, Indianapolis, 1977, §22, p. 47)

32 32 An allusion to a line from the final strophe of Schiller’s ‘Rider’s Song’: ‘Youth dashes, life sparkles’ (Friedrich Schiller, ‘Reiterlied’, in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Gerhard Fricke and Herbert G. Göpfert, 3rd edn, Munich, 1962, vol. 1, p. 414).

33 33 In §7 of the introduction to the second volume of the Logical Investigations (‘The Principle of the Presuppositionless Character of Epistemological Investigations’) Husserl wrote: ‘An epistemological inquiry which makes a serious claim to be regarded as scientific in character, must, as has indeed often been said, satisfy the principle of presuppositionlessness. But in our view this principle can only mean the strict exclusion of all assertions that cannot be fully and completely realized phenomenologically’ (Husserliana, Gesammelte Werke, vol. IX.2: Logische Untersuchungen. Zweiter Band, p. 24; Logical Investigations, vol. 2, Findlay, p. 11). Adorno always strongly criticized philosophies which appealed to some kind of first or original principle, and thus rejected ‘the idea that we must begin from something which is primary and entirely certain, upon which everything else must subsequently be based in a transparent way.’ For this approach already decides key questions in advance – like the question concerning the possibility or necessity of some such original principle in the first place. These questionscan only be resolved in the context of philosophy itself. The concept of presuppositionlessness in particular is a fantasy and has never actually been realized by any philosophy. Anyone who genuinely engages with philosophy must leave this idea of presuppositionlessness outside … In short, the only appropriate thing where philosophy is concerned is to give oneself over to it without recourse to any kind of authority, but also without anticipating the result by imposing rigid demands on it from the start, while still retaining one’s own capacity for thought. There can be no rules for this, but only modest suggestions for how to go about it. (Zum Studium der Philosophie, GS 20.1, pp. 318f.; see also NaS IV.4, pp. 30f.; Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, 2001, pp. 15–17)

34 34 The ‘Dasein analysis’ to which Adorno refers was developed by Ludwig Binswanger (1881–1966), a student of C. G. Jung (1875–1961), in the early 1940s. It attempted to develop a therapeutic approach that was not specifically based on psychology – i.e., on an analysis of the subjective development of the patient – but drew instead on the so-called analysis of existence undertaken by Heidegger.