Praxis and reason were in fact the two poles of Critical Theory, as they had been for the Left Hegelians a century before. The interplay and tension between them contributed greatly to the Theory’s dialectical suggestiveness, although the primacy of reason was never in doubt. As Marcuse wrote in Reason and Revolution, speaking for the entire Frankfurt School, “Theory will preserve the truth even if revolutionary practice deviates from its proper path. Practice follows the truth, not vice versa.”102 Still, the importance of self-determined activity, of “anthropogenesis,” was constantly emphasized in the Institut’s earlier writings. Here the influence of Lebensphilosophie on Horkheimer and his colleagues was crucial, although they always understood true praxis as a collective endeavor. The stress on praxis accorded well with the Frankfurt School’s rejection of Hegel’s identity theory. In the spaces created by the irreducible mediations between subject and object, particular and universa!, human freedom might be sustained. In fact, what alarmed the Frankfurt School so much in later years was the progressive liquidation of these very areas of human spontaneity in Western society.
The other antipode of Critical Theory, the Utopian reconciliation of subject and object, essence and appearance, particular and universal, had very different connotations. Vernunft implied an objective reason that was not constituted solely by the subjective acts of individual men. Although transformed from a philosophical ideal into a social one, it still bore traces of its metaphysical origins. Vulgar Marxism had allowed these tendencies to reemerge in the monistic materialism that the Institut never tired of attacking. And yet, as we have seen, even in Critical Theory there were an implicit negative metaphysics and negative anthropology—negative in the sense of refusing to define itself in any fixed way, thus adhering to Nietzsche’s dictum that a “great truth wants to be criticized, not idolized.”
As thinkers in the tradition of “positive freedom” that included Plato, Rousseau, Hegel, and Marx, they were caught in the basic dilemma that dogged the tradition from its inception. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out,103 the notion of positive freedom contained an inherent conflict, symbolized by the tension between the Greek political experience and the subsequent attempts of Greek philosophers to make sense of it. From the former came the identification of freedom with human acts and human speech—in short, with praxis. From the latter came its equation with that authentic being which was reason. Attempts at an integration have been made ever since. The subtlety and richness of the Instituas effort mark it as one of the most fruitful, even though it too ultimately met with failure.
Before passing on to the methodological implications of Critical Theory, the contributions of other Institut members to its formulation should be made clear. Although Lowenthal and Pollock were concerned primarily with other matters, both intellectual and institutional, they still actively participated in the discussions of the articles submitted for publication in the Zeitschrift. More influential, however, were Adorno and Marcuse, both of whom wrote extensively on theoretical issues under their own names. By examining their work individually, we can perhaps further clarify the Instituas philosophical stance. We will do so, however, without commenting on the validity of their analyses of other thinkers; the object is to illuminate Critical Theory, rather than to outline an alternative interpretation.
Insofar as his Institut contributions were concerned, Adorno was occupied in the 1930’s almost entirely with the sociology of music. Outside of the Zeitschrift, however, he published one long philosophical study and worked at great length on another.104 In both, his closeness to Horkheimer’s position was manifestly revealed. Although the two men did not write collaboratively until the i94o’s, there was a remarkable similarity in their views from the first. Evidence of this exists in a letter Adorno wrote to Lowenthal from London in 1934, discussing his response to the recently published Dämmerung:
I have read the book several times with the utmost precision and have an extraordinary impression of it. I already knew most of the pieces; nonetheless, in this form everything appears entirely different; above all, a certain broadness of presentation, which earlier had annoyed me in single aphorisms, now seems obvious as a means of expression—exactly appropriate to the agonizing development of the capitalist total situation whose horrors exist so essentially in the precision of the mechanism of mediation. . . . As far as my position is concerned, I believe I can almost completely identify with it—so completely that it is difficult for me to point to differences. As new and especially essential to me, I would like to mention the interpretation of the problem of personal contingency against the thesis of radical justice, and in general, the critique of static anthropology in all the pieces. Something to discuss would perhaps be the general relation to the Enlightenment.105
Here perhaps for the first time Adorno hinted at that more sweeping critique of the Enlightenment which he and Horkheimer together would carry out many years later.
Adorno’s earliest major philosophical critique was Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, written in 1929–1930 and submitted as a Habilitationsschrift for Paul Tillich in 1931. Its date of publication ironically fell on the day Hitler took power in 1933. Siegfried Kracauer, with whom Adorno had studied Kant, was the recipient of its dedication; the impact of another close friend, Walter Benjamin, was also evident in Adorno’s arguments. Both Benjamin and Tillich were among the book’s favorable reviewers.106 Kierkegaard was, however, not a critical or popular success. While partly due to its unapologetically abstruse style and demandingly complex analysis, its minimal effect was also produced by what Adorno was later to call its being “overshadowed from the beginning by political evil.”107
Whatever its difficulties—all of Adorno’s work was uncompromisingly exacting for even the most sophisticated reader—the book did contain many of the themes that were to be characteristic of Critical Theory. The choice of a subject through which Adorno hoped to explore these issues was not surprising in the light of his own artistic inclinations. From the beginning of the book, however, he made it clear that by aesthetics he meant more than simply a theory of art; the word signified to him, as to Hegel, a certain type of relation between subject and object. Kierkegaard had also understood it in a specifically philosophical way. In Either/Or, he had defined the aesthetic sphere as “that through which man immediately is what he is; the ethical is that through which he becomes what he becomes.”108 But as Adorno noted in his first of many criticisms of Kierkegaard, “the ethical subsequently withdrew behind his teaching of paradox-religion. In view of the leap’ of faith, the aesthetic was deprecatingly transformed from a stage in the dialectical process, namely that of the nondecisive, into simple creature-like (kreatürliche) immediacy.”109 To Adorno, immediacy, that is, the search for primary truths, was anathema. Like Horkheimer’s, his thought was always rooted in a kind of cosmic irony, a refusal to rest somewhere and say finally, Here is where truth lies. Both men rejected Hegel’s basic premise of the identity of subject and object.
Ostensibly, Kierkegaard had rejected it as well. Yet to Adorno, Kierkegaard’s renowned celebration of subjectivity unwittingly contained an identity theory. “The intention of his philosophy,” Adorno wrote, “does not aim towards the determination of subjectivity but of ontology; and subjectivity appears not as its content but as its stage (Schauplatz)”110 Behind all his talk of the concrete, existential individual, there lurked a covert yearning for transcendent truth; “Hegel is turned inward: what for him is world history, for Kierkegaard is the individual man.”111
Moreover, the ontology posited by Kierkegaard was that of hell, not heaven; despair rather than hope was at the center of his vision. The withdrawal into inwardness that Kierkegaard advocated was really a retreat into a mythical, demonic repetition that denied historical change. “Inwardness,” Adorno wrote, “is the historical prison of prehistorical humanity.”112 By rejecting the historical world, Kierkegaard had become an accomplice of the reification he so often denounced; his dialectics were without a material object and were thus a return to the idealism he claimed