Adorno’s dissertation rejected Husserl’s idealism for Cornelius’s immanent philosophy

Evidence

As he was a precocious young man, his contempt for the academic world was all the greater. In 1924 he took his doctorate with Cornelius, with a dissertation on The Transcendence of the Material and Noematic in Husserl’s Phenomenology. In the middle of May', he wrote to Leo Lowenthal in July 1924, I planned my dissertation, and on the 26th I reported the substance of its ideas to Cornelius, who accepted it. I finished it on 6 June, dictated it on the 11th, and handed it in on the 14th.’ The task which he had set himself was to resolve the contradiction between the transcendental idealist and the transcendental realist components of Husserl’s theory of the object (Ding). He did this by declaring it to be a false problem from the point of view of Cornelius’s pure immanent philosophy'. This considered the thing to be simultaneously ideal and empirical by taking it to be a law-governed interrelation of appearances, subject to correction by experience and constituted by the unity of personal consciousness. In his letter to Lowenthal, Adorno himself said of the dissertation that it was less authentic than it ought to be, even for mei.e. it is Cornelian’. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 276

Categorization

• DEFINE: Clarifies Cornelius’s ‘pure immanent philosophy’ as the view that things are law-governed interrelations of appearances constituted by personal consciousness.
• XREF: Adorno’s early rejection of Husserl foreshadows his later critique of the ‘jargon of authenticity’ and his immanent method of critique. — connects to: Adorno renounced Husserl’s object theory via Cornelius’s pure immanent philosophy — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 276; Cornelius’s neo-Kantianism rejected Husserl’s intuition of states of affairs as mystical — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 175; Frankfurt University’s first philosophy chair was held alone by Cornelius for fifteen years — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 175 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Cornelius’s neo-Kantianism rejected Husserl’s intuition of states of affairs as mystical #corroborates (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 175
• Frankfurt University’s first philosophy chair was held alone by Cornelius for fifteen years #corroborates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 175
• Horkheimer defended his teaching by invoking Cornelius, Kant, and Hegel #corroborates (0.72) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 528