Kracauer taught Adorno to read Kant as coded historical writing
Evidence
His teacher of composition was Bernhard Sekles, with whom Paul Hindemith had studied before the First World War. Adorno’s friend and mentor, Siegfried Kracauer, fourteen years his senior, whom he met towards the end of the First World War, took care of his theoretical education. They worked together on Saturday afternoons for years on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, taking an unconventional approach. Under Kracauer’s guidance, Adorno experienced the book not just as an epistemological theory but as a kind of coded writing from which the historical condition of the spirit could be deciphered, and in which objectivism and subjectivism, ontology and idealism were joined in battle. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 263
Categorization
- DEFINE: Shows the origin of the Frankfurt School’s characteristic practice of reading philosophical texts as encrypted expressions of their historical moment.
- XREF: Connects to how the Frankfurt School read all culture as symptomatic — the same move later applied to popular music and mass culture. — connects to: Lukács’s distinction shaped Adorno’s and Kracauer’s understanding of the novel. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 263; Kracauer read Kant’s epistemology as a prolegomenon to metaphysics, not scepticism — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 271; Kracauer’s Kant tutorials shaped Adorno’s philosophical and cultural sensibility more than university did (+1 more)
- corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 263