Several months after qualifying as a lecturer in philosophy, Adorno delivered an inaugural lecture at the Institute for Social Research, an independent organization that had recently appointed Horkheimer as its director and, with the arrival of the literary scholar Leo Lowenthal, social psychologist Erich Fromm and philosopher Herbert Marcuse, sought to exploit recent theoretical and methodological advances in the social sciences. His lecture, "The Actuality of Philosophy," created a scandal. In it Adorno not only deviated from the theoretical program Horkheimer had laid out a year earlier but challenged philosophy's very capacity for comprehending reality as such: "For the mind," Adorno announced, "is indeed not capable of producing or grasping the totality of the real, but it may be possible to penetrate the detail, to explode in miniature the mass of merely existing reality." In line with Benjamin's The Origin of German Tragic Drama and preliminary sketches of the Arcades Project, Adorno likened philosophical interpretation to experiments that should be conducted "until they arrive at figurations in which the answers are legible, while the questions themselves vanish." Having lost its position as the Queen of the Sciences, philosophy must now radically transform its approach to objects so that it might "construct keys before which reality springs open."
