philosophical theory of aesthetics. Thus, in the middle of 1929 he accepted Paul Tillich's offer to present an habilitation on Kierkegaard, which Adorno eventually submitted under the title The Construction of the Aesthetic. At the time, Kierkegaard's philosophy exerted a strong influence, chiefly through its claim to pose an alternative to Idealism and Hegel's philosophy of history. Yet when Adorno turned his attention to Kierkegaard, watchwords like "anxiety," "inwardness" and "leap"—instructive for existentialist philosophy—were detached from their theological origins and posed, instead, as problems for aesthetics. As the work proceeded—and Kierkegaard's overcoming of Hegel's idealism was revealed to be a mere interiorization—Adorno excitedly remarked in a letter to Berg that he was writing without looking over his shoulder at the faculty who would soon evaluate his work. Receiving favourable reports from Professors Tillich and Horkheimer, as well as Benjamin and Kracauer, the university conferred on Adorno the venia legendi in February 1931; on the very day his revised study was published, 23 March 1933, Hitler seized dictatorial powers. 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." Following Horkheimer's taking up the directorship of the institute, a new journal, Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, was produced to publish the research of Institute members both