204 Part III: Emigration Years
Husserl. To his annoyance the editorial discussions about the two pieces
in New York dragged on for months. His incisive and principled cri-
tique of Mannheim’s ‘sociologism’ was finally rejected by the institute
for what were said to be ‘tactical’ reasons. The Husserl essay too was
rejected, even though Horkheimer described it as ‘a huge intellectual
achievement’. But he went on to say that it assumed too much knowledge
to be comprehensible to the readers of the Zeitschrift. He explained the
reasons for his rejection in a lengthy letter in October 1936:
None of your efforts to demonstrate the impossibility of categorial
intuition is really compelling.... Whether and to what extent you
have really done justice to the different strata of phenomenology,
both static and dynamic, and to the levels of meaning in Husserl’s
analyses does not emerge clearly from your essay, if only because
it does not begin with an explicit exposition of the theories that
you are attacking.... Try as I might to immerse myself in your
arguments, I find myself unable to confirm your passionate belief
that an attack on Husserl’s phenomenology as the most advanced
form of bourgeois philosophy is also to refute the most important
intellectual motifs leading to idealism.^73Having failed to deliver proof of his competence as both a sociologist
and a philosopher, Adorno fell into a depression, and he reacted with
some irritation to the fact of two rejections in such a brief period of
time. He reminded Horkheimer that merely from the point of view of
‘husbanding his energies’ it was scarcely thinkable that he could simply
stuff the two essays into a drawer and forget about them. They had
after all cost him a huge effort. In terms of their content both essays
were important for the institute’s sociological programme: the Mannheim
article because it had succeeded in providing a definitive account of
the limitations of the sociology of knowledge and the Husserl essay
because it had ‘embarked in earnest on a critique of idealism’.^74 This
very confident account of his intentions referred in the first instance
to the extended version that Adorno had produced for the Zeitschrift
für Sozialforschung: a comprehensive treatise over one hundred printed
pages in length, and written in a very enigmatic style. Had it been
printed it would have had to be serialized over a number of issues of the
Zeitschrift. Moreover, this essay was the shorter version of what Adorno
called his major book on Husserl that had grown over time to over four
hundred typewritten pages.^75 This immersion in Husserl’s Formal and
Transcendental Logic and his Cartesian Meditations was the means to
an end in Adorno’s mind. He thought of it as ‘a kind of critical, dialectical
prelude to a materialist logic’.^76
Given this specific aim, how did Adorno approach Husserl’s
phenomenology? He made no attempt to expose logical inconsistencies
in Husserl, but discussed his philosophy as measured against the idea of