206 Part III: Emigration Years
black cloth and who with the incantatory formula that everyone should
keep still produces family pictures of the kind that are found in the
collection of examples to be encountered in pure phenomenology.’^87
With its monadological vision of man, Adorno concludes, Husserl’s
phenomenology remains trapped within idealism. This conception of
the subject as a closed windowless entity ‘could only ever be sublated if
consciousness could succeed in exercising dominion over being, since
hitherto its perennial assertion that being was grounded in consciousness
had always been untrue.’^88
In this critique, as in the Mannheim essay, Adorno wrote from a
materialist standpoint in which historical forms of consciousness were
analysed in relation to economic modes of production. In a letter to
Horkheimer in December 1935 he admitted that, the more he ‘burrowed
into questions of logic, the more “orthodox” my views become. In
principle, I am convinced that the entire subjective philosophy of imman-
ence is really the expression of a property-owning consciousness...
I can scarcely doubt that our entire logic... has been built on the
model of legal norms that are designed to protect particular relations of
production.’^89
Even before Adorno had formulated his variously framed criticisms
of phenomenology he had started to make notes for a particular book
project. Once again, he had the idea from Horkheimer, albeit indirectly.
Under the powerful impression made on him by Dawn and Decline,
Horkheimer’s book of aphorisms, he had begun himself to collect
fragments of the same type.^90 Horkheimer’s aphorisms dealt in an unsys-
tematic way with questions of morality, character, metaphysics and
the workers’ movement. The title alludes to the demise of the liberal,
bourgeois age and the beginning of totalitarianism, the threatened ‘night
of mankind’.^91 From a social point of view, the book was written in a
spirit of a humanist socialism that would hopefully lead to a rational
organization of society once economic exploitation had been eliminated
and human potential set free. Typical of Horkheimer’s outlook is his
statement that ‘A premium has been placed on vileness’.^92
Once he had started to become more aware of the implications of
being an émigré, Adorno began to make notes about it. He had already
experimented with the aphorism in his music reviews. He now set
about making use of it to reflect on his own experience. As he remarked
in a letter to Horkheimer in February 1935, ‘I cannot be accused of
mincing my words.’ He announced a ‘volume of aphorisms that treats
the situation in which fascism has taken over. The title: The Good
Comrade.... No one knows of the existence of this volume apart from
yourself. It is already very far advanced.’^93 This is the first mention of
what was to become his most successful book decades later. He had
evidently been considering a collection of aphorisms from the mid-1930s.
Ten years later, the volume which he published with the title of Minima
Moralia had swelled and contained a number of sections. It contained