Adorno

Debates with Benjamin, Sohn-Rethel and Kracauer 221

since my first encounter with Benjamin’s work – and that was in 1923!
This upheaval reflects the magnitude and power of your ideas – but also
the depth of an agreement that goes much further than you could have
suspected.’^43 On Sunday 22 November, the two men met in Oxford
and spent the day in intensive discussions about the problems involved
in a ‘prehistory of logic’.^44 The next day Adorno wrote to Horkheimer
in New York, telling him of his positive view of Sohn-Rethel’s planned
study. Much along the lines of his own work on Husserl, Sohn-Rethel
was attempting, he said, ‘to explode idealism from within, on the basis
of its own assumptions.... His thesis is... that the “meaning” of syn-
thesis in a Kantian sense (i.e., a key concept of idealism) is itself social
and reducible to the fact of exploitation.’^45 For all his enthusiasm Adorno
did suggest that Sohn-Rethel’s work was inadequate in its present form.
Because it was being written ‘in extreme isolation’, it ‘bore all the
stigmata of a monological and even monomaniacal way of thinking’.^46
Nevertheless, he believed that the institute should give it full support.
‘In so far as my own assistance as critic is required, I shall gladly make
it available. From the end of January, Sohn will be without any means
of subsistence... And he would undoubtedly manage to survive with a
meagre pension.’^47 To Adorno’s mind, his work should take precedence
over Kracauer’s, for example.
Horkheimer reacted much more coolly to Sohn-Rethel’s idea that
the abstract notion of exchange should be seen as an a prioriprerequisite
of pure rational activity. He raised the objection that ‘to return from
critical theory to yet another eternal system was highly problematic’.^48
He even went so far as to accuse Adorno ‘of having let himself be
taken in by Sohn-Rethel’s great intelligence’. He took the trouble to
expose what seemed to him to be the obvious defects of Sohn-Rethel’s
manuscript and summarized his objections as follows: ‘Sohn-Rethel’s
constant assurance that proofs would have to be obtained to demonstrate
that some “geneses” or other from Being or from history or from the
development of mankind or from the deepest roots of the existence
of man in his historical being are synonymous with the truth problems
of consciousness or the question of when knowledge can be said to be
valid or questions of social praxis – all this I find infinitely wearying
and boring.’^49 But in addition to this fundamental critique, Horkheimer
tried to draw Adorno onto his side. ‘You yourself are not particularly
sympathetic to such exaggeratedly idealist views. You will recollect
those sections of Schelling’s identity philosophy that led Hegel to talk
about the night in which all cows are grey.’^50 That was evidently a clear
enough hint for Adorno. Just as he had been influenced by Horkheimer’s
criticisms of Walter Benjamin, so too, in this case, he partly came to
accept at least some of Horkheimer’s objections to Sohn-Rethel’s
attempts to deduce the transcendental subject from the commodity form.
Adorno developed a slightly ironical distance towards ‘dear Alfred’s’
highly abstract and prolix arguments to the point where, in a letter to