268 Part III: Emigration Years
Horkheimer was evidently kept busy trying to manage the adminis-
trative affairs and questions of personnel from his house in Pacific
Palisades. But, in addition, he took care to make sure that Adorno’s
productivity should remain focused on the joint project of philoso-
phical self-clarification. He broached a somewhat arcane topic: that of
questions of the philosophy of language. He wanted to know what
language was appropriate to critical thought in the specific sense of
thought that was both anti-positivistic and anti-idealist.^135 In his first
written response, Adorno argued that the disintegration of language
was unstoppable; it must be understood as the expression of the impot-
ence of the subject in the face of the overwhelming power of social
conditions. ‘The power of the facts has become so appalling that all
theory, even true theory, seems ridiculous by the side of it. This has
been burnt into the organ of theory, namely language, and has left its
mark on it.’^136 However, Horkheimer declined to let himself be sucked
into the global critique of linguistic usage. He was interested instead in
clarifying the interplay between language and reason. He asked whether
the universal nature of language was not the precondition of the poss-
ibility of reason, and whether ‘it might not be possible to ground the
idea of a true society... in an interpretation of this universality.’ It
would follow that, if language enters into the service of existing society,
it must find itself in constant contradiction to its own nature, and this
would become manifest in individual linguistic structures.’^137 He was
preoccupied by the question of whether language has a transcendental
status, whether it is more than a medium for describing the world
and carrying out actions, and whether all speech presupposes truth and
reason. He had an extremely interesting intuition about language which
he was able to articulate very clearly: ‘To speak to someone means
basically to recognize him as a possible member of a future association
of free human beings. To speak presupposes a common relation to the
truth, and hence the innermost affirmation of the alien existence that
is being addressed, and indeed of all existent beings according to their
potential.’^138 Adorno evidently failed to notice Horkheimer’s original-
ity, the innovative potential of his reflections on language, for in his
answering letter, which he wrote forthwith, he turned Horkheimer’s
tentative ideas on their head. His own view of language was based on
the rather more orthodox idea of its social preformation, its reification.^139
For this reason, he interpreted Horkheimer’s insight into the rational
potential of language as a deciphering of ‘the antagonistic character
of all language hitherto.... If mankind is not yet mature, that means
literally that up to now human beings have not been able to speak.’^140
However, in one brief passage an idea surfaces that comes closer to
Horkheimer’s speculative notions. He finds it hard to understand,
Adorno writes, ‘how a man who speaks can be a rogue or that he
could lie.’ The idea contradicts ‘the truth claims of language’. ‘The state-
ment that a man has said something and it must therefore be true, a