278 Part III: Emigration Years
Horkheimer aimed the philosophy they were in the course of formulat-
ing at a public that did not yet exist, they were agreed that their theory
of society could not claim to be systematic, nor did it wish to be so.
Instead, it was a critique of existing society: ‘Evil rather than good is the
object of theory.’^27 As such it had to be as fragmented as the works of
art of radical modernity. Adorno put the case for this idea very insistently
in a letter to Horkheimer in August 1941. Just as he had already done
in the philosophy of music, he argued the case for the relevance of
gestures in critical theory. Their common philosophical reflections were
‘less and less like theories in a traditional sense’. They were rather
‘gestures taken from concepts’, for which, however, ‘the whole labour
of conceptualization’ was required.^28 What theory did Adorno have in
mind when he used this metaphor? How did he intend to explain the
relation of language to world once he had rejected the idea of truth as
adequacy, as coherence or correspondence in the course of his critique
of idealism? And what was the metaphysical impulse underlying this
new conception of philosophy that was conceived as a collection of
messages from the shipwrecked – messages that were as shocking in
their content as they were fragmented in form?
Messages in a bottle, or, How to create enlightenment
about the EnlightenmentLaugh at logic if it runs counter to the interests of mankind.^29‘The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant’^30 – the accusa-
tion is directed not at ‘the war of all against all’ of the world of nature
but at the modern world that lays claim to the fundamental principles of
thought guided by reason and of enlightened action. Because Adorno
and Horkheimer found themselves in a world in which culture and
barbarism lived cheek by jowl, their experience taught them that there
was only one way to go, and this was to undertake a fundamental recon-
struction of the rise and fall of Western thought from the standpoint
of a history of philosophy. This reconstruction was linked in their minds
with the wish to pursue the kind of philosophy that would be able to
grasp its epoch in thought. Hegel’s dialectical philosophy of contradic-
tion supplied the model for their reconstruction of the history of
civilization in the West, as did Marx with his concept of social labour
and his theories of the historical forms of consciousness. Scarcely less
influential were Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, with its view of the
emergence of norms and values as a process of overwhelming and dis-
ciplining people, and Freud’s late treatise Civilization and its Discontents,
according to which an individual’s claims to happiness had to be sacrificed
to a social order founded on the compulsion to work and the repression
of the instincts.^31