Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 343thought and his dissonant way of speaking had created a new type of
intellectuality: ‘the construction of a critical, oppositional intellectual’.^66
Did Thomas Mann admire the aphorisms that Adorno had written
between 1944 and 1947 because their author had the intellectual cour-
age in a newly conservative age to confront the moral aspirations of
a bourgeois liberal society with its reality? ‘I have spent days attached
to your book as if by a magnet’, he wrote to Adorno from America in
January 1952. ‘Every day brings new fascination... concentrated nour-
ishment. It is said that the companion star to Sirius, white in colour, is
made of such dense material that a cubic inch of it would weigh a tonne
here. This is why it has such an extremely powerful gravitational field;
in this respect it is similar to your book.’^67 Since the aphorisms meant so
much to Adorno not only as models of a dialectical way of thinking, but
because of their particular prose form, he may well have cherished
Thomas Mann’s judgement more than Kracauer’s: ‘Really, Teddie,
I was completely fascinated by your ability to enter mentally into the
material of existence, and what most impressed me, and often con-
vinced me, was that, when an interpretation seemed one-sided or other-
wise unsatisfactory, it was soon followed by another one that revised
or supplemented the first one so that it ended up with the entire phe-
nomenon having been drawn into the dialectical process. Many of the
objections that occurred to me as I read were anticipated by you as you
developed the idea.’^68
Kracauer nevertheless criticized the book on the grounds that Adorno
left the reader in the dark about ‘the criteria by which the author had
judged “mere existence”’. In fact, Adorno did proceed ex negativo, with-
out a fixed position, as indeed we can see from the section entitled ‘On
the Morality of Thinking’: ‘what is asked of the thinker today is that
he should be at every moment both within things and outside them
- Münchhausen pulling himself out of the bog by his own pig-tail
becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes to be more than either
verification or speculation. And then the salaried philosophers come
along and reproach us with having no definite point of view.’^69
Thus Adorno did not claim to know the only tune that would make
society dance. The only thing that was clear was that, in so far as the
total fabric of morality had become torn and bourgeois consciousness
had turned cynical, the maxims of what an Aristotelian ethical code
thought of as a ‘magna moralia’ had lost their credibility. If ‘the whole
is the false’,^70 the substance of morality must shrink to an infinitesimal
quantum. At the same time, the moral philosopher must become a
social critic whose paradoxical interventions shock us into perceiving
the conditions that make a binding moral code impossible. This means
that the question of how it can be possible for ‘a rightly lived life to be
lived within the wrong one’^71 is no mere piece of rhetoric, but strictly
a matter of sociology: it is a question of the social presuppositions of a
responsible life.