Adorno

430 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional

science in that its discoveries made sense only if they envisaged an
improvement in social living conditions. A further consideration was
that to make science value neutral could lead to its manipulation for
political ends. ‘Just as a strictly apolitical stance becomes a political fact,
a capitulation in the face of might... , so value neutrality generally
subordinates itself. ..to what.. .are known as value systems.’^94 This
implies an explicit commitment to the value of critique.^95 As he remarks
in his lecture course, thanks to this link with the concept of value,
critical theory is identifiable ‘tant bien que mal’ as ‘the Frankfurt School’.^96
This value-laden commitment to critique laid the Frankfurt conception
of sociology open to the accusation of backwardness. But, according to
Adorno, the prediction that the philosophy of the Frankfurt School was
becoming old-fashioned reminded him of ‘the question asked by the
little girl upon seeing a large dog – how long can such a dog live?’^97

Against German stuffiness

Fundamental ontology behaves towards existence a little bit like the wicked

stepmother in the fairy tale of ‘Snow White’. She is ‘the fairest in the

land’, which is immeasurably large, but somewhere far away, ‘beyond the

hills, with the Seven Dwarfs’, lives Snow White, who is fairer far than she.

Fundamental ontology cannot bear there to be even a small exception,

and so it is...continually spurred on to eliminate every trace of the

memory of existing things, to obliterate them even at the risk of finally

becoming so abstract that nothing at all remains of itself.^98

In the 1950s, when Adorno first began to respond to the dominant
climate in post-Nazi Germany, he discovered that in public lectures and
speeches, newspaper articles and monographs, in Protestant academies
and writings on education, as well as in a large part of the prose and
poetry that was fashionable at the time – wherever he looked, in fact –
there were symptoms of what he called ‘Heideggerism’ (Heideggerei).
He had already started compiling some initial notes for a subsequent
critique of Heidegger’s theory of being,^99 elements of which went back
to his inaugural lecture of 1931 and were then picked up again in his
lecture course on ‘The Concept of Philosophy’ in 1951–2. Thus we can
read in the transcript of the lecture of 6 December 1951 that Heidegger’s
authoritarian language ‘created a theological aura’. He went on to say
that Heidegger gave the impression that his language was ‘the language
of being itself. It is reminiscent of the way in which the Kabbalists
derived objective structures from the divinely revealed Hebrew lan-
guage. Heidegger is nothing but a kind of Kabbalist. Since this language
lacks history, history becomes mythologized. There is a connection
between this philosophy and the fascists.’^100
But he did not produce his detailed, fundamental criticism of
Heidegger’s ontology until his own lecture course on ‘Ontology and