438 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
just arrived! Wonderful! What a Xmas gift!’ Admittedly, he did have
queries about it, and since they came from the point of view of the
Marxist theory of revolution they naturally differed from those put by
Scholem, a professor of Jewish mysticism. Did ‘Negative Dialectics have
nothing to say about changing the world? Is all that [namely the Cul-
tural Revolution of the Red Guard in China] part of the “affirmative
tradition” from which “the book wishes to liberate the dialectic”? Or
is it the case that you do not think changing the world is impossible,
but only question that it means “putting philosophy into practice”? In
that event, then, the forms of thought would not be determined by
social being and would have reverted to a dialectical idealism.’^153 In
his reply, a few days later, Adorno advised Sohn-Rethel, in a slightly
schoolmasterly tone, that he should read the book right through, since it
was ‘highly structured’ and one could only gain a complete impression
‘by following the argument through to its end’.^154 On the questions
about putting philosophy into practice, Adorno replied that he rejected
‘the moral pressure coming from official Marxism, which amounts to
a specific type of positivity’. He agreed with Grabbe’s statement that
‘nothing but despair can save us.... I am unable to believe that what is
happening in China can be any cause for hope. I would have to deny
everything I have thought my whole life long if I were to admit to
feeling anything but horror at the sight of it.’ What they had believed in
their youth and had discussed with Kracauer and Benjamin in the 1920s
was something that had been bypassed by ‘the world spirit, or whatever
it may be called’. ‘We should truly strive to learn from our mistakes
without being untrue to our motives.’^155
To what motives did Adorno remain true? For one thing, heremained
true to the idea of a materialist dialectics that Scholem had found fault
with but that he had pursued since his inaugural lecture of 1931. Ac-
cording to that dialectics, the social world was to be understood in
principle as an open-ended, historically changing space produced and
shaped by human hand. The underlying theme of Negative Dialectics
was in fact its author’s conviction that, even though the world appears
as a given, it must be held to be contingent and with an open-ended
future. If in his book Adorno constantly insists on the primacy of the
object over the subject, he was nevertheless concerned to criticize the
thing-like nature of social relations and the blind coercion exercised
over human beings by material conditions. The book aimed to be a
philosophical denunciation of the social causes of suffering and want. It
is for this reason that Adorno speaks of ‘the convergence of specific
materialism with criticism, with social change in practice’.^156
Proceeding from this starting-point, Adorno deepened his criticism
of philosophical systems in Negative Dialectics; this too was a theme to
which he remained true. He had challenged their claim to validity in
Husserl and later in Hegel and had then expanded this line of thought
in the Dialectic of Enlightenment with a deconstruction of reason and of