Adorno

482 Epilogue

interpreted the physical and psychological decay of human beings with

increasing age and as a prelude to the definitive end as the reason why

it was impossible to conceive of any hereafter. Nevertheless, the thought

that death is ‘the last thing pure and simple’^5 cannot be accepted be-

cause it would make every idea of truth meaningless. ‘For it is a feature

of truth that it will last, along with its temporal core. Without any

duration at all there would be no truth, and the last trace of it would be

engulfed in death, the absolute.’^6

Adorno’s wish to be judged by his substantial achievements as a

philosopher may well have inspired him to make a rare emotional diary

entry, as he did while speaking of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis: ‘Thank

heaven I was spared to complete this.’^7 At the age of sixty-five, Adorno

still wished to place more in the scales than he had already done. He

had wanted to write a book about Beethoven for years and had made

notes for it in over forty notebooks. As early as 11 June 1940 he had

written to his parents, saying that ‘the next major piece of work I shall

undertake will be the book on Beethoven.’^8 He had repeatedly tried to

bring the book ‘home and dry’, as he put it, but he ended up just adding

it to the list of tasks to be undertaken once he had finished the Aesthetic

Theory.^9 For Adorno the completion of this great music project on

Beethoven was a perpetual challenge, and it appears that it was less the

difficulties of substance that were the problem, than those of organizing

the heterogeneous materials. A further music project that had pre-

occupied him ever since he had studied with Berg in Vienna was the

Theory of Musical Reproduction. His notes on this subject assumed

a definite shape in the years in Los Angeles. But in this instance, too,

the plethora of notes he had taken in his so-called Black Book could

not be published until thirty years after his death: a theory of true

musical interpretation, one that adhered closely to the music’s objective

substance, its structure.^10

These two great projects did not prevent him from conceiving a plan

for yet another book, this time on moral philosophy, for which he could

draw on extensive materials for a lecture course he had given in 1963.^11

Judging by these lectures it is reasonable to assume that his thesis was

the impossibility of a moral philosophy as a binding doctrine, a thesis

already contained in his celebrated formula ‘There can be no good life

within the bad one.’^12 Adorno would no doubt have linked his argument

to the ethical premises he had referred to in Negative Dialectics as the

‘new categorical imperative’: that human beings should ‘arrange their

thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not be repeated, so that

nothing similar will happen again’. Admittedly, Adorno makes explicit

in the same passage that this imperative ‘is as resistant to justification as

the one given by Kant was in its day.’^13 It would have been interesting

to know how Adorno would have resolved this difficulty.

The same may be said of the book he had planned on social theory.

In it he aimed to collect his current analyses of society together with

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