Introduction

Two figures took centre stage on the philosophical scene in Germany in the 1920s: Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Focusing on Husserl in his 1924 doctoral thesis, Adorno continued to engage with his ideas in later work as well. However, Adorno was neither a Husserlian nor a Heideggerian. He first criticized Heidegger's work in “The Idea of Natural History” (INH: 260–61), where he rejected Heidegger's notion of historicity, opting instead for a Marxist perspective on history. His critique of Heidegger became far more strident in subsequent work where, among other things, he charged that Heidegger's philosophy of Being devolves into “an irrationalist world view” (ND: 85, tr. mod.). Indeed, Martin Jay remarks that Adorno viewed phenomenology as a whole as “the last futile attempt of bourgeois thought to rescue itself from impotence”. Content merely to reproduce existing conditions, phenomenology not only “turned against action in the world”; it had a “subterranean connection with fascism” because both “were expressions of the terminal crisis of bourgeois society”.

Adorno's formative influences were astute commentators on this crisis. They included the culture critic Siegfried Kracauer, whom Adorno met towards the end of World War I. Acquainting him with the work of Immanuel Kant, Kracauer taught Adorno to interpret all philosophical works as coded texts from which “the historical condition of the mind could be read” (NLII: 59). Kracauer also introduced Adorno to Walter Benjamin, who remained a close friend until Benjamin's death in 1940.