The Materialist Interpretation of Philosophy Adorno’s Approach Ashraf Hassan Mansour Associate Professor Department of Philosophy – Faculty of Arts – University of Alexandria Adorno’s Works contains what we can call a materialist interpretation of philosophy, that is, a critique that reveals the socio-economic conditionality of philosophical thinking. This type of conditionality is not just a critique of philosophical systems, but also a very novel contribution to our understanding of philosophy itself. This kind of interpretation goes back to Marx and Engels, but it didn’t carry the same mechanical causality or the automatic relationship between the base and the Superstructure in Orthodox Marxisms, because it deals with the philosophical systems from a sociological-materialist perspective, not a historical materialist or a dialectical materialist one. I show thereby that Adorno’s analyses of philosophical Systems, especially the systems of Kant, Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger, combines a class perspective with the traditional Marxist perspective of the forces of production. And this combination allowed Adorno to deal with the systems of the philosophers just mentioned as conditioned both by their Bourgeois outlook and by the changing position of the Bourgeoisie in the production process. So Kant’s philosophy was, according to Adorno, the expression of the German Bourgeoisie in the Eighteenth century, and all its dualism are due to the historical and social contradictions of this class. Hegel was aware of those deep contradictions, not only in the German Bourgeoisie, but in the whole European Bourgeoisie, so he tried to transcend them with his dialectical method in thought only, that is, Ideally. Finally, Husserl’s philosophy was the expression of the contemporary situation of the Bourgeoisie after it turned to a Finance class, making money from money without producing, and that revealed itself in Husserl in his theory of essential intuition, as a method of gaining truth (or profit) immediately without running through a thought process or an experimental one. In the end, Heidegger’s philosophy is the Ontological expression of the crisis of the Bourgeoisie that became completely impotent towards the new historical and social challenges. And this impotency reveals itself in Heidegger’s existential categories of angst, fear, being towards death, and throwness into the world.