CONTRADICTION, CRITIQUE, AND DIALECTIC IN ADORNO A ...

how the potential can be fulfilled and an effective motivational force for practical
intervention to render the world ever more expressive of its rational essence—the type of
intervention Hegel sees as the motor of history.
Adorno, on the other hand, maintains that the immanent logic of the social order
is itself irrational. Against (1) above, Adorno holds (1’) that local elements of
irrationality in the modern social order are understood correctly when seen as local
expressions of the global irrationality of the order as a whole, an irrationality that can be
diagnosed as resulting from the pathological psycho-dynamics that accompanied the rise
of modernity, and that continue to become ever more pathological with modern
capitalism’s unbridled expansion. Understanding the irrationality of a local occurrence
thus requires an understanding of the global irrationality (rather than rationality) of the
total social context in which it occurs. But, if the context of intelligibility for a local
irrationality is not itself rational but rather mired in irrationality, then it follows that (2’)
the act of placing the local irrational occurrence in relation to its background does not
indicate how the local irrationality could be locally “fixed” in order to render it rational.
In fact, the kind of practical intervention that would transform the social world into a
rational world would of necessity for Adorno have to aim at a global change of the entire
underlying structure of society, for it is the overall irrationality of the whole order that
causes localized instances of irrationality to erupt.
This means that understanding the immanent logic of any element of the social
order leads only to an understanding of the irrationality of the social order as a whole
(specifically determined in terms of the social order’s relation to non-rational nature).
But, then, it is impossible to move from an identification of the essential principle that
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