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

landscape is encountered by consciousness in a way pervaded by social categories. 150
And these categories are objective elements of the landscape; they are not subjective
additions that can be subtracted.
Adorno of course does not hold that reality is ideal, that it only exists insofar as it
is, or can be, experienced. However, he does hold that when we speak of reality in
isolation from the elements that make it experienceable—elements that are always
already social in nature—we are able to speak in this manner only after a process of
abstraction. The idea of a substratum free of subjective (and thus also social) categories
is derivative and constructed on the basis of an original concept of reality that is always
already mediated by social understanding. Social conceptual categories constitute “nicht
sowohl die konstitutive Begrifflichkeit des erkennenden Subjekts al seine in der Sache
phenomena of private life requires appeal to the context in which these phenomena occur, and the context
is always already social. See Adorno, “Soziologie und empirische Forschung,” in Gesammelte Schriften,
Vol. 8 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969). For a discussion of Adorno’s defense of the concept
of society in sociological analysis, see Benzer, Matthias, The Sociology of Theodor Adorno (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2011), chapter 1, pp. 15-50.
150 Confronted with this claim, the skeptic may argue that scientific or mathematical structures are
constitutive of reality and yet free of social categories and therefore seem to offer a counter-example to
Adorno’s claim. However, there is no reason why Adorno would need to deny that scientific and
mathematical knowledge gives us insight into objective elements of reality. His point is only that we arrive
at knowledge of these objective elements via processes of rational abstraction that are secondary to the
more basic encounter in experience with a reality that is never exhausted by such elements, and that is
pervaded by social understandings. We for instance never encounter numbers or mathematical structures in
experience, but rather find numbers and structures through a subsequent analysis of experience. This does
not deny the validity of mathematical and scientific forms of knowledge, only their primacy. To make the
view clearer, consider Plato’s theory of knowledge in the Republic. Experience is never directly of
intelligible objects, be it mathematical objects or the pure Forms. Rather, experience provides a basis on
which, through processes of intellectual abstraction, we can arrive at intelligible objects. However,
whereas for Plato these objects reveal what is truly real and only distorted in the appearances of the
experienceable realm, for Adorno neither experience nor intelligible structures are more or less real. Both
are objective elements of reality, and Adorno is not interested in making any ontological claims about more
or less fundamental structures of being (he thinks the whole idea of such an ontological project is flawed).
But he does hold that the fullness of experience is primary insofar as it is what we actually encounter in our
transactions with the world, and the intelligible structures are derivative attempts to make certain isolated
elements more precise in a secondary step of reflection.
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