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

epresentationally connected, but rather as the poles of intelligibility of a single realm:
(social) reality. Appearance and essence, and their relation, are constitutive of object and
subject in accordance with the “contradiction in the object.” The “contradiction” here is
rooted in the fact that the logic of appearance is incompatible with the logic of essence
when the two are considered in isolation: the analysis of appearance alone (the analysis
of finite facts and isolated elements of social life in independence from the social totality)
yields conclusions that are logically contradictory with the results that follow from
analyzing appearance as determined by essence (that is, by analyzing finite facts and
elements as intelligible only in relation to the social totality and, in particular, the
principle of exchange). This “contradiction” between the logic of appearance and
essence is according to Adorno grounded in the way concrete reality is structured as a
result of its determination by exchange: hence the reason to call the contradiction a
“contradiction in the object.”
Finally, we have seen that the “contradiction in the object” is shown by critical
thought to be not an abstract contradiction but rather to be the internal structure of reified
reality: hence to be internal to a more developed conception of appearance. In the
section that follows, I explain and flesh out the idea that the dialectic between the reified
notions of appearance and essence is sublated [aufgehoben] in a higher notion of
appearance rather than a higher notion of essence.
4.3 Adorno’s resolution of the dialectic of appearance and essence
One of the more salient peculiarities of this view is what I have reconstructed as
the idea that the intervention of critical thought into the one-sided dynamics between
168