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

social interests of individuals grounded in the possibility of putting the later set of
interests first, a negation of widespread hunger in poor countries grounded in the fact that
the means to produce enough food to feed the human population already exist, etc), so
that each step reveals not merely a ‘logical’ possibility for things to be different but rather
a real, concrete possibility.
The concept of a different social order as a whole is a task—a task constituted by
step-wise determinate negations of elements in the existing order. This task, however, is
never completed and fully given, and this is why the concept of a different, non-reified
social order is as a whole never apprehensible in the fullness of its constitutive conceptual
marks, but rather operates as a regulative principle on critical thought. Yet, even if never
given in fullness, the concept of another order of things is not merely abstract, for it is not
the mere logical possibility of a different social reality, but is rather given as a task made
of specific concrete negations of the existing order.
Following Kant’s distinction between merely ‘logical’ and ‘real’ possibility, 168 we
could say that each of the steps involved in the construction of the concept of another
order constitutes a ‘real’ possibility. Yet the complete concept of another order is a
concept the construction of which is never completed, so that all marks in the concept
cannot be displayed in toto before our eyes. And this means that the concept as a whole
is not in itself fully possible in the sense of ‘real’ possibility, but more indeterminate. But
168 See Kant, Immanuel, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4, ed. Prussian
Academy of the Sciences (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1973), A220-1/B268. For Kant, logical possibility
requires only that concepts be non-contradictory, whereas ‘real possibility’ requires further that concepts
agree with the formal conditions of experience in general (the conditions of the understanding and
intuition). For example, that a figure can be enclosed by two straight lines is logically possible (there is no
contradiction b/n the concepts of straight line and two) but it is not really possible because the conditions of
space and its determinations, which contain the a priori form of experience in general, render the
proposition impossible.
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