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

(2) that there are tendencies already at work in the social order toward the destruction of
capitalism and the institution of a rationally planned society. These assumptions express
a much closer affinity with Marxism than Adorno has. Adorno disagrees with both
assumptions: He is much less sanguine about the tendencies at work in society at his
time, and he does not even believe in the existence of a coherent ‘revolutionary subject,’
and much less with the idea that human beings are ‘essentially’ defined by the striving for
freedom, since Adorno worries quite a lot about the deformation of individuals under
conditions of reification, and is not at all certain that the capacity for freedom will survive
much longer under these conditions.
With regard to the main topic of this chapter, the relation between Adorno’s and
Marcuse’s conception of the dialectic of essence and appearance can be summarized as
follows: Initially, there is a similarity between Adorno’s and Marcuse’s views in that
they both argue that that there is a tension between appearance and essence in advanced
capitalist society, and that this tension is developed theoretically though a dialectical
Lebensphilosophie, existentialism, even phenomenology tried to go beyond the epistemological subject to
something concrete. But, Marcuse argues, they failed because they did not attack the specific unfreedom of
the individual in the actual production process. He says:
So wurde der Platz der abstrakten Vernunft hier von einer ebenso abstrakten ‚Geschichtlichkeit’
eingenommen, die bestenfalls zu einem alle gesellschaflichen Gruppen und Ordnungen gleichgültig
ansprechendem Relativismus kam. Indem sie sich mit jenen gesellschaftlichen Kräften
vergindet, die durch die geschichtliche Situation als die fortschrittlichen und wirklich
‚allgemeinen’ ausgezeichnet sind, steht die materialistische Tehorie jenseits des historischen
Relativismus (“Zum Begriff des Wesens,” Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Vol. V (1936): 31,
emphasis mine).
English translation in “On the Concept of Essence,” in Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (London:
MayFlyBooks, 2009), 57:
Consequently, the place of abstract reason was taken by an equally abstract ‘historicity’, which
amounted at best to a relativism addressed indifferently to all social groups and structures.
Materialist theory moves beyond historical relativism in linking itself with those social forces
which the historical situation reveals to be progressive and truly ‘universal.’
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