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

eality as a whole does not result in a final explanation of this reality, but rather
conceives of the structure of the totality as new material for interpretation. The
interpretation that remains to be carried out is specifically an interpretation of the
mediation of the entire social order by nature.
4.4 Positivist v. critical thought
In this section, I employ the account I have developed of the “contradiction in the
object” and the dialectical mode of reflection to which it gives rise in order to get a more
detailed account of negative dialectics. First, I explain the distinction that Adorno takes
there to hold between a positivist, ideological form of thought and critical thought. Then
I build an account of the logical structure of negative dialectics based on the idea that its
object of analysis—that is, social reality as a whole—is structured in terms of the
dialectic of essence and appearance that characterizes the “contradiction in the object.”
What Adorno calls “positivism” is characterized by a form of thinking that
concerns itself with the study of isolated facts but does not analyze them in their relation
to the whole, to the social totality. In other words, positivism gathers information about
the appearance of social reality as it is taken up in ordinary consciousness but does not
inquire into the mechanisms by which such consciousness is pre-formed. Critical
thought, on the other hand, accomplishes three further things: first, it analyzes finite facts
in terms of their mediation by the social totality and its determining principle of exchange
(which means that it interprets the sphere of appearance in relation to essence); second, it
shows that the relation between the logic of finite facts and the logic of their mediation by
the social totality is contradictory (which means that it develops a dialectical
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