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

etween the principle of exchange (the logic of the social) and nature in Adorno does not
challenge the ontological monism that unites subject and object in the way I have
developed it here, but it means that our philosophical understanding of both subject and
object remains superficial if it ends with the realization that subject and object are
constituted by the principle of exchange in accordance with the model of reification. In
order to go deeper, analysis needs to see the principle of exchange as itself determined in
relation to nature. In fact, Adorno holds that we understand the subject, and the nature of
concepts, only if we understand them as dialectically related, and mediated by, nature.
The account that we have thus far of the relation between thought and being, of
how this relation makes dialectics possible, and of the dialectical structure that follows, is
therefore incomplete. It contains a blind spot, which is the determination of the whole
structure in relation to non-rational nature.
The difference that I am highlighting here between Adorno, on the one hand, and
Hegel and Marx, on the other, was already presaged by the way in which their views of
the dialectic of essence and appearance diverge: specifically by the fact that both Hegel
and Marx ultimately subsume ‘appearance’ under a dialectically developed concept of
‘essence,’ whereas I have reconstructed Adorno’s view of the dialectic as culminating in
the incorporation of the initial concepts of appearance and essence, and the tension
between them, under appearance. I have already argued that the point of saying that the
more highly developed dialectical concept is appearance and not essence is to
characterize the social order as a whole as contingent and neither grounded in some
external absolute foundation, nor self-grounding, but rather in need of further
interpretation through another mediation: the mediation by nature.
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