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

conception of historical development. So, the first thing we need to do is to clarify what
kind of necessity is involved in teleological explanation.
There are two main forms of teleological explanation. We may call the first
‘broadly teleological,’ and the second ‘functional.’ 265
1. Broadly teleological: There is a process (a pattern of change) that culminates in a
certain state, where we explain the occurrence of the process and each of its
stages in terms of the state in which the process culminates.
2. Functional explanation: Here we have an overarching system made up of parts,
where the parts act together in a way that yields and maintains a single
overarching functional economy. What we do here is to explain the behavior and
the nature of the parts by reference to their role in the overarching functional
economy.
Adorno’s explanation of the historical development of Western civilization, and its
descent into paranoid pathology, is clearly not teleological in the first sense above, since
the explanation of historical development is not ultimately given in terms of the present
pathology. In fact, the goal of Dialektik der Aufklärung was to find an explanation for
the ‘barbaric’ present state of things, which seemed to Adorno and Horkheimer to
contradict the self-understanding of Western culture as enlightened. If the culminating
point in the process is what stands in need of explanation, it cannot be the ground of
explanation, which means that the account of Dialektik der Aufklärung does not follow
the ‘broadly teleological’ form described above.
265 This distinction is drawn from Michael Loux’s lectures on the concept of teleology in
Aristotle’s Physics, given at the University of Notre Dame in the Fall Semester 2007.
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