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

subsection (6.2.2), I briefly explain each side of this mutual dependence and the relation
that holds them together. The view of history that will emerge from this explanation is
clearly not teleological in its overarching structure and on its basis I will bring my
polemic against the teleological reading of Dialektik der Aufklärung to a close in the final
sub-section (6.2.3).
First, let us see how the historical dimension requires the natural dimension in
Adorno’s philosophy of history. In general, the mere accumulation of contingent
historical changes would be meaningless without an element of continuity. History,
understood as the accumulation of transient events, does not persist in the present—
unless one has an eternalist “block universe” theory of time or something of the sort. But
Adorno is not in the business of metaphysical speculation of this kind. Yet he is also
decidedly not a presentist, denying real existence to events of the past, for he holds that
reality is irreducibly and objectively historical. How, then, does the past, and the
historical dimension, exist in the present?
For Adorno, the historical dimension is ontologically constitutive of natural
things; it constitutes the core of objectivity of things and subsists in the mode of being of
nature. As we have seen, by ‘nature’ Adorno understands the ontological element of
existents that is emphatically not ‘mental’—paradigmatically, the instincts [Triebe] of the
self, but also the habits and desires of bodies, the history of feelings and their inscription
in unreflective behavior, even the tacit taboos and norms that remain invisible to the
individuals whose world is governed by them. History survives in the present in much
the manner that history persists in the individual: in unconscious layers that correspond
to the psychic development of the individual, in the unconscious and its implicit
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