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

was already familiar to her but implicit becomes comprehended. As Michael Rosen
notes,
We have to have already implicitly acquired the Scientific consciousness which
the Phenomenology is out to deduce. But we are not yet fully aware that we have
acquired it. It is not a matter of comprehension [Begreifen] or Thought [Denken];
we merely have a figurative representation [Vorstellung] of it. The task of the
Phenomenology is to bring this unconscious knowledge to full knowledge, to
raise consciousness to the level of the activity of the ‘universal self’, to enable us
to move from Science in the form of Vorstellung to Science proper, Absolute
Knowledge or (simply) Thought. But it is itself Science in the form of
Vorstellung. What allows it to presuppose this is a fact of history, namely, that
the formative process of Spirit is completed. 21
Geist has already completed its development. But this cannot be demonstrated to the
skeptic before she follows the journey through the various forms of consciousness that
make up the history of Geist. It can only be shown through the experience of going
through the journey, since only if we do have the knowledge already implicitly will we be
able practically to follow the path of the Phenomenology, and, specifically, to move from
one form of consciousness to the next through determinate negation with a clear
understanding that the movement is dictated by the form of consciousness itself and
therefore ontologically necessitated by it. “Rather than giving a rational, discursive
demonstration in which we try to establish in advance that such reasoning patterns are
plausible, for the benefit of skeptics, the intelligibility of the Phenomenology will give
their justification, as it were, in use.” 22 The intelligibility of the ontological necessity
connecting different forms of consciousness and the ability of the observing
1982), 44.
21 Rosen, Michael, Hegel’s Dialectic and its Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
22 Ibid., 44.
20