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

social order as a totality, must be the final ground of social reality. Why, then, should we
reduce the dignity of this final ground by claiming that, though analysis cannot go
beyond it, and though it accurately describes the structure of the real, it is not a ground or
the essence of the real, but rather a ‘mere appearance’?
One reason to say that the real is a mere appearance without ground is to
emphasize the point that reality is not definitive of truth. The idea of a final ground is
traditionally understood—and it is initially hard to see how it could not be so
understood—as a principle of “ontological truth.” That is, an account of how reality is
structured is generally believed to be ipso facto an account of “the truth” about the real.
And, yet, what if reality itself should be understood rather as a pathological symptom, a
systematic structure of delusion? The mere description of reality’s structure and the
notion of ontological truth then come apart. This is exactly what happens with Adorno’s
theory, and it is why he claims that “[d]as Ganze ist das Unwahre” 285 [the whole is the
false]), without an underlying existing “truth” of which “the whole” can be said to give a
distorted (false) impression.
“Still,” one might imagine the critic responding, “the structure of reality is
understood as delusional and thus false through the analysis of its relation to nature.
Doesn’t this mean that nature, and the natural history that makes the pathological quality
of the social intelligible, constitutes the underlying ground or essence of the false
illusion? Isn’t paranoid pathology the essence, and the social order the appearance, of the
real?”
285 Adorno, Minima Moralia, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 4 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp
Verlag, 1969), §29, p. 55.
310