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

consciousness to perform the operation of determinate negation therefore presuppose that
consciousness has already gone through the sequence of transitions that develops to
absolute reason. Retrospectively, from the standpoint of the completed journey,
consciousness is able to understand that there was ontological necessity pushing the
dialectical progression forward all along. This necessity is an autotelic property of the
system.
Moreover, it is not only the subjective progression of consciousness in the
direction of ever more explicit rationality that is presupposed by the operation of
determinate negation. On the object’s side, the ontological necessity that pushes each
form of consciousness forward, and which is not intelligible to the forms of
consciousness prior to the end-point of the dialectical journey, is in the end revealed to
have a definite structure: the structure of speculative reason. The entire structure that
becomes pellucid only after philosophical scrutiny of the dialectical journey was from the
start embedded in each form of consciousness and was the motor of the form of
consciousness’s inherent drive to develop into a specific new form of consciousness. It is
therefore because teleological, speculative reason is the inner structure of reality, pushing
toward ever fuller and more self-conscious actualization of itself, that the transitions
between forms of consciousness at the micro-level are necessary. The autotelic property
of the Hegelian system operates thus both at the macro-level (enabling the observing
consciousness to understand the journey of the ordinary consciousnesses in the text as
necessary) and at the micro-level (impeling the objects considered in the text, the forms
of ordinary consciousness themselves, to develop contradictions). The necessity
connecting forms of consciousness at each stage of the dialectical progression, which
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