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

contradiction between appearance and essence is elucidated in the moment in which a
finite element of appearance appears to be unintelligible in isolation from its relation to
the whole system. For the second form of thought that I am considering, which stops at
the level of the contradiction between appearance and essence, this contradiction is in the
end explained in functionalist terms: the appearance has a “logic” of its own, which
follows from and feeds back into the logic of the whole.
This second form of thought successfully reproduces concrete reality in thought,
in the sense that it reproduces the system and its structure. But the meaning of the system
remains hidden. The internal structure of the system is attributed to the self-sufficient
totality, which in turn becomes identified with reason (whether as Geist or even as
historical materialism). The system, which is (in the conception of the social order that
we have developed here) in reality a system of delusions, a symbolic product of a
pathological social imaginary, is transfigured into an autonomous totality whose structure
is fully determined and determinable rather than partly non-rational and elusive from
within the system. Marxian and Hegelian forms of dialectics exemplify this second form
of thought.
Finally, there is a third form of thought that supersedes the second by first
understanding the inner structure of the system (that is, of social reality as it concretely
exists) and then further understanding this structure as delusion. This form of thought
does not take the system to be the final structure of intelligibility for appearance, but
rather understands the system itself as an extended symbol produced by a further, not
fully rational source of significance: the social imaginary and its specifically
pathological relation to nature. This approach does not take the dialectic between essence
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