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

CHAPTER 7:
THE CONTRADICTION IN THE CONCEPT
In chapter 4, we saw how the mediation of every finite aspect of life by the social
totality is available to dialectical reflection. I argued that Adorno holds that the structure
of concepts replicates the structure of the socio-historical context in which the concepts
originate, and this structural correspondence is a condition for the possibility of concepts’
ability to track social reality. More specifically, I showed in chapter 4 that Adorno’s
conception of the relation between concepts and social reality satisfies two conditions
that are each necessary and jointly sufficient to justify thought’s capacity to track and
reproduce reality through a form of dialectical reflection conceived along
Marxian/Hegelian lines. These conditions were: (1) that there be a homology between
conceptual structure and the structure of the (social) world, and (2) that the structure of
both concepts and world be holistic. These two conditions make possible (3) the
reproduction of concrete (social) reality in thought thorough the progressive
determination of the object of critique beginning with more general (abstract) categories
and moving dialectically from these categories to more determinate, concrete ones.
Conditions (1) and (2) account for the idea that dialectical logic is an ontological, rather
than a merely formal, logic. And (1) and (2) make possible a form of dialectical
reflection whose aim is expressed by (3).
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