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

with this view too and, in fact, he finds it still too idealistic, because it attributes to the
concept the structure of reality and downgrades nature to an indeterminate substratum
that is in itself without cognitive significance, without meaning. It thus follows the
model of an all-powerful subject (even if the subject is conceived as social praxis rather
than pure mind) whose activity determines the structure of the world, on the one hand,
and an indeterminate nature that serves solely as the substratum for classification, on the
other.
A radical philosophical materialism, in Adorno’s view, is one that takes objects to
be significant in their own right: one that first of all acknowledges a radically non-
conceptual core of objectivity in the object, and that, second, takes it to be not inert but
rather a center of meaning that actively contributes to cognition. The first requirement
distinguishes Adorno’s materialism from any type of idealism, and the second sets it
apart from any physicalism or mechanism. Adorno’s materialism is rather a form of
naturalism, where nature is taken to be radically non-conceptual, meaningful in-itself, and
a necessary contributor to cognition. For Adorno, the view of the object that defines his
materialism is the only one that places that element in the object which is the opposite of
mind (i.e., its non-conceptual nature) at the center of cognition, and only this view of the
state of society, indeed in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a
number of generations, each of which stands on the shoulders of the preceding one, developing the
industry and its intercourse, and modifying its social order in response to changing needs. Even
the objects of the simplest ‘sense certainty’ are given to the human being only through social
development, industry and commercial exchange/ intercourse.
This does not mean that for Marx nature is eliminated. Rather, as Habermas rightly argues in
Knowledge and Human Interest ((Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), esp. pp. 29-40), Marx adheres to the idea
of something like a “nature in itself,” whose existence must be presupposed for epistemological reason, but
which is disclosed only within the historically determined dimension of social labor. Habermas argues,
correctly in my opinion, that Marx preserves a distinction between form and matter where the matter is an
unknown and indeterminate natural substratum that acquires form through subjective activity, so that the
world that we know is known only as formed through subjective labor.
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