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

own to account for the ontological-logical structure of reality as a whole, and, on the
basis of the inadequacies revealed, gives rise to a new, logically more complex and
determinate, item of thought. Again, the transition from the derived inadequacies or
“contradictions” to the new item of thought is ontologically necessitated by the form and
content of the contradiction. The “deductions” that make dialectical movement from one
basic item of thought to the next are possible because they are instances of determinate
negation. And the possibility of advancing through determinate negation toward a
completed system of all basic forms of thought is guaranteed by the idea that the
completed system is already implicitly contained in every form of thought from the start,
and that in the end nothing remains external to the system itself. In other words, the
dialectical movement of the Logic presupposes the absoluteness of the Hegelian system.
This is why the transitions in Hegel’s system are not only transcendental
arguments moving from a specific conception x to the necessary conditions for x but are
rather supplemented by an argument that x, in order to be fully actualized in the world, or
in order for it to work as an all-encompassing account of reality, must be supplemented
by y. But this is a teleological strategy, 24 and the teleology is grounded in the idea that
the whole system is implicitly present in each form of thought under consideration from
the start. The goal of the Logic as a whole is in fact to argue that, in order to think
anything at all, the whole system of pure concepts presented in the text must be
presupposed, and the dialectical movement developed in the Logic ultimately
24 See Frederick’s Neuhouser short discussion of the methodology involved in Hegel’s transitions
in Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2000),
fn. 27, p. 29. Neuhouser argues that Hegel’s arguments make use of both transcendental and teleological
arguments, and, if the latter are ignored, key points of Hegel’s dialectical “derivations” are lost.
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