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

concept or finite set of concepts already refers to all other concepts because its
very content is determined by its relations to other concepts.)
2. The ‘object’ refers to the object of thought: a theory, work of art, philosophical
position, or any other object in which society expresses its self-understanding.
Recall that for Adorno, as for Hegel (and even Kant for that matter) the object
always already contains a reflexive structure; it is always already permeated by
concepts through and through. The ‘object’ for Adorno contains two components:
a. First, it contains a conceptual element defined both by the concepts by
which the object presents itself and the concepts by which the object has
been historically understood and handed down to us today.
b. Second, the object contains a non-conceptual ‘nature, namely the
experiential Entstehung and Herkunft of the object, i.e., the particular
experiential content of which the object is the expression.
It will be helpful here to consider an example. Think again of Adorno’s analysis of
Kant’s dualism between phenomena and noumena. In this example, ‘concept’ and
‘object’ refer to the following:
1. The ‘concept’ refers to our discursive tools for interpreting and analyzing Kant’s
theoretical philosophy, in particular the distinction between phenomena and
noumena.
2. The ‘object’ here is Kant’s theoretical distinction between phenomena and
noumena as expressed in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. This object has two
components:
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