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

And yet, as I hope to have shown in section 1, determinate negation in Hegel presupposes
the complete “absolute” system.
This would seem to imply that Adorno’s position is incoherent. But let us not be
quick and look at the grounds on which Adorno rejects Hegel’s conception of the
completed teleological system in order to be in a position to evaluate what consequences
this rejection has for the kind of ‘negation’ at work in negative dialectics.
The key to understanding Adorno’s critique of Hegel is that it does not constitute
a wholesale rejection of Hegel’s system. In good dialectical fashion, what Adorno
proposes is that Hegel’s complete position, contained in the total conception of the
system, is not final but rather is itself susceptible of dialectical development (although
such development does not lead to a “higher,” more comprehensive position of thought,
but rather to the demonstration that the Hegelian system is as a whole dialectically
mediated by something external to it). For Adorno, then, the problem with Hegel is that
he fell short of the dialectical rigor he pledged and provided a final account that was one-
sided and thus ultimately un-dialectical. 27 This is because, according to Adorno, the
completed Hegelian system is not the end of dialectical progression, for it is dialectically
opposed to (i.e., mediated by and meditative of) non-conceptual nature.
27 Another way to put this point is to say that Adorno rejects Hegel’s claim that the system is, as a
whole, beyond dialectical contradiction. Rather, as he puts it in Negative Dialektik, “Auch insofern ist der
Welgeist, anders als Hegel es wollte, sein eigener Widerspruch. Das Vertierte selbsterhaltender Vernunft
treibt den Geist der Gattung aus, die ihn anbetet. Darum ist bereits die Hegelsche Geistmetaphysik auf all
ihren Stufen so nah an der Geistfeindschaft” (Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6
(Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 341). [In this sense too the world Spirit (Geist) contains its own
contradiction, against what Hegel wanted. The bestiality of self-preserving reason drives out Spirit (Geist)
from the species that worships it. Because of this the Hegelian metaphysic is already in all its steps so
close to hostility against Spirit (Geist). (Translation mine.)]
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