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

The presentation of Adorno’s critique of Hegel—i.e., his dialectical development
of the Hegelian system beyond Hegel’s closure of it—can be pursued with respect to any
of the elements in Hegel’s system: in terms of the philosophy of consciousness,
Adorno’s critique can be reconstructed as arguing that the opposition of subject and
object with which the Phenomenology begins is never fully overcome because the
journey described in that book is as a whole dialectically mediated by a ‘natural’
substratum that consciousness never acknowledges or overcomes. In terms of the Logic,
Adorno’s critique can be reconstructed as showing that the full self-movement of “the
Concept” remains until the end unable fully to capture the object because the non-
conceptual element in the object eludes the discursive logic of concepts. In terms of the
philosophy of nature, Adorno’s critique can be reconstructed as showing that the essential
moments of nature are not fully accounted for in terms of the Concept’s self-
externalization because this externalization itself is mediated by nature; and, in terms of
the philosophy of spirit, Adorno’s critique can be reconstructed as arguing that
consciousness is never able fully to retrieve its natural origins because its development
remains until the end ‘blindly’ determined by a non-rational natural substratum.
Adorno’s full critique of Hegel is, in my view, contained and thus expressible in
terms of any of the more specific critiques of the Hegelian system described above—
whether it is a critique of the system’s completeness in the sphere of pure concepts, or in
the sphere of the science of consciousness, or the philosophy of nature, or even the more
specific Hegelian accounts of the system’s “externalization” in social reality and world
history. The reason why Adorno’s general critique is contained in any of the more
specific critiques is that any of these more specific critiques illustrates Adorno’s key
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