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

the system’s inability to express a key element in history: namely, the element of
‘nature,’ from the standpoint of which history emerges in a light that opposes the
Hegelian narrative.
One of Adorno’s main complaints against the Hegelian philosophy of history is
that the latter upholds a hypostatized conception of reason that in the end becomes
divorced from the concrete experiences of individuals and as a result loses concrete
meaning. For Hegel, the philosophical assessment of history requires that the
experiences of individuals be subsumed under a rational reconstruction that explains their
overarching meaning, and this meaning actualizes itself “behind the back” of individuals’
consciousnesses. Hegel’s account requires his idea that there are two different
standpoints for consciousness, which standpoints diverge until the individual reaches
absolute knowledge: on the one hand, there is the standpoint of the concrete, empirical
individual, and, on the other, the standpoint of self-conscious Geist. A certain historical
event may be rife with individual suffering and seem wholly irrational to the individuals
undergoing it, and yet, according to Hegel, the same event can be understood as a step
toward the ever-greater actualization of reason from the standpoint of absolute
knowledge.
Hegel says of individuals that “sie sind in einem geringen Verhältnis zu der
Masse des Menschengeschlechts” [they are of slight importance in comparison to the
mass of the human race], 31 and, in a famous passage, he says,
31 Hegel, G.W.F., Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte, in Werke, Vol. 12 (Frankfurt
am Main: Suhrkamp taschenbuch, 1986), 34.
31