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

Aufklärung, is measured in terms of control over fearful nature, and this control
necessitates violence and a dominating relation both toward the subject’s inner nature—
instincts that must be repressed in order to meet the requirements of social life—and of
outer nature. As instrumental rationality increases, so do repression and domination of
nature, so that the historical processes of “progress” and “regression” are dialectically
intertwined. Because Hegel develops only one side of this dialectic, his view is
ultimately one-sided. His philosophy ultimately bottoms out in a dogmatic elevation of
Geist over nature and individual subjects, and in this sense is not properly dialectical. 39
39 Hegel’s development of only one side of the dialectic allows him to subsume the individual standpoint
on reflection under a speculative standpoint that sees history as fully reconciled with the subject. Adorno,
on the other hand, maintains that the Hegelian narrative is one side of a dialectical opposition between geist
and nature, but this opposition cannot be overcome by thought. This is why, for Adorno, the experience of
thinking is epitomized by the unglückliche Bewußtsein [the unhappy consciousness]. This form of
consciousness is described by Hegel as one stage within Geist’s journey to absolute knowledge. The
unhappy consciousness is the first form of consciousness in the Phenomenology that explicitly recognizes
itself as contradictory. It generates standards to which it cannot live up and, as a result, it lives in painful
recognition of its own insufficiency; the ideal it seeks has constantly to be relegated to a ‘beyond’ in
comparison to which the unhappy consciousness experiences itself and its world as a failure. The unhappy
consciousness sets out to eliminate contingency and changeability, which it sees as insubstantial, so as to
become one with its ideal, an infinite realm of universal reason. But it cannot accomplish this task because
it knows itself to be contingent and changeable, and thus inessential according to its own standards. We
can interpret Adorno as holding that the Hegelian absolute consciousness is contained in the moment in
which the unhappy consciousness seeks to eliminate its own ‘inessential’ moment and to be one with
universal reason, where the moment that is ‘inessential’ corresponds to the natural element in the self, but
the attempt to eliminate this natural moment fails again and again. Adorno holds that the unhappy
consciousness captures the experience of the philosophical consciousness in today’s world. See Adorno,
Negative Dialektik, in Gesammelte Schriften, Vol. 6 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, 55. So, whereas
for Hegel the unhappy consciousness is just one stage in the journey of the ordinary consciousness—a stage
that the observing consciousness comprehends as belonging to a path that leads to understanding the world
as fully rational—for Adorno Hegel’s observing or speculative consciousness is ultimately just a moment
of the unhappy consciousness, and it is rather the inner dynamic of the unhappy consciousness that defines
the intellectual experience of philosophical thought. The pain and frustration of the unhappy consciousness
is the definitive affect of our experience of thinking—it is the affective expression of non-conceptual
nature.
[U]nglückliches Bewußtsein ist keine verblendete Eitelkeit des Geistes sondern ihm inherent, die
einzige authentische Würde, die er in der Trennung vom Leib empfing. Sie erinnert ihn, negativ,
an seinen leibhaften Aspekt; allein daß er dessen fähig ist, verleiht irgend ihm Hoffnung. Die
kleinste Spur sinnlosen Leidens in der erfahrenen Welt straft die gesamte Identitätsphilosophie
Lügen, die es der Erfahrung ausreden möchte: »Solange es noch einen Bettler gibt, solange gibt es
nocht Mythos«; darum ist die Identitätsphilosophie Mythologie als Gedanke. Das leibhafte
Moment meldet der Erkenntnis an, daß Leiden nicht sein, daß es anders werden solle. »Weh
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