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

It is clear, however, that (2) is not an option. Once it is seen through that the
Hegelian conception of the Concept and the teleological account of Reason to which it
gives rise is only one side of a further dialectic with nature, the Hegelian view of the
Concept and Reason itself is transformed, for, though the Concept does not incorporate
nature, its relation to nature is internally constitutive insofar as it mediates the Concept,
rather than merely external. We cannot simply take the Hegelian system and its logic of
determinate negation, on the one hand, and the relation of non-conceptual nature to
concepts and rationality with some independent account of its internal logic, on the other,
and then juxtapose the two or relate them in some ex post facto manner. Adorno’s
critique of Hegel is in fact built on the idea that the Hegelian system contains its
contradiction with non-conceptual nature internally and thus can be dialectically
developed as one side of a further dialectical opposition. Once the totality of the
Hegelian system has been submitted to dialectical analysis, it is destabilized and
internally transformed. As a result, we cannot take any of its one-sided categories
unchanged. In other words, we must follow (1) above. The Hegelian account of
determinate negation cannot give us a way to understand how dialectical movement
proceeds and is made possible in negative dialectics.
We are, then, left with the following quandary: Either negative dialectics
proceeds through some alternative conception of determinate negation, or else Adorno
illegitimately imported the Hegelian conception into his own philosophy, without
realizing that his critique of the Hegelian system made such importation problematic.
The second view is defended by Michael Rosen in the last chapter of his Hegel’s
Dialectic and its Criticism (1982). My goal is to explore the viability of the first position,
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