Weekly Updates:
September 5, 2025
Unrequested Advice for Interpreting Theodor W. Adorno's Paradigm-Challenging Book: Negative Dialectics (1966)(pdf.)
“The whole of my activity as an author has been a corrective.”
--Søren Kierkegaard, “The Point of View for My Work.” 1848
in reaction to the impersonalism of Hegelian Idealism and lifeless Christendom
Introduction
That
big ugly overpriced puke green book that is my copy of Adorno's
philosophical work, Negative
Dialectics,
has been sitting on my bookshelf for so long that its cheap glued
spine crystallized, cracking into three separate pieces—my one
volume is now three separate volumes. Fortunately, I stumbled upon
the same book edition and pagination in electronic form.
The
first time picking up Negative Dialectics, I read page after page
without understanding hardly a word written. It is a terrible
experience. I'm sure you have encountered the same frustration--
knowing that you are well-read, but can't make heads or tails out of
a text. In many cases, the reader is just lacking a broader context.
Without understanding the issues at hand, the relevant problems, what
is at stake, and the methodologies and language used in addressing
philosophical questions, the text will be incomprehensible. The text
will resemble only one side of a phone conversation, with the other
speaker's responses absent.
To
enhance clarity, I will review the 408-page text and focus on the
most significant and densely written essays. I will interpret these
essays based on three
groups of principles
that Adorno consistently applies when formulating his critiques of
philosophical arguments.
Even before finishing Adorno's “Introduction,” (pp. 3–57) these
interpretive principles will provide a framework for reading any of
Adorno's essays in this book, in any order, and gradually Adorno's
bad writing will become more coherent, clear, and concise—it's
funny how that works. When every essay starts appearing to repeat the
same reasoned criticisms, that is a good sign: this means you are
closely following Adorno's text, thinking, and arguments.
Understanding Adorno's Negative Dialectics will enhance one's
intellectual maturity—your ability to think philosophically will
advance a light year,
metaphorically speaking.
I promise to always get to the point quickly so as not to waste your valuable reading time!
Required background knowledge
Adorno completed his PhD. doctoral dissertation, “The Transcendence of the Ego in Husserl's Philosophy” under his advisor Christian socialist theologian, Paul Tillich, at the University of Frankfurt in 1924. Their philosophical interests closely overlap, but Tillich was a Christian existentialist while Adorno was highly critical of existentialism and instead developed negative dialectics from his Marxism-Hegelian critiques. Adorno saved Tillich's life by advising him to leave Germany in 1933 after being barred from teaching for criticizing the Nazi movement. In contrast to Adorno's polemic against existentialism, Tillich refers to Heidegger eleven times in his three-volume work, “Systematic Theology,” (1951 - 1964)(pdf.) and three times in “The Protestant Era,” (1948)(pdf.).
Adorno's targets of critique are primarily vulgar Marxism (Aka: Soviet non-dialectical materialism), German Idealist Wilhelm Hegel, Transcendental Idealist Immanuel Kant, phenomenologist Edmond Husserl, and existential-phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (although Heidegger would reject this label). Adorno is a trained scholar of Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Husserl, and is a Neo-Kantian.
Adorno studied under Professor Hans Cornelius, a Neo-Kantian philosopher from the Marburg school known for its focus on Kant's epistemology. In 1933, Adorno published “Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic” as a means of exploring his own ideas related to individuality, non-identity, and idealism. He drew inspiration from Kierkegaard's writings to formulate the concepts of the nonidentical and the loss, or “withering” of individual experience.
Actually, the reader only needs very general knowledge of Kierkegaard, Marx, Hegel, Kant, and Husserl to understand Negative Dialectics. I have never found a problem with any Wikipedia article about philosophy and so is a good source, in my opinion, for general background knowledge about these philosophers. For an excellent summary of Kant's Transcendental Idealism see Frederick Copleston, S.J., “A History of Philosophy, Vol. 6; Part II, Modern Philosophy, Kant,”(Image Books,1964), read “The Problems of the First Critique” pp. 7 – 30; “Scientific Knowledge,” pp. 30 – 71; “Metaphysics Under Fire,” pp. 71 – 101. Pay special attention to Kant's concept of the “I think” unity of apperception. Other editions of Copleston's history of philosophy series will have this section on Kant in different volumes. Also, on p. 142 in Negative Dialectics, there is a long footnote that summarizes the logical “I think” in Kantian idealism that Adorno is so critical.
In the case of Hegel, I would suggest reading Copleston's same edition, “A History of Philosophy, Vol. 7; Part I, Modern Philosophy, Fichte to Hegel; read “Hegel 1, 2, 3” pp. 194 – 295. Pay special attention to Hegel's concepts of Spirit and Reason.
Adorno is critical of Edmond Husserl's student, Martin Heidegger, viewing him as an adversary—but both are struggling with the same phenomenological-existential questions. Adorno delivers a devastating critique of Heidegger's concept of “Being” that we will examine later. The term “fundamental ontology” refers to Heidegger's book, “Being and Time,” that contains his phenomenological analysis (a description) of human consciousness and experience known as the “Dasein Analytic.”
The First Group of Interpretive Principles: The four meanings of “Negative”
This term is in the first group of principles to always keep in mind reading Adorno's criticisms: it has at least four meanings for “negative” depending on the context. First, it means simple negation as in “not-X” that can also be expressed as an identity “A = not non-A” that Adorno saves for his critical arguments against positivist (empirical) science, and logical positivism.
Secondly, dialectical negation means that a particular object never perfectly fix our concept even as a universal category swallows up and devours the particular thing. In Plato's work The Statesman, he classified walking animals into bipeds and quadrupeds, then into feathered and featherless animals. But, such a classification would include humans as “featherless bipeds.” However, a human being is very different from a plucked chicken! The category of featherless bipeds fails to capture, fails to identify the complete human being-- this “non-identity” that escapes the concept's power of classification is the meaning of dialectical negation. The non-identical is the remainder that any concept necessarily leaves behind as a residual, or remainder. Don't judge a book by its cover! Adorno calls this conceptual subsumption of any particular a kind of violence and domination.
Thirdly, the term negative is a methodological anti-system negation that rejects all final synthesis, or closed systematic conceptual totalities since all philosophical systems fail to recognize the non-identical in reality.
Lastly, critical-theoretical negation means that negative dialectic's role is to expose through critique social reification of abstractions (abstractions treated as if they are real objects, or things creating pseudo-objects is reification). “The market is nervous,” is a reification leading to false assumptions. The market has no feelings, no consciousness--treating an abstraction as though it were a concrete, sentient thing is reification. The purpose of negative dialectics is to critique all reified thinking.
Critical philosophers, existentialists, and Hegelianism often use the concept of "negation" or "negativity" in different contexts. For example, Marcuse differentiates between negativity as the potential "possible" while the actual is the "empirical positive." Adorno uses the term to denote a critical analysis of a philosophical system. Sartre discusses nothingness in relation to consciousness as a non-object. Heidegger links nothingness to the concept of death, while Hegel views negation as the logical "no" or an antithesis.
The Second Group of Interpretive Principles: Four ontological dualisms
Even a careful reader might miss Adorno's criteria for judging philosophical systems, and to target systemic incoherence. On page 91 Adorno writes,” ...dualisms of within and without, of subject and object, of essence and appearance, of concept and fact...." Adorno always examines how a philosophical system resolves or leaves open these four dualisms. 1.) the dualism within and outside of the self, or mind and body. 2.) the dualism between the epistemological subject (knower) and the object (known). 3.) the dichotomy between essence (idea) and appearance (experience). 4.) the dualism between concept (idea), and fact (thing, or entity). Anyone can formulate a concept, but it doesn't mean it corresponds to anything in fact, or reality. Adorno measures his objects of critique, such as Hegel or Kant, by searching for these weak joints of contradictions that can be corrected, or for any antinomies--contradictions that cannot be resolved and end in aporia.
The Third Group of Interpretive Principles: Nonconceptuality, Individuality, and Particularity
Adorno believes Western academic philosophy has neglected these three concepts due to the dominance of abstract universals at the neglect of the concrete particulars: that speculative idealistic philosophies fail to recognize lived experience. 1.) Nonconceptuality refers to those aspects of particulars, objects, things, and entities that cannot be captured by definitions, concepts, or categories so that there is always a “remainder” that escapes objectification. 2.) Individuality of a person, object, or event is unique, but historically philosophy's general laws and abstractions pass over them. 3.) Particularity of specific details and context in a concrete situation or set of qualities such as an illegal act committed against some universal category of the state such as judicial criminal law.
These three groups of eleven interpretive principles will guide the reader in following the through-line of this book. Adorno presents his ideas abstractly, outlining the intricate structures of vastly complex philosophical systems so that reading in paragraphs for a clearer understanding of his arguments and narratives is helpful.
One might wonder, "If Adorno is critiquing many of the philosophers he studied and taught, does this mean he is dismissing Marxism, Kantianism, Hegelianism, Existentialism, and empirical science?" Adorno does reject Heidegger's fundamental ontology, though he occasionally acknowledges certain philosophical insights by him. He views the systemic contradictions in the works of other philosophers like Marx, Kant, and Hegel as negligent misinterpretations by the authors or their contemporaries. While we can choose to accept or reject Kantian duty ethics, questions arise about Kant's epistemology and categorical identity thinking. Should we cease thinking? No. Adorno states, “We can see through the identity principle, but we cannot think without identifying. Any definition is identification (p. 149).” Some contradictions that Adorno identifies in these philosophical systems are meant for us to "see through."
Adorno's negative dialectics is similar to Kierkegaard's lifelong pursuit, aimed at offering a corrective for the modern philosophies of their time. Adorno's one hundred and sixty essays offer numerous insights and corrections to the systems he critiques.
Updated: September 5, 2025
Negative Dialectics contains a total of 160 essays in seven sections, not including “Translator's Note” and the “Preface.” The mean average length of all the essays is only two and a half pages. Only four essays reach five pages in length. I am speculating that Adorno wrote about an essay a week, which is a good length for a writing session, and for a student's scheduled reading routine. Adorno's “Introduction” has twenty-seven essays; “The Ontological Need,” sixteen essays; “Being and Existence,” fourteen; “Concept and Categories,” thirty essays; “Freedom,” thirty-two essays; “World Spirit and Natural History,” twenty-seven; lastly, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” has twelve essays.
Some of the essays have titles that do not effectively convey their content. A title should provide clear information and guidance to the reader, rather than simply being an indexed keyword, which appears to be the case for some of the essays. Consequently, I will suggest alias titles for some of Adorno's essays that better reflect their content and meaning to the reader. Familiarity with the first twenty-seven essays in Adorno's “Introduction,” where many of the eleven principles of interpretation are initially presented will be beneficial; afterward, readers should be able to approach the essays in any order. Each essay is self-sufficient and can coherently stand alone.
“The Possibility of Philosophy” (pp. 3 – 4) in Negative Dialectics: Summary and Comments
“Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realize it was missed.... after the attempt to change the world miscarried.” (p. 3)
This is Adorno's first essay of the book, and it is about the condition of philosophy as a whole after the catastrophic World Wars I and II. Another title could be, “Philosophy at the Crossroads.” Adorno argues that philosophy lost its opportunity to change the world for the better. Philosophy's reputation was already suffering from Marx's famous statement that philosophy's role was to change the world and not just to interpret it. Prior to Marx, Immanuel Kant piled on by drawing a strict transcendental dividing line; the knowable world of experience (phenomena), and what remains unknown, referred to as the “thing-in-itself,” (noumena) in contrast to the “thing-as-appearance,” which led to a shift in epistemology towards an predatory empirical-positivist approach to all things scientific (see, Kantian Block, p, 386). Hegel's grand critique of world history collapsed like a dead horse. Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset commented in 1929 that it wasn’t Hegelianism itself that had died, but rather the generation of thinkers who truly understood Hegel. Under a cloud of defeatism, philosophy quietly retreated into fragmented atomistic academic specialization and “seedy scholars” . Political theory never became practice and so “miscarried.” How shockingly relevant Adorno is today. Instrumental reason (τέχνη: téchnē meaning, technological knowledge) eclipsed philosophy. Adorno argues that philosophy must turn its analytical methodology on itself by interrogating its own presuppositions.
“…the seedy scholars feasting on subjective speculation seemed to Goethe, one hundred and fifty years ago. The introverted thought architect dwells behind the moon that is taken over by extroverted technicians.” (p. 3)
In this quote Adorno views academic philosophers as speculators and displaced isolated armchair intellectuals, thus, the “moon” metaphor. On the other hand, capitalism's technological global logic advances like a marching revolutionary force, but severed from human values in the name of progress to preserve the standing reserve of surplus production.
“If Kant had, as he put it, ‘freed himself from the school concept of philosophy for its world concept,’ it has now, perforce, regressed to its school concept.” (p. 4)
Kant attempted to steer philosophy away from parochial scholasticism and instead toward a broader inquiry aligned with the spirit of the Enlightenment. Well, Adorno thinks the exact reverse occurred during his time: philosophy’s quietest educational function eclipsed its critical mission only to be sandbagged by sterile curricula rather than fulfilling its cultural mission Kant envisioned. Within a ghetto of abstraction, Adorno charges, philosophers erect a one-way mirror to exactly observing reality but are blind to the sociological structures that shape both subject (knower) and object (known). I should note that Adorno uses the two metaphors of the reflecting “mirror” (representing empiricism) and economic “barter” (representing the identity principle) as devices for critique throughout his book.
Only one hundred and fifty-nine essays to go! I will only lightly touch some essays, pass over some, and selectively examine others in greater detail to highlight Adorno's methodology, metaphors, and argument strategies.
“Dialectics Not a Standpoint” pp. 4 – 6: Summary and Comments
“Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint.” (p. 5)
The identity principle is simply thinking, “To think is to identify,” focusing particularly on the subjective act of categorization. Dialectical thinking is watchful for the space that opens when a concept attempt to encapsulate an object's richness entirely—that is to say the nonidentical (p. 5), or the nonconceptual (p. 8). Contradiction is the hallmark of nonidentity. However, unlike Hegel, Adorno does not want to resolve the contradiction into a higher synthesis but instead holds open this tension to show the “untruth of identity,” and to critique empirical positivist materialist reductionism, and dogmatic idealism.
“Identity is a lie.” (p. XI.)
Negative dialectics is not a prepackaged worldview but is the drive of thought to map its own limits. Thought necessarily seeks unity and attempts to smother the object's nonidentity, particularly within idealistic abstract systemic totalities that subsume various particulars under a predetermined categorical standardizing concept. This essay could bear the alias title, “When Thought Betrays Its Objects: A Negative Account of Dialectical Practice.” Rather than seeking a higher synthesis, dialectics shows where the concept fails. Our sense of nonidentity arises in capitalist society as an “impoverishment of lived experience” induced from the abstract flattening of reality into a monotonous one-dimensional sameness and strict regimentation. This idea of nonidentity represents a nuanced shift in spatial metaphors: not an otherworldly transcendence mysticism, but a different spatial metaphor connected to this world— “depth.” He rejects warmed-over Kantian Idealism that seeks logical closure everywhere and anti-idealist dogmas that impose a false totality—an ontology of a false condition. Systemic propositional contradictions, whenever identified, is paradoxically an instance of nonidentity that reveals the inaccuracies of absolute identification.
“Reality and Dialectics” (pp. 6–8):
“...in the administered world of the impoverishment of experience....” (p.6)
Living in agony from existential meaninglessness congeals into a concept that engages in a subject-object dichotomy. Negative dialectics “unfolds” the difference between the particular and universal that the same universal defines and controls. A more fitting title for this essay could be “When Concepts Fail: Tracking the Gap Between the Universal and the Irreducible Particular.” Adorno takes another swipe at efforts to resurrect Kant's aporias as exemplified by his four famous antinomies which lack the ability to achieve “reconcilement” and release the nonidentical from the universal's “spiritual coercion” thus giving access to the repressed complex multiplicity of the object. Because Adorno's unbound dialectical method challenges the power of the principle of identification by categorization, his critics accuse him of “panlogism” that asserts everything is rationally connected by logical principles in a systematic structural totality. Hegel once wrote, “What is rational is real; and what is real is rational,” describing historical development toward an end, or telos.
“.... Hegel’s substantive philosophizing was the primacy of the subject, or—in the famous phrase from the 'Introduction' to his Logic—the ‘identity of identity and nonidentity.’ He held the definite particular to be definable by the mind because its immanent definition was to be nothing but the mind.” (p.7)
Adorno is advocating a non-idealist dialectic that examines how cognitive categories have ossified into dogmatic static doctrines. Adorno questions Hegel's assumption that particulars are knowable because their being is only a moment of the development of an universal knowing subject (rational consciousness) where everything real is reducible to a concept. Negative dialectics flips Hegel's idea on its head that the subject is the only centralized locus where reconcilement is achieved in a dynamic reality that no single mind can fully contain. Reality's contradictions do not merely live inside the subject but also exists out in the world. For Hegel, the “identity of identity and nonidentity” (p. 7) means that what seems different (nonidentity) is ultimately reconciled within thought’s self-identity; for Adorno, “nonidentity” names the irreducible remainder that resists conceptual capture, so the subject is only one point where reality’s contradictions appear, never their final destination.
“Where present philosophy deals with anything substantive at all, it lapses either into the randomness of a weltanschauung or into that formalism....” (p. 7)
The German term “weltanschauung” means “world view" or Welt (“world”) + Anschauung (“view” or “perception”) and is meant here to be merely cultural, or opinion--- the opposite of systematic logical formalism.
Updated: 9-12-2025
"The Concern of Philosophy” pp. 8 - 10
This essay by Adorno has inspired me the most and is the moment that the philosophical penny dropped for me —a lot of pennies dropped. It prompted me to revisit and reassess the philosophers Kant, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, and various existentialist thinkers over the course of ten years. A particular sentence validated my intuitions regarding Wittgenstein's mysticism and my critical stance toward logical positivism—but only tacitly known, that is, silently known. I would give the alias title to this essay, “Uttering the Unutterable: Negative Dialectics and the Limits of Conceptuality.”
Still on the topic of philosophy, Adorno reminds the reader that philosophy once held out the promise of a new reality, but instead it became an enfeebled abstract philosophy that tries to present itself as scientific, mimicking an empiricist mirror that merely reflects reality as given in perception. Adorno argues that philosophy must critique itself to disclose the blind spots of its own concepts and expose the social interests that wish to maintain the false conditions of a status quo. Philosophy's mission is to redeem what concepts erase.
Adorno’s complaint is with the entire lineage of Western philosophy from Plato through Hegel for dismissing as unimportant three neglected areas: nonconceptuality, individuality, and particularity. Hegel called these neglected issues “lazy Existenz.” Even Husserl and Bergson, who touched on these themes, ultimately retreated into the safe enclosures of idealistic subjectivity and metaphysics. Against this tradition, Negative Dialectics is a mode of thinking that pits concepts against themselves, forcing them into collision to expose what they “suppress, disparage, and discard.” Philosophy must struggle to embrace the nonconceptual.
Adorno admires Bergson’s bold gambit--inventing an intuition unbound by categories--but faults him for cleansing dialectics of its critical mission. By elevating immediacy as freedom, Bergson risks turning life into an undifferentiated flux, discarding the very structures that make critique possible. His metaphysical retreat undercuts the dialectical tension between generality and particularity, replacing it with a Romantic fable of pure becoming. In Adorno’s view, that cult of spontaneity simply mirrors the ideology of liberation sold by consumer capitalism. Bergson’s “pure duration” collapses into the same conceptual cage he tries to escape. By equating intuition with an inner temporal flow, he's only reinventing Kant’s form of time consciousness, but under a different name. All these attempts to rehabilitate philosophy by Bergson's intuitive flux and Husserl's purified essence lead into a cul-de-sac. Negative dialectics seeks to find the limits of conceptual speech.
The Atom Smasher
The dialectical analytical process is akin to a particle accelerator: just as physicists hurl atoms into high-speed impacts to shatter their apparent unity and reveal the hidden particles within (nonidentical), Adorno hurls philosophical concepts into confrontation with their own contradictions. The aim is not destruction for its own sake, but exposure--to break apart the smooth surface of philosophical systems and bring to light the nonidentical, the nonconceptual, the individual, and the particular. Where the physicist uncovers quarks and leptons, Adorno uncovers the crashed fragments of reality that refuse to be fully captured by thought, insisting that philosophy remain open to whatever resists its grasp. Adorno imagines a cognitive utopia in which concepts uncover the nonconceptual, allowing for understanding without erasing it within their own abstractions.
A Rose by Another Name
In this essay, two terms to know: terminus ad quem is Latin for “end point” or “limit toward which,” or the destination or final aim of a cognitive process. And, this is an important one: données immédiates de la conscience is French for “immediate data (or givens) of consciousness,” or the raw, unmediated experiences as they present themselves to the mind before any conceptualization.
For the phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl, there are two modes of thought: a direct, intuitive “perception of essence” in a concrete particular, and the process of forming “general abstract concepts.” The first is Wesensschau (perception of essence) that is direct and intuitive. For example, I see a rose, but before even thinking of “flower,” or a “plant,” I see the petals, the bright red, a spiral shape in the center bloom, and its scent. In Husserl’s terms, you are intuitively grasping the eidos, or the essential “roseness” as it presents itself in this concrete lived experience, but not yet a general category. The second mode of thought is general abstract concepts used in everyday routine identifying. I already know what a rose is—a stinking perennial plant of the genus Rosa, family Rosacea. I give roses to my wife when I'm in trouble (see, I'm projecting) and is classified as a symbol of love in many cultures. The rose is now subsumed under a general category stripped of all immediate details. The opposite of “immediate” here is “mediated,” meaning grasped through the a priori filters of history, language, and social structures rather than in a direct unthematized encounter. The two modes are very close, so close that Adorno claims Husserl's “essence perception” fails to preserve the immediate particular and falls back into general abstraction. Husserl's notion of the rose just becomes another generalized essence lacking the distinguishing nonidentical particular. Husserl begins with the particular but ends up creating a mirror image of abstractions which he sought to avoid. Philosophy must rediscover the lost particular.
At the Edge of the Concept: Philosophy’s Struggle to Embrace the Nonconceptual
Built into philosophy is the contradiction of attempting to “utter the unutterable,” making it a dialectical philosophy by default being stuck between its medium (concepts) and what goes beyond the concepts (nonidentical). A self-reflecting philosophy must confront this paradox, or contradiction. Philosophy's naïveté is that the concept can be transcended to discover the nonconceptual; otherwise, philosophy and the human mind would capitulate and abandoning the very possibility of knowing truth.
Reason’s Edge and the Dream of Cognitive Utopia
Adorno insists that philosophy must turn toward what it has traditionally “suppressed, disparaged, and discarded.” He is not dismissing the immediate experience that irrational philosophies may reject; rather, he advocates for a self-reflective use of these conceptual tools while recognizing their limitations. Adorno opposes Hegel's approach of subordinating all difference to a universal concept through the identity principle. Instead, Adorno seeks to create space for the nonconceptual. In his book, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (1846), Kierkegaard criticized the disregard for the individual within Hegel's scientific systemic totality. The title of the book itself serves as a critique of Hegel's system by indicating an unscientific and unsystematic philosophical fragment--the antithesis of an idealist's all-encompassing system. Kierkegaard is recognized as an important critic of Hegel, following only Marx.
Utopia:
from Greek οὐ
(ou,
“not”) + τόπος
(topos,
“place”) --literally
“no-place.”
“Utopia” was coined by Sir Thomas More as the title of his 1516 book describing
an ideal island society.
Logician Ludwig Wittgenstein was first exposed to Søren Kierkegaard’s philosophy through books sent to him by his sister, Margaret Stonborough-Wittgenstein, while he was serving on the front lines during World War I. Wittgenstein ends his book, “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921) with the mysterious Proposition 7: “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” For the Kierkegaardian scholar, Theodor Adorno, philosophy must not resolve the conflict between the concept and the nonconceptual. This philosophical ideal does not constitute a final synthesis but instead resists synthetic closure. Philosophy's attempt to go beyond itself creates an “antagonism” between the concept and nonconcept. Without faith in a cognitive utopia, all thought would become sterile. Consequently, philosophy represents a never-ending endeavor where concepts can act as keys to unlock their own repressing bindings and blinders and not confuse the concept with the really real.
I should note philosopher Ernest Bloch interprets utopian projection as a deep desire for liberation anticipating a non-teleological fulfillment of new possibilities for freedom. “Utopia” can also mean “possibility” in a dynamic ontology of becoming and is a necessary spiritual component for the revolutionary imagination to create a new paradigm of Being. This viewpoint is also very Kierkegaardian in spirit.
“The Antagonistic Entirety,” p. 10 – 11
Negative “dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things”—or of a false condition. Why is the condition false? The world is structured around contradictions and one-sided self-interests. Adorno highlights the inherent antagonism within any systemic totality that overshadows individual particulars, resulting in internal conflicts that widen the gap between concepts and facts, which is one of the four dichotomies he identifies. He critiques systematic approaches to dialectics, expressing concern about inadvertently reinforcing the identity thinking that these approaches aim to challenge (specifically the idea that concepts can fully encompass their objects) by steering clear of reestablishing the logic of the identity thesis (where the subject equals the object, and thought equals being). Adorno's critique of the identity thesis is also a social critique.
“...no philosophy can paste the particulars into the text...” (p. 11)
These contradictions are not merely propositional: they are materially grounded and shaped by historical and social coercive forces. Dialectics serves as a critique of idealism, which situates this conflict within the individual, but contradiction originates in the social-material world---not just in thought. The identity thesis influences social reasoning, functioning as a totalizing force that promotes false universalities behind a mask of reason about class structures and peoples. The subject embodies society, but its antagonistic structure can also enfeeble human beings rendering them as “unknowable and incapacitated” by establishing “identity by barter” which reduces individuals to the same denominator literally, and metaphorically. This essay reflects the utopian function of negative dialectical analysis and could bear the suitable title, “Ontology of a Damaged World: Why Dialectics Relates to an Incorrect State of Affairs.”
In his book, "Concluding Unscientific Postscript" (1846), Kierkegaard criticized the disregard for the individual within Hegel's scientific systemic totality. The title of his book itself serves as a critique of Hegel's system by indicating an unscientific and unsystematic philosophical fragment--the very antithesis of an idealist's all-encompassing system.
...to continue with the next essay, “Disenchantment of the Concept.”
