A Changed Concept of Dialectic

Abstract

For Marx, and many later Marxists, the critique of philosophy was equally the critique of society. This was not accomplished by relating the claims of philosophy to their social origin and thereby undermining their validity in a relativist fashion, but by demonstrating that the philosophy in question was wrong: self-contradictory, fundamentally inconsistent or antinomical and thus inherently self-defeating. A new notion of theory as the analysis of society was developed and the relation between philosophy as theory and philosophy as a form of practice defined. Adorno took this task upon himself, seeking to show that philosophy is impossible but essential — as theory — but that even as theory of society, it is bound to be self-defeating.¹