3 - Adorno and logic

Summary

Introduction

Adorno and logic might seem to be a combination as unpromising as Nietzsche and democracy, or Sartre and Hinduism. Adorno has no logic in the sense of a theory of valid forms of argument and inference. He is also deeply hostile to any attempt to formalize thinking because, he believes, formal thinking disguises the complexities and ambiguities inherent in any subject-matter, making it impossible to reflect on them (CM: 245–6). To encourage genuinely reflective thought, Adorno writes in a fragmentary and allusive style far removed from the logically formalized style of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy.

Yet Adorno does engage with an alternative tradition in logic which Kant and Hegel developed. Kant's transcendental logic studies the basic concepts – such as reality and causality – by which (Kant thinks) we structure our experience. Hegel transformed this transcendental logic into dialectical logic. Hegel's logic deeply influenced Adorno's approach to the study of socio-historical phenomena, especially his account of how enlightenment turns into its opposite, myth. But Adorno also criticizes Hegel, transforming his dialectical logic into a negative dialectic. In its most general form, negative dialectics applies to relations between concepts and objects, or between what Adorno calls “identity thinking” and the “nonidentical”.

To understand Adorno's thinking about logic in this Kantian- Hegelian sense, we need to examine a cluster of concepts – those of negative dialectics, of concept and object, of identity and the nonidentical – as well as Adorno's concept of constellations which forms part of his account of negative dialectics.