428 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
theory.’^81 The process of unregimented experience should be continued
in the form of interpretation, for interpretation is able to penetrate
the façade of appearances by means of conceptual reflection. It is ‘the
attempt to make experience, the process of wanting to express some-
thing... , binding, to give it objectivity.’^82 To make something binding
means the formation of a theory which represents the culmination of
the unity of concept and thing.
Elsewhere, Adorno had defined the relation of theory to experience
as comparable to that of a person to the bread he eats: theory lives on
experience as an eater lives on bread: ‘Theory is consumed by thought,
thought lives on theory and theory vanishes into thought at the same
time.’^83 Adorno was convinced that the tools of methodology point our
attention in a fixed direction from the outset and thus lead us to a
specific but distorting point of view. This was the dilemma that Adorno
hoped to resolve through his own approach. Its point lay in ‘passively
and without fear trusting oneself to one’s own experience’.^84 This trust
in our own experience does not absolve us from intellectual exertion.
‘But this intellectual exertion is predominantly the destruction of its
usual exertion, of its using violence towards the object.’^85 Truth, accord-
ing to Adorno, does not lie ‘in fitting propositions... to data that
happen to be given’, but in the element of expression, that is, in saying
what ‘the world reveals to us’. The validity of what the world so reveals
is to be gauged by the criterion of the evidence. Given the objective
nature of reality, the process of cognition can only be painful since it is
a matter of accounting for the absurdity of the world while remaining
conscious of the possibility of a life lived rightly.^86 He did not succeed
in formulating this idea satisfactorily until his philosophical magnum
opus, the Negative Dialectics: ‘The need to lend suffering a voice is
a condition of all truth. For suffering is objectivity that weighs upon
the subject; its most subjective experience, its expression, is objectively
conveyed.’^87
Because society is both rational in its means and irrational in its ends,
the criterion of non-contradiction cannot be maintained for the objects
of sociological knowledge. The science of society must live with the
paradox that the object of its gaze is both comprehensible and incom-
prehensible at the same time. It is comprehensible because it deals
with human beings who enter into relations with one another; incom-
prehensible because these human beings are subject to the abstract rule
of the universal laws of exchange. This, Adorno believes, is what gives
rise to the dual character of sociology. Its field of investigation is both
subjective and objective. It is subjective inasmuch as social relations
are reducible to relations between human subjects. Society is objective,
however, as a structured entity, a systemic totality in which human
subjects are perforce integrated.
When Adorno undertook to refine this conception of a critical socio-
logy within the framework of his introduction and his lecture course, he