Progress and regression under the dialectic between the particular and the universal

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to confront Hegel’s conceptions of progress, based on Theodor Adorno’s rearrangement of the categories of particular and universal, that follow from Hegelians’s philosophy. The purpose is to expose Adorno’s criticism, formulated in the Negative Dialectic, to Hegel’s notion that the course of universal history is the effective realization of the progress of the world’s spirit in its particular figures. So, the particular and the universal will be taken as explanatory categories of the Adornian critique of the totality and systematicity, with the aim of relocating the particular within the dialectic by attributing to it the non-identity character and resistance to systematicity and coercive forms of totality; then, it will be to evoke Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history present in Adorno’s thought, so that, finally, one can support the hypothesis that the march of the spirit of the world is less consistent with progress, however, much more with the regression, which occurs as progress makes use of a narrative whose tendency is to obliterate violence and the domination of universal forces over the particular, by hiding the contradictions triggered in the context of the march of the history of the spirit of the world.