Adorno on Nature

Deborah Cook

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317548034
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems.

CHAPTER ONE

CRITICAL MATERIALISM

Adorno’s work has been variously described as Nietzschean, Weberian, Hegelian, idealist, Marxist and materialist.¹ With equal frequency, commentators have excluded Adorno from one or the other of these camps. So, for example, Stephen Bronner argues that Adorno’s work has nothing to do with materialism “unless that concept is configured in the most abstract terms” (1996: 186–7). Some Italian Marxists were even more critical than Bronner, excoriating Adorno as a romantic idealist. This is certainly true of Lucio Colletti, who, as Perry Anderson observes, soundly denounced Adorno (and others as well) for his allegedly Hegelian rejection of materialism (1976: 70). This charge reappears in a different form in Sebastiano Timpanaro’s influential On Materialism (1975). Among other things, Timpanaro objects that the Frankfurt School as a whole has an “antimaterialist, anti-Enlightenment, anti-jacobin orientation”. All the school’s theorists are pessimistic thinkers who “end up in, or at least tend towards, more or less explicitly religious positions” (ibid.: 19).

These barbed criticisms contradict Adorno’s own description of his work as materialist in orientation. Although he would reject Timpanaro’s claim that a materialist would never reduce experience to a “reciprocal implication of subject and object”, Adorno advances a version of materialism that agrees in part with Timpanaro’s view that materialism involves “above all acknowledgement of the priority of nature over ‘mind’” (ibid.: 34). Furthermore, both Timpanaro and Adorno acknowledge their debts to Marx. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno cites the same passage from the preface to Capital that Timpanaro endorses in his discussion of materialism. On Timpanaro’s interpretation, this passage shows that the later Marx was a materialist because he gave priority to physical and biological nature. The passage reads:

My standpoint, from which the development of the economic formation of society is viewed as a process of natural history [als ein naturgeschichtlichen Prozeß²], can less than any other make the individual responsible for relations whose creature he remains, socially speaking, however much he may subjectively raise himself above them.

(Marx 1976a: 92; cited in part in Timpanaro 1975: 41)

Yet Adorno’s gloss on this passage differs significantly from that of Timpanaro, who neglects to cite the second part of the sentence (“can less than any other …”). Adorno not only cites the entire sentence, but also (albeit elliptically) the five sentences that precede it, and interprets Marx’s reference to natural history as a reference to second – rather than to “first”, or physical and biological – nature. To bolster this interpretation, Adorno cites a later passage from Capital where Marx declared that “’the law of capitalist accumulation … has been mystified into a law of nature’” (ND 354).³ In fact, Adorno agrees with Marx: capitalism now appears in the guise of second nature because it seems to be governed by natural, immutable laws. Owing to this mystification, anything that might be deemed first nature has been masked or concealed. For bourgeois consciousness, “nothing appears to exist outside any more; in a certain sense there actually is nothing outside any more, nothing unaffected by mediation, which is total”. As a result, the distance between human history and nature only continues to grow (ND 357–8).

Adopting Marx’s critique of capitalism as second nature, Adorno also shares his interest in exploring the role of first nature in human history. Here, too, his reading of Marx differs significantly from Timpanaro’s. For Adorno would contest Timpanaro’s claim that “Marxism, especially in its first phase (up to and including The German Ideology), is not materialism proper” because the early Marx believed that first nature constitutes “more a prehistorical antecedent to human history than a reality which still limits and conditions human beings” (Timpanaro 1975: 40–41, trans. mod.). Citing a passage from The German Ideology, Adorno declares that the early Marx emphasized the unending entwinement of nature and history “with an extremist vigor bound to irritate dogmatic materialists” (ND 358). According to Marx:

We know only a single science, the science of history. History can be conceived from two sides, divided into the history of nature and the history of humankind. Yet there is no separating the two sides; as long as human beings exist, natural and human history will qualify each other.

(Marx & Engels 1976: 28)

Adorno follows this quotation with the assertion that the traditional antithesis between nature and history is true in one respect and false in another. The antithesis is “true insofar as it expresses what happened to the natural element” – namely that first nature has been occluded to such a degree that what now appears to be natural is actually social in character. However, the antithesis is false to the extent that “it apologetically repeats the concealment of history’s natural growth by history itself” (ND 358).

Since history has masked its own entwinement with nature, our understanding of ourselves is seriously flawed. Adorno wants to correct this flawed self-understanding by employing negative dialectics “to break through the fallacy [Trug] of constitutive subjectivity” (ND xx), or the illusory view (which takes different forms) that mind, or spirit, constitutes nature. In setting himself this task, Adorno again follows Marx. For once Marx drew “the line between historical materialism and the popular metaphysical kind”, historical materialism became “the critique of idealism in its entirety, and of the reality for which idealism opts by distorting it” (ND 197). A critique of the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity would show that the mind is not primary. Indeed, on Adorno’s reading, Hegel himself derived self-conscious mind from matter. Hypostatizing the mind, Hegel was nonetheless barely able to conceal the origin of the “I” in the “Not-I”. Even for Hegel, mind (Geist) ultimately originates “in the real life process, in the law of the survival of the species, of providing it with nutrients” (ND 198). Moreover, these survival imperatives, which shape our relationships with organic and inorganic nature, are in turn embedded in, and shaped by, the capitalist mode of production with its instrumental and exploitative relation to nature.

These ideas will be explored here. Chapter 1 begins by exploring Adorno’s thesis about the primacy (Vorrang), or preponderance, of the object. This discussion of the preponderance of nature and society, of first and second nature, over individuals will provide the philosophical framework for understanding Adorno’s idea of natural history. If, as Marx insists in The German Ideology, it is not possible to separate nature from history or history from nature, the following section of this chapter will show that the idea of natural history supplements Adorno’s thesis about the preponderance of first and second nature over human life by emphasizing their dynamic interaction. After examining Adorno’s account of the imbrication of nature and history, the chapter will end by exploring the salient features of Adorno’s materialism. Among other things, I shall argue that Adorno’s unique version of materialism can accommodate his unwavering commitment to emancipation and freedom.

PASSAGE TO MATERIALISM

In a section of Negative Dialectics called “Passage to Materialism”, Adorno asserts: “It is by passing to the object’s preponderance that dialectics is rendered materialistic” (ND 192). Borrowing a phrase from Peter Strawson, Ståle Finke believes that Adorno’s thesis about the preponderance of the object refers to “the weighty sense of an object of experience – and its extra-conceptual status” (2004: 127 n.17).⁴ Finke’s interpretation is correct as far as it goes, but Adorno’s thesis does not simply mean that objects are extra-conceptual. Specifically, objects are weighty owing to their materiality; the preponderance of the object implies that matter (Stoff, Materie) preponderates over mind. This preponderance can be grasped subjectively by reflecting on our experience (ND 185), but Adorno also complains that, when a thing becomes an object of cognition, “its physical side is spiritualized [vergeistigt] from the outset by translation into epistemology” (ND 192). Rejecting such spiritualization, Adorno wants to do justice to things by disclosing those aspects of them that are not identical with concepts. These non-identical aspects “show up as matter, or as inseparably fused with material things” (ND 193).

Frustratingly, perhaps, Adorno never provides a full-blown account of matter. In his own defence, however, he contends that it is not possible to provide such an account because matter is always also mediated by mind, material objects by concepts. As he explains in his lectures on metaphysics, the “peculiarity of the concept of ϋλη, or matter, is that we are here using a concept … which, by its meaning, refers to something which is not a concept or a principle”. Warning against hypostatizing the concepts that refer to matter, Adorno concedes that we invariably find ourselves captive “in the prison of language”. Yet he also insists that we can at least “recognize it as a prison” (2001b: 67–8 passim). His thesis about the preponderance of the object elucidates this prison metaphor because it entails that material objects are distinct from, and not fully accessible to, the concepts (and practical activities) we use to apprehend them.

Adorno makes a related point when he criticizes Kant’s concepts of form and content. The mediation of form by content and of content by form must be differently weighted because the forms (concepts and categories) of thought are “essentially mediated by contents and cannot be conceived at all in their absence”, whereas the content always contains “a reference to something that is not fully coextensive with form and cannot be fully reduced to it” (KCPR 233).⁵ Accordingly, the object’s preponderance further entails that concepts themselves are “infiltrated” with a material, or natural element. Concepts not only refer to non-conceptual, material particulars (ND 11), but also emerge in historically situated and conditioned encounters with them. Concepts are “entwined with a nonconceptual whole” because what survives in them by dint of their meaning (Bedeutung) is their non-conceptual conveyance or transmission (Vermitteltsein) under specific historical conditions.⁶ In turn, this historically generated meaning “establishes the conceptuality of concepts”, including our concept of nature. But, while concepts always require “nonconceptual, deictic elements”, they often pass themselves off as constitutive of things. To counter the mistaken idea that concepts constitute objects, Adorno urges us to recognize “the constitutive character of the nonconceptual in the concept”. This recognition would have the salutary effect of stemming “the compulsive identification which the concept effects unless halted by such reflection” (ND 12).

On this point, however, it is important to avoid misunderstanding. For Adorno does recognize that nature will always be socially constructed (to use a contentious phrase, the corrective to which lies in Ian Hacking’s [1999] question: the social construction of what?). Indeed, Adorno does not seek to forego mediation, as some critics, including Jürgen Habermas (1984: 382ff.), have mistakenly charged. What concerns Adorno is not the mere fact that nature is socially mediated, but rather the ways in which nature has historically been mediated. In his critique of the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity, Adorno objects to the prevailing form of conceptual mediation – the blind and compulsive subsumption of particular objects under universal concepts – because this identitarian use of concepts indicates only what nature “falls under, what it exemplifies or represents, and what, accordingly, it is not itself” (ND 149).

The preponderance of the object also implies that the cognizing subject is itself a material object. It is not necessarily “part of the meaning of objectivity to be a subject”, but it is part of the meaning of subjectivity to be an object. Concept formation presupposes material particulars, and there is a decidedly material, objective dimension to the subjects who wield concepts as well (ND 183). Experience involves the encounter of a corporeal subject with equally material, physical things. Indeed, experience would not be possible if the subject did not belong “a priori to the same sphere as the given thing” (ND 196). The cognizing subject can experience things only because it is not radically other than them. Another reason why Adorno rejects the “supremacy of thinking over its otherness” – or the fallacy of constitutive subjectivity – is because mind is always “otherness already, within itself” (ND 201). As Adorno argues in “On Subject and Object”, “No matter how the subject is defined, existent being [Seiendes] cannot be conjured away from it”. Objects are not “so thoroughly dependent upon subject as subject is dependent upon objectivity” (SO 249–50).⁷

By emphasizing the materiality of the subject and the material ground of its concepts, Adorno underscores the resemblance between subject and object. He elaborates on this idea of the fundamental resemblance or likeness between subject and object qua material, physical, when he remarks, in his discussion of the concept of causality, on the affinity (Affinität) between them (ND 270). Here he asserts that causality is “nothing but the natural growth [Naturwüchsigkeit] of individuals, which they continue as control of nature” (ND 269). Our use of this concept to apprehend the natural world makes manifest our own natural growth because it has been driven by instinct.⁸ A related point was made earlier: when we impose the concept of causality upon a material content, we are driven by a compulsion to identify objects with our causal conceptions of them. As Chapter 3 will explain in more detail, our use of concepts such as causality reveals our own affinity with nature because it has been driven by survival imperatives (ND 234).

Bernstein contends that Adorno’s idea of affinity “represents the indeterminate idea of our immersion in and being parts of nature”. He also notes that Adorno employs the word as though affinity were at one and the same time already established and yet to be achieved. Adorno expresses himself in this way in order to “halt an identitarian employment of our relation to nature”, or to suggest that our affinity with nature has not yet been fully instantiated (2001: 291). Despite our de facto affinity with nature, we are largely unaware of this affinity because we have historically regarded ourselves as radically distinct from nature. We neither fully experience nor understand ourselves as natural – material, physical – because, among other things, we have not yet taken the full measure of the extent to which our behaviour and activity – both practical and theoretical – have been, and continue to be, instinctually driven. We therefore fail to respect the heterogeneous character of nature, including our own.

It may appear contradictory to refer to the heterogeneous character of nature in the context of discussing our affinity with the natural world. But to acknowledge our affinity with nature by no means implies that we are fully identical with it. “To be a mind at all”, Adorno argues, the thinking subject “must know that what it touches upon does not exhaust it, that the finiteness that is its like does not exhaust it” (ND 392). Concepts too are heterogeneous with respect to objects. Emerging in our material encounters with non-conceptual things, concepts are subjective constructs rather than objective entities; abstract determinations, not concrete properties; universal, not particular. Abstract universality, which allows concepts to designate a class or category of non-conceptual particulars, is obviously a distinctive feature of concepts.

Although a particular thing is not “definable without the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Critical materialism
• 2. Nature, red in tooth and claw
• 3. Thought thinking itself
• 4. Adorno's endgame
• 5. Adorno and radical ecology
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index