Introduction

Summary

[I]t would be up to thought to see all nature, and whatever would install itself as such, as history, and all history as nature.

Theodor W. Adorno (ND 359)

Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Theodor W. Adorno criticized our destructive and self-destructive relation to nature with the ultimate aim of reshaping that relationship in more mutually beneficial ways. His criticisms originally appeared in a 1932 essay, “The Idea of Natural-History”, where he advanced the project of showing that human history is always also natural history and that non-human nature is entwined with history. This project informs all Adorno's work, including Negative Dialectics and the unfinished, posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. The idea of natural history provides the template for interpretive practice in philosophy: philosophical interpretation “means reading nature from history and history from nature” (HF 134). Philosophy is tasked with demonstrating that human history is linked inextricably to both our own internal, instinctual, nature and non-human nature. But philosophy also shows that nature is historical, not just because nature evolves and constantly changes, but because it has been profoundly – often negatively – affected by human history. Adorno's idea of natural history reveals the dynamic, and potentially catastrophic, interaction between nature and history.

When philosophy reads nature from history, the idea of natural history becomes “the canon of interpretation for philosophers of history” (ND 359; see also HF 125).