In this paper I interrogate the actuality of Adorno’s concept of nature in the light of the contemporary environmental crisis. In particular, I try to understand what happens to the critical force of Adorno’s concept of nature if we accept that a decisive turn has been taken in the domination of nature. I articulate two key aspects of Adorno’s critical theory that I think are important resources for thinking in a time of potential environmental catastrophe, which are the themes of (...) a dialectical understanding of reason and nature and the theme of “lifeless life.” I then question whether two key mediating concepts in Adorno’s dialectic, namely the concepts of self- reflection and self-preservation, need to be rethought. Finally, I consider how the concept of a reconciliation with nature, a concept central to the first generation of the Frankfurt school, can be thought anew in an era marked by ever increasing human domination of nature. (shrink)

The concept of natural history has received a great deal of attention in contemporary practical philosophy, especially as a result of Michael Thompson's concept of natural-historical judgments which aims to explain the normativity of the human life-form. With this concept, the norms effective in a life-form are understood as something natural and constitutive for that life-form. Although Thompson does not present a historical-philosophical model, he claims to be able to determine the normativity of the historically developing human life-form. By contrast, (...) Theodor W. Adorno developed his own concept of natural history on the one hand as an interpretative conceptual model of historical reality, on the other hand, to indicate the normativity of the natural-historical course of human history itself. The normativity of natural history that Adorno focuses on is historically and socially determined, in contrast to the categorically conceived natural normativity that is at the heart of Thompson's approach. This article analyses the similarities and differences between the two approaches in such a way that it becomes clear to what extent ethical naturalism also provides possibilities for critique that can be made fruitful for a critical theory inspired by Adorno. (shrink)

In this article, Herbert Marcuse’s nature-ethical considerations, which have to date been scarcely received, are used to develop perspectives on how the nature-ethical gap in contemporary Critical Theory could be closed. The central idea is that nature is tobe recognized as a subject in its own right without needing to anthropomorphize it in the process. The advocatory ethics of nature, which is outlined here, differs from current sustainability and environmental ethics primarily in that it maintains the tension between an anthropocentric (...) and an ecocentric approach and does not resolve it in one direction. Marcuse’s so-called “liberation of nature” is understood as a means for the “liberation of humans”, but the latter can only succeed if the former is also carried out. (shrink)

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