Bringing Nature Back In

The ethical impulse of Adorno's thinking, what it is to think the world as disenchanted, is fundamentally oriented by remorse, the need to make restitution, to repair the damage done, to seek reconciliation, to make amends. Only that backward-looking impulse, when elaborated, can do justice to the present in a manner that would redeem the hopes of the past. Before I can give substance to this ethical impulse (I conclude this chapter with an account of it), I must begin making amends for leaving out of account a major item in Adorno's argument: the role of nature. In a manner that is difficult to provide with conceptual clarity, Adorno consistently reads the dualisms implied in the Kantian contrast of concepts with intuitions - form and matter, universal and particular, spontaneity and passivity – as themselves darkly mirroring, in an epistemological register, the more fundamental duality of culture and nature. For Adorno and Horkheimer, rationalization desocializes nature (disenchantment) and denatures society, which is the explanation for society itself becoming desocialized, that is, an iron cage dominating persons.