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).

The radical ecologists discussed in Chapter 5 emphasize the unity of nature to the detriment of its diversity. Naess may have conceded that we can debate the nature and limits of the unity of life on this planet, but it is a central tenet of Ecosophy T that life is fundamentally one (1989: 166). Bookchin stressed the unity of nature as well; he gave this idea a Hegelian twist when he argued that nature's unity takes the form of a latent subjectivity that “expresses itself in various gradations, not only as the mentalism of reason, but also as the interactivity, reactivity, and the growing purposive activity of forms” (1991a: 275). And, while Merchant claims that her ethics recognizes both the continuities and the differences between human beings and the rest of the natural world (2003: 217), she views human and non-human nature as identical when she treats them as partners. When she endorses Bohm's process physics, which grounds animate and inanimate matter in the holomovement (ibid.: 209), Merchant again champions unity over diversity.

Adorno recognizes that the damage we have inflicted on nature has been extensive, and predicts that it could assume catastrophic proportions if we continue to behave as we do now: as rapaciously acquisitive creatures whose survival instincts are veering so far out of control that we are now destroying not just what we are trying to preserve but need to survive. What we call progress is forcing hundreds of millions of people to renounce the satisfaction of their needs to the point where they suffer horribly from malnutrition, starvation and preventable diseases. In less severe cases, we are forfeiting far richer, more materially and spiritually fulfilling, lives because mere survival remains our primary goal. For its part, non-human nature lies in ruins because we have imposed goals and purposes on it that are far different from those that it would adopt independently. We have ignored and suppressed nature's autotelic powers.

The looming prospect of environmental catastrophe – the extinction of all life on this planet – now acts as a powerful stimulus to thinking about the changes that must be implemented to ensure the survival of human and non-human nature. As Adorno argues throughout his work, our current idea of progress – the progressive domination of nature – is incompatible with a more emancipated form of progress in which human beings would reconcile themselves with nature (HF 151).

Adorno ventured the claim that the entire programme of Western philosophy consists in self-reflection: “philosophy in general has been the implementation of just this νóησις υοήσεως that he [Aristotle] ascribes to the divine principle as the primal image of all philosophy” (MCP 94–5). He repeats this claim in his lectures on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason: “philosophy is really a matter of ‘thinking on thinking’, as Aristotle defined it” (KCPR 82). But if self-reflection has been the lifeblood of philosophy, Adorno insists that it is not an end in itself. Denouncing Western reason because it effectively condemns thought to thinking itself, he argued that, to escape the sphere of immanence, of narcissistic navel-gazing, thought must become self-critical. He stressed the need for critical self-reflection throughout his work, and dignified it with the name “metaphysics”. Metaphysics should not limit itself to the “self-reflection of thought and of the pure forms of thought”. As self-critical, metaphysics must question the tacit, unexamined “thesis of the whole metaphysical tradition”, namely “whether thought and its constitutive forms are in fact the absolute” (MCP 99).

Metaphysics must question whether, and to what extent, thought can transcend the sphere of concepts to grasp objects. Although philosophy's confidence in its ability to transcend concepts is as “doubtful as ever”, it is both one of philosophy's “inalienable features and part of the naïveté that ails it”.

Indissolubly entwined, nature and history preponderate over individuals and their cognitive activity. Nature preponderates over cognition because our cognitive faculties serve primarily as instruments of adaptation to the natural world. Our concepts themselves are tied to non-conceptual reality; they emerge and develop in our embodied encounters with material objects (ND 11). By extension, nature preponderates over individuals as corporeal beings, driven by instinct and need. Now as in the past, self-preservation runs wild, and reason ends by regressing to nature (ND 289). For its part, history preponderates over cognition, not just because our concepts are intersubjectively sustained constructs with socially conditioned and sedimented histories, but because – as Adorno often put it – individuals are imprisoned in prevailing modes of thought. Finally, this chapter will show that late capitalist society preponderates because it shapes the process of individuation, ensures the material survival of individuals and defines their relation to nature as members of the labour force.

Under the monopoly conditions that characterize late capitalism, individuals stand in much the same relation to society as particulars stand to universal concepts. Adorno suggests this throughout his work when he refers to society as the “universal”. Where identity thinking summarily subsumes objects under concepts, society reifies individuals, expunging their idiosyncrasies by subsuming them under abstract exchange relations. Adorno emphasizes the isomorphism between identity thinking and exchange relations when he observes that exchange is “fundamentally akin to the principle of identification” because it serves as the “social model” for this principle.

Marx famously asserted that life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life (Marx & Engels 1970: 47). On the orthodox interpretation of this assertion, Marx meant that socioeconomic conditions causally determine what Georg Lukács later called forms of objectivity or thought. Objecting to this interpretation, which implies that all consciousness is false – or ideologically distorted – consciousness, Adorno argues that “the definition of consciousness in terms of being has become a means of dispensing with all consciousness which does not conform to existence” (1967c: 29). When interpreted in a strictly deterministic fashion, Marx's distinction between base and superstructure was used repressively (in the former Soviet Union, for example) to undermine criticism by suggesting that it is impossible to think beyond the given. Against orthodox Marxism, Adorno wants to rescue the “baby” of criticism from the “bathwater” of false consciousness. To denounce all culture as false consciousness would wrongly extirpate “with the false, all that was true also, all that, however impotently, strives to escape the confines of universal practice, every chimerical anticipation of a nobler condition”, thereby bringing about “directly the barbarism that culture is reproached with furthering indirectly” (MM 44).

In Negative Dialectics, however, Adorno gives Marx's claim about the priority of the material life process over consciousness a more positive reading. This claim should not be read as “metaphysics in reverse”, that is, as though it authorized the reduction of consciousness to being, because Marx was primarily criticizing the “delusion that mind … lies beyond the total process in which it finds itself as a moment” (ND 200).

Adorno's work has been variously described as Nietzschean, Weberian, Hegelian, idealist, Marxist and materialist. 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.