抄録
Decades before the so-called "ecological issues" came up to the fore, Th.W. Adorno and his colleagues paid serious attention to the destructive relation of human beings to the nature. In spite of their deep interest in the thought of K. Marx, they did not reduce its cause to the matter of mode of production. They also rejected the idea of "return to nature" in spite of the influence of romanticism on their thought. That is, they pursued the way of emancipation from the dominative as well as subordinate relation of human beings to the nature. This paper focuses on Adorno's idea of "Naturgeschichte" (natural history) which is one of bases of this highly requested and currently meaningful enquiry.
I firstly argue that Adorno's idea of "Naturgeschichte" has two aspects in his terminology. On the one hand, "Naturgeschichte" functions as a critical description of human history. In this description human history appears as a blindly compulsive, namely, naturally growing (naturwüchsig) process. Such an idea was formed through Adorno's own interpretation of Marx. On the other hand, "Naturgeschichte" refers to the reconciliation (Versöhnung), that is, a possibility of fleeing from the dominative or subordinate relation of human beings to the nature. What is the correlation of these two aspects which are apparently incompatible? I consider this question by way of reexamining the ideas of G. Lukács and W. Benjamin that Adorno attempts to synthesize. He suggests the conception of deciphering the "second nature" which appears stiff and compulsive but is a historically produced world, as a "transitory (vergänglich) nature", hence, a variable moment.
I conclude that Adorno's aim lies at the emancipation from ideas which stiffen the process by positing either nature or history as the first principle. This is the emancipation not only from "the ideology of subordination to the nature" (an ideology shared by Hegel, social Darwinism and the so-called Dialectical Materialism), but also from "the ideology of domination over the nature" (Marx).
