Notes on the idea of natural history, or on the calvary of the absolut spirit

Abstract

Abstract: This paper examines Adorno's essay Idee der Naturgeschichte (1932). Its goal is to elucidate his main theses and to delimitate the problem of the philosophy of history from an Adornian perspective. The work is part of the author's academic efforts to map the main phases of Adorno's thinking, present in his doctoral thesis. Adorno's interest in the philosophy of history has intensified, taking almost two decades of reflections, culminating in the publication of Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), a project executed at four hands with Horkheimer. The paper presents then the origins of the concept of natural history, the way in which Adorno criticizes the mystification of the perception of nature operated by the Heideggerian fundamental ontology, the concept of history as nature in Lukács and the concept of nature as history in Benjamin. In addition, it offers an interpretation of the idea of natural history of Adorno from the notion of appearance. The hypothesis that guides this investigation is that, in Adorno’s work, the natural history is thought from a moral theological category, the one of Calvary. Thus Adorno's dialectical reading of the problem of the relation between history and nature leads him to think of natural history itself as the ordeal of the absolute spirit.