International Journal of Philosophical Studies

ISSN: 0967-2559 (Print) 1466-4542 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riph20

Understanding Adorno on ‘Natural-History’

Tom Whyman

To cite this article: Tom Whyman (2016): Understanding Adorno on ‘Natural-History’,

International Journal of Philosophical Studies, DOI: 10.1080/09672559.2016.1206604

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Published online: 26 Jul 2016.

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 International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 2016
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09672559.2016.1206604

Understanding Adorno on ‘Natural-History’

Tom Whyman
University of Essex, UK

ABSTRACT
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‘Natural-History’ is one of the key concepts in the thought of the Frankfurt School
critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, appearing from his very earliest work through
to his very last. Unfortunately, the existing literature provides little illumination as
to what Adorno’s concept of natural-history is, or what it is supposed to do. This
paper thus seeks to supply the required understanding. Ultimately, I argue that
‘natural-history’ is best understood as a sort of ‘therapeutic’ concept, intended to
dissolve certain philosophical anxieties which might otherwise present obstacles
to our being able to obtain a critical-theoretical understanding of reality.

KEYWORDS  Adorno; critical theory; Walter Benjamin; philosophy of nature; philosophy of history

1. Introduction
We can identify a general consensus in the literature surrounding Adorno’s
concept of ‘natural-history’. Unfortunately, this consensus is: that no-one quite
understands it. For instance, Max Pensky (2004, 227) claims that natural-history
is ‘surely a candidate for the most troubling and resistant theoretical element of
Theodor Adorno’s intellectual legacy’. Meanwhile Susan Buck-Morss (1977, 53)
claims that the 1932 essay in which Adorno first presents the concept represents
him ‘at his most obscure’. Robert Hullot-Kentor (2006, 238) goes still further,
describing the essay as ‘awkwardly constructed, at points repetitive, at others
opaquely desultory’.
This is unfortunate, since natural-history is one of the key concepts in
Adorno’s thought, appearing from his very earliest work (the aforementioned
1932 essay; his 1933 monograph on Kierkegaard) through to his very last
(Model II of Negative Dialectics; the 1964–65 History and Freedom lectures;
the chapter in Aesthetic Theory on ‘Natural Beauty’). Understanding this con-
cept is, thus, of real importance for understanding Adorno’s philosophy as a

CONTACT  Tom Whyman  twwhym@essex.ac.uk

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 2    T. Whyman

whole – and, given that it is particularly decisive for his account of nature, this
goes double if one reads Adorno as a sort of naturalist (see Freyenhagen 2013).1
Moreover, Adorno is a thinker who has interesting things to say about nature
which arguably hold independently of the context of his thought. Given our
present era of environmental crisis, there may indeed be a politically vital ele-
ment to this: Deborah Cook (2011) draws out this aspect of Adorno with ref-
erence to contemporary ecological thought. In a quite different way, Hans Fink
(2008) hints at a relation between Adorno’s thinking about nature and that of
Wittgenstein, Dewey, and John McDowell. This can likewise connect Adorno’s
concept of natural-history to contemporary trends in ethical naturalism.
This paper, then, attempts to supply the required understanding of Adorno’s
concept of natural-history. It does so primarily by examining the 1932 essay,
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entitled ‘The Idea of Natural-History’ (Adorno 2006a), offering a close reading

of the text oriented towards the problems which (I argue) it is trying to solve.
I also bring in passages from Adorno’s later work on the concept, in particular
some pregnant remarks from the aforementioned History and Freedom lec-
tures (Adorno 2006b). Ultimately, I will claim that we can make best sense of
Adorno’s concept of natural-history by understanding it to serve an essentially
therapeutic function, in the context of the critical-theoretical interpretation of
reality.

2.  The Problem of Natural-History

I’m going to start my investigation by orienting my reading of Adorno’s concept
of natural-history towards the problems it is meant to solve, and towards the
function it is meant to perform. It is my view that natural-history is intended to
address a series of related problems (what in Adornian jargon might be referred
to as a ‘constellation’ of problems), which can only really be understood when
taken together. I’m going to start out articulating this constellation of problems
by presenting four quotes, from two texts:
The real intention here [in this essay] is to dialectically overcome the usual antith-
esis of nature and history. (Adorno 2006a, 252)
If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it
only offers any chance of a solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being
in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural
being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it seems
to rest most deeply in itself as nature. (Adorno 2006a, 260: emphasis in original)
What you will discover in this programme [of natural-history] … is the transmu-
tation of metaphysics into history. It secularizes metaphysics into the ultimately
category of secularity, that of decay. (Adorno 2006b, 126)
If you reflect on what I have said to you about philosophical interpretation, you
will perhaps be able to see why I have placed such great emphasis upon the theory
of natural history. It is because this interweaving of nature and history must in
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   3

general be the model [Modell] for every interpretive procedure in philosophy. We

might almost say that it provides the canon [Kanon] that enables philosophy to
adopt an interpretative stance without lapsing into pure randomness. (Adorno
2006b, 133)
At first pass then, these four passages would suggest that Adorno’s concept
of natural-history is intended to do (at least) three distinct things. Firstly, it is
supposed to allow us to solve the problem of the relation of nature and history,
by comprehending historical being as natural being, and nature as (likewise)
historical being. Secondly, it is intended to ‘secularise’ metaphysics into the
category of ‘decay’. And thirdly, it is supposed to act as a sort of ‘model’ for the
interpretation of reality whilst avoiding any lapse into ‘pure randomness’. But
of course, we are not yet in a position to say what any of this exactly means. So
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I’m going to attempt an explication.

In Hullot-Kentor’s (2006, 242) ‘Introduction’ to the 1932 essay, he interprets
its problem as that of ‘historicist relativism’: that is, the problem that historical-
ly-formed meaning might lack a ‘material’ basis in nature. Hence, this problem
is ultimately that of the interweaving of nature and history: unless the two can
be seen to be robustly linked in some way, historical change cannot be consid-
ered genuinely meaningful. The threat here is that all historical change might
just be nothing more than a random procession of ‘stuff that happens’ for no
particular reason, or with no comprehensible causal determinacy. If this were
the case, then history itself would not be the sort of thing that we (as thinkers)
could gain any sort of critical purchase on: significantly, we could not do any-
thing to help understand or avert the sort of great destructive events that beset
us throughout history.2 The thought Adorno appears to have is that: if we were
to bring ourselves around to seeing how historical events have a material basis
in nature, then we could avoid this threat of meaninglessness.
But of course, we must also be able to account for this historically-derived
meaning being, precisely, historical: if we cannot anticipate (at least some)
meaning as being genuinely historically (as opposed to ‘naturally’) formed,
we might find ourselves existing in a perfectly meaningful universe, but we
would be unable to account for the significance of historical change. This is
also something introduced as a threat in the 1932 essay: Adorno (2006a, 253)
defines ‘nature’ as ‘fatefully arranged predetermined being’. Hence if all his-
torical meaning was simply ‘natural’, then everything historical would get its
meaning, ultimately, by reference to something unchanging. What then, we
might ask, was the point of its being placed within history at all? We might as
well have done away with history altogether. History as such would be rendered
pointless and thus – again – we have a lapse into a sort of nihilism.
It is to this problem of historicist relativism which Adorno (2006a, 252)
appears to be referring when he states, in the opening paragraph of the 1932
essay, that he hopes to use it to ‘further develop the problems of the so-called
Frankfurt discussion’. According to Buck-Morss (1977, 53), this ‘Frankfurt
 4    T. Whyman

discussion’ was a debate on historicism which took place starting in the 1920s
between Max Scheler, Karl Mannheim, and Ernst Troeltsch.3
As Buck-Morss (1977) relates matters, Scheler and Troeltsch both wished to
affirm the existence of a ‘transcendental realm of truth and ethics, despite the
historical relativity of ideas’ (53). By contrast, Mannheim ‘totally [rejected] the
concept of a realm of eternal absolutes transcending history … hence denying
the possibility of an ontology of being’ (53). Even on these cursory descrip-
tions, we can see how either position might lapse into the problems already
discussed above. The Scheler-Troeltsch position appears to ground historical-
ly-formed meaning ahistorically, and thus is (potentially) unable to provide a
robust account of the significance of historical change. The Mannheim position
denies the existence of ahistorical meaning, and thus potentially fails to ground
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meaning in any way at all.

Adorno, for his part, was intuitively disposed towards Mannheim’s position:
indeed, Buck-Morss (1977, 53) is able to cite convincing textual sources which
suggest that Adorno was basically unmoved by relativism as a problem, i.e. that
he was unable to conceive of how affirming the historical relativity of ideas really
could empty them of meaning. Nevertheless, regardless of whether Adorno
himself is moved by the problem or not, he still needs some way of accounting for
the fact that getting rid of ahistorical essences won’t lead to relativistic nihilism.
Judging by what he says in the 1932 essay then, this seems like it is what the
concept of ‘natural-history’ is going to be invoked to secure.
We can see now how this problem of accounting for the interrelation of
history and nature – which was expressed in the first two quotes given at the
start of this section above – is related to Adorno’s assertion in the fourth quote
that natural-history is supposed to be able to provide us with a model for the
philosophical interpretation of reality that can avert a lapse into pure random-
ness. ‘Pure randomness’, here, would be pure historical relativism. On a purely
relativistic picture, it would of course be impossible to assume a meaningful
interpretative stance: since there would be nothing meaningful to interpret at
all. But equally, Adorno is suggesting, a static essentialism would likewise void
the possibility of the philosophical interpretation of reality.
Why is this? After all, couldn’t philosophical interpretation always pertain
to ahistorical essences: that is, couldn’t it be about reading them out of experi-
enced, historical reality? For Adorno, the answer has to be no. This is because
what he is really talking about here is not ‘philosophical interpretation’ in any
maximally broad sense but rather, the specifically critical-theoretical interpre-
tation of reality – and critical theory always has to be in some sense transform-
ative. Just think of Horkheimer’s definition of the Frankfurt School project in
his 1937 essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’: critical theory is the attempt
to critique society as a whole, with a specific emancipatory purpose. Hence,
whenever critical theory identifies something existent in reality that appears
to be exercising a coercive influence over us, it has to attempt to work out how
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   5

this thing might be made otherwise.4 And this, for Adorno, just is the point of
critical-theoretical interpretation:
interpretation leads us to break through … surface existence. The deepest prom-
ise interpretation makes to the mind is perhaps the assurance it gives that what
exists is not the ultimate reality – or perhaps we should say: what exists is not
just what it claims to be … In this sense, the interpretative stance in philosophy
is the prototype of a utopian stance towards thought. Interpretation in fact means
to become conscious of the traces of what points beyond mere existence – by
dint of criticism … and into the shortcomings and fallibility of mere existence.
(Adorno 2006b, 138)
Of course, one might still want to say that what Adorno is trying to do here is
entirely logically compatible with essentialism. For instance: it is most intui-
tive to think that when Adorno is talking about ‘surface existence’ here, he is
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really talking about a sort of existence which is socially formed. Adorno thinks
that presently-existing society and culture is radically wrong or false: it is this
existence that he wants to transform (see ‘Dedication’ in Adorno 2005, 15–18).
So then interpretation must be directed at how society might be otherwise: it
tells us how our present social world might be different. But this sort of social
transformation need not necessitate any alteration of the ultimate fabric of
reality! Indeed we might want to say that we can only really evaluate social-
ly-formed wrongness with reference to some ultimate picture of how reality
‘is’ and (hence) what society, as a result, ‘should’ be.
For Adorno however, this would not be a possibility. At one point in his
Lectures on Negative Dialectics, Adorno makes much of the motto with which,
decades earlier, he had prefaced his Metacritique of Epistemology: the fragment
from Epicharmus which states that ‘mortals must think mortal thoughts, and
not immortal ones’ (Adorno 2008a, 80). His point being, that – since it is done
by finite, cognitively limited beings – ‘if philosophy possesses anything at all,
then it can only be finite, and not infinite’ (80). When philosophy attempts to
do anything more than that – that is, to state something as it exists essentially
and ahistorically – this can only amount to thought’s ‘naïve hypostasis of its
own finiteness’ (80). That is: it is the mere representation of something finite
as something infinite. And, hence, such thought utterly fails to get beyond its
own finitude at all.
In short then, for Adorno, any form of critique that involves reference to
ahistorical essences could only fail to escape the presently-existing context of
social badness, since it would rely on the illegitimate representation of some one
aspect of that context as being untransformable. This is, likewise, why Adorno
is of the view that such attempts at thinking ‘the infinite’ end up being coercive.
Ahistorical critique – critique which proceeds in relation to something repre-
sented as infinite – is the form of ‘transcendent’ social criticism that Adorno
criticises heavily in his essay ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’. Adorno describes
this form of critique as having ‘an affinity to barbarism’, and claims that, in its
 6    T. Whyman

‘blanket rejection of culture’, it is forced to fall back upon an illegitimate ideal

of ‘naturalness’ and is hence ‘only a step’ away from ‘the official reinstatement
of culture’ (Adorno 1967, 31–32). Our ideal of naturalness, Adorno is argu-
ing, must have been derived from somewhere. And that somewhere is precisely
what we are supposed to be attempting, as critical theorists, to think critically
about. Representing some aspect of that somewhere as unchanging, perhaps
even unchangeable, is going to rig the process of critique from the start. This
is why transcendent social criticism always risks allying itself with oppressive
tendencies in our society and culture.
A similar thought is at the core of Adorno’s critique of what he calls ‘ontol-
ogy’. Adorno’s critique of ontology is something that occurs at a number of
points in his writings: for instance, it constitutes the primary subject matter of
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Part 1 of Negative Dialectics (Adorno 1973); likewise Adorno’s (2008b) 1960–61

lectures on Ontologie und Dialektik, which elaborate at length on themes from
this section of his magnum opus. But it is given perhaps its simplest statement in
Adorno’s lectures on Metaphysics, where it is related in an important way to the
critique of Aristotle which Adorno pursues in the first two thirds of that work.5
Adorno tends to use the word ‘ontology’ in a very specific and somewhat
idiosyncratic way. For him, ‘ontology’ describes any attempt to posit – as what
‘really’ exists – a realm of ahistorical, essential forms. This is for instance the
sort of project that, according to Adorno, Plato is involved in: for Adorno,
Plato’s thought is really just an attempt, conscious or not, to hypostatise social
reality as it appeared to wealthy members of the landowning aristocracy in
Ancient Athens (Adorno 2000, 15–19).6 The instinct behind ontology is in
part coercive: it is about setting up the heaven of Ideas as something that all
future thinking must, if it aspires to correctness, ultimately conform to. But
the ontological drive is also, in part, theological. Indeed, Adorno (2000, 18)
claims, the Platonic project ought to be seen as a kind of ‘secularisation of
theology’, turning ‘the gods into concepts’. This is probably the best light in
which what Adorno calls ontology can be seen: since, understood in this way,
ontology appears to represent a genuine historical advance – from a body of
thought (theology) which exercised a coercive power on thinking that was
irrational, to one that did so rationally. So at the very least, ontology coerces
our thinking in a way that exposes us to reasons: a shift from the force of the
sword, as it were, to the force of the better argument. The problem however is
that ontology does not just turn the gods into concepts; by placing them in the
Platonic heaven, it also serves, in a way, to turn the concepts into gods. So even
in its secularisation of theology, ontology problematically contains an irrational
‘theological residue’ at its core.
What Adorno calls ‘metaphysics’ develops from out of ontology: metaphysics
is born in the Aristotelian response to Plato (Adorno 2000, 18). The key differ-
ence – according to Adorno – is that whereas Plato is only really interested in
how the Idea exists in his heaven, Aristotle is interested in how it manifests itself
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   7

in the empirical, material world (Adorno 2000). In short then, metaphysics can
be seen as a further development in the process of the secularisation of thought
kick-started by ontology. For all this, however, metaphysics is, according to
Adorno, not yet sufficiently secular: this is because Aristotle ultimately retains
the primacy of the Idea over how things are in the material world. Aristotle
is, as Adorno reads him, primarily a thinker of how dynamic change is pos-
sible, but his account of change is always that of change towards how things
are in what is (essentially) the Platonic heaven; change towards an ‘unmoved
mover’ which remains eternally, forever the same (Adorno 2000, 39, 56, 87).
Hence Aristotelian metaphysics contains an ‘ontological’ residue within it, just
as ontology retains a residuum of ‘theology’.7
We are now in a position to understand the significance of the third quote
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given at the start of this section above. Adorno thinks that natural-history can
serve as a ‘secularisation’ of metaphysics. What this must mean is: natural-his-
torical thought is supposed to somehow represent the elimination of the residue
of ontology from philosophical thinking about (historical) change. It is worth
noting how close Adorno’s characterisation of Aristotle’s position seems to be to
one which has already been dismissed as unsatisfactory above: it is a version of
the position which attempts to account for historically-situated meaning with
reference to something eternal and unchanging, and hence (ultimately) fails
to account for said meaning’s historical dimension. Natural-history, ostensibly,
acts as a corrective to this.
Hence we can now see how all three points introduced at the start of this
section are related. Adorno wants to develop a coherent critical theory of soci-
ety and culture. Standing in the way of his doing this is the problem of the
relativity of all historically-derived meaning: critical theory needs a way of
accounting for the meaningfulness of historically contingent being, whilst also
allowing for the possibility that this meaning might change (indeed, that it can
be transformed, by critical thought). This problem can also be understood as
the problem of uniting nature and history. Standing in the way of its solution is
the philosophical heritage of ‘ontology’ and Aristotelian ‘metaphysics’: philoso-
phers are, according to Adorno, constantly tempted to follow these thinkers in
relating historically-derived meaning to something spuriously ‘infinite’, which
blocks possibilities for transformation. Natural-historical thought will, we must
suppose, remedy this temptation towards ontology by showing us how nature
and history really are (properly speaking) united, and this will likewise provide
us with a ‘model’ for the critical-theoretical interpretation of reality.
I will now explain, in the next three sections of this essay, how Adorno
invokes natural-history to achieve all of these things, in the context of his
1932 essay.
 8    T. Whyman

3.  Ontology and Metaphysics: from Heidegger to Lukács

In the 1932 essay, Adorno does not refer explicitly to this dialectic of secu-
larisation – from ontology, to metaphysics, to natural-history. Nevertheless,
it is my view that we can identify it as being present in the way that the essay
moves through three thinkers, all of whom Adorno highlights as attempting
a solution to the nature-history problematic: from Heidegger, to Lukács, and
finally to Benjamin.
Having introduced the problem of the relationship of nature and history
in the essay’s opening paragraphs, Adorno commences his investigation of
the possibility of solution, by invoking Heidegger and other thinkers (nota-
bly Scheler) whom he labels ‘neo-ontologists’ (Adorno 2006a, 253ff). Due to
the nature of their own project – this distinctively post-Husserlian attempt to
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demonstrate that objectivity can be grounded in certain fundamental structures

of subjectivity – the neo-ontologists find themselves subject to the problem
of natural-history: this is because our subjective consciousness is itself some-
thing which manifests historically; the fundamental ontology these thinkers
are developing is, hence, obliged to account for this fact. According to Adorno,
Scheler finds himself hopelessly adrift in this problem – this is part of the scope
of the ‘Frankfurt discussion’ described above. Heidegger’s distinctive contribu-
tion to the project, Adorno claims, consists in his attempt to address it.
According to Adorno, Heidegger’s solution to the problem of natural-history
consists in his attempt to re-describe the basic ontological structure of reality
as something marked by ‘historicity’. In short this means that Heidegger com-
mutes history itself into essential being. As Adorno (2006a, 256) puts things: in
Heidegger, ‘History itself, in its most extreme agitation, has become the basic
ontological structure’. ‘Historicity’ is, thus, ‘a fundamental quality of human
existence’ (256). This would purport to solve the problem, since it means that
there need be no gap between historically-formed thought, and the fundamen-
tal structure of being: the fundamental structure in question just is a historical
one. Hence being gets both its essence and its meaning, in and through history.
But Adorno is not impressed: he describes Heidegger’s solution to the
nature-history problem as ‘only an apparent’ one. This is because, Adorno
(2006a, 257; my emphasis) claims:
Even though history is acknowledged [by Heidegger] to be a fundamental phe-
nomenon, its ontological determinations or ontological interpretation is in vain
because it is transfigured directly into ontology. This is the case for Heidegger, for
whom history, understood as an all embracing structure of being, is equivalent
to his own ontology.
Hence, according to Adorno, Heidegger ontologises history, by transforming it
into the category of historicity. Historicity is, by Heidegger’s own lights, a fun-
damental quality of the structure of being: as long as there is or was something
rather than nothing, history (as historicity) has always been, and always will
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   9

be. History, however (as we have already seen above), is identified by Adorno
(2006a, 253) specifically with change; ‘the occurrence of the qualitatively new’.
Hence, by Adorno’s lights,8 Heidegger has dropped a philosophical clanger
here: by rendering this notion of change itself something unchanging. This
means that Heidegger’s system (apparently) cannot account for the historical
specificity of particular events: Adorno (256–257) here cites the example of
the French Revolution.
One can set up a general structural category of life, but if one tries to interpret
a particular phenomenon, for example, the French Revolution, though one can
indeed find in it every possible element of this structure of life … it is nevertheless
impossible to relate the facticity of the French Revolution in its most extreme
factual being to such categories.
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The argument, I think, is that events like the French Revolution involve a pretty
dramatic overhaul of what had been going on before: real social, institutional,
cultural change. But Heidegger, in describing such events as part of the funda-
mental ontological structure of reality, can only shrug his shoulders and say: ‘oh
yeah, but that sort of thing happens all the time.’ The tendency of ontology is,
according to Adorno, towards ever-sameness; identity; the unchanging. History
is supposed to stand in opposition to this. But Heidegger makes history itself
identical with ontology – and hence we are left, once again, with eternal same-
ness. The only difference, really, is that which one might observe between a flat
line, extended into infinity; and a wavy one extended likewise. Eternal sameness
is, ultimately, not all that different from eternal flux: and both, for Adorno,
would be unable to effectively ground historical meaning. It is, for Adorno, a
general conceptual truth that all change must require reference to something
unchanging – otherwise there is no way in which we could understand anything
to have changed at all.9 Heidegger does not give us sufficient scope to conceive
things in these terms; and so, it appears, he eliminates change.10
Hence the lesson that Adorno ultimately draws, from his discussion of
Heidegger, is that the nature-history problematic cannot be solved by simply
collapsing the dualism. Both history – as the qualitatively new – and nature –
as the quantitatively old – must be preserved in their quite separate spheres of
significance, if one is ever going to be able to understand the significance of
either of them.
Every exclusion of natural stasis from the historical dynamic leads to false abso-
lutes, every isolation of the historical dynamic from the unsurpassably natural
elements in it leads to false spiritualism. (Adorno 2006a, 259)
This is why Adorno ultimately ends up asserting one of the things which I’ve
already quoted him as saying at the start of section 1 above:
If the question of the relation of nature and history is to be seriously posed, then it
only offers any chance of a solution if it is possible to comprehend historical being
in its most extreme historical determinacy, where it is most historical, as natural
 10    T. Whyman

being, or if it were possible to comprehend nature as a historical being where it

seems to rest most deeply in itself as nature. (260)
Adorno will spend the rest of the 1932 essay attempting to demonstrate that it
is indeed possible to anticipate such a relationship.
The first thinker that Adorno turns to, in order to accomplish this, is György
Lukács: specifically, the early, pre-Marxist Lukács of The Theory of the Novel.
Adorno begins section 2 of the 1932 essay with a discussion of this aspect of
Lukács’ work. Adorno praises the young Lukács’ thought for the way in which
it articulates a distinction between a meaningful world (of ‘immediacy’) and
an alienated – hence meaningless – ‘second-natural’ world of commodities,
convention, things created by man. At present – so the story goes – we exist in
the latter world.11 The key question is, then, how we could ever – from imma-
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nently within such a world – ‘re-awaken’ meaning. In attempting to answer this

question Lukács – according to Adorno (2006a, 261) – comes tantalising close
to articulating something like true ‘natural-historical’ thought.
For Adorno, the key quotation from Lukács is the following:
The second nature of human constructs has no lyrical substantiality, its forms
are too rigid to adapt themselves to the symbol creating moment... This nature
is not mute, corporeal and foreign to the senses like first nature: it is a petrified
estranged complex of meaning that is no longer able to awaken inwardness; it is
a charnel-house of rotted interiorities. This second nature could only be brought
back to life, if ever, by a metaphysical act of reawakening the spiritual element
that created or maintained it in its earlier or ideal existence, but could never be
experienced by another interiority. (Lukacs 1971, 63–64; cited in Adorno 2006a,
261–262)
As Adorno describes things, ‘The problem of this awakening... is the problem
that determines what is here understood by natural-history’ (262). So what this
appears to mean is that Adorno thinks that our ability to grasp the appropriate
relationship between nature and history (which – by Adorno’s own lights –
means apprehending historical being as natural being, and vice versa), would
be identical to our ability to ‘re-awaken’ alienated, historically-derived meaning.
Hence the appropriate image appears to be one of putting nature and history
somehow back together.
How can this be done? Well, as Adorno reads Lukács, it seems like the kind
of process that we’re supposed to engage in here, would be one that involves a
sort of interpretation.12 Adorno highlights this mysterious image of alienated
‘second nature’ constituting a ‘charnel-house of rotted interiorities’, as given in
the passage from The Theory of the Novel already quoted above:
The reference to the charnel house includes the element of the cipher: everything
must mean something, just what, however, must first be extracted. (262)
Adorno clearly approves of this line of thinking, and believes that it is a powerful
one.13 But Lukács does not yet, Adorno thinks, give us the correct understand-
ing of it. The reason for this, Adorno claims, is that:
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   11

Lukács can only think of this charnel house in terms of a theological resurrection,
in an eschatological context. (262)
In the context of the 1932 essay itself, this remark is utterly cryptic. But if
we cross-reference it with the material I’ve presented above pertaining to the
‘dialectic of secularisation’ from ontology through metaphysics to natural-­
history, then I think it can become clear what Adorno is accusing Lukács of. If
Heidegger is (in Adorno’s sense, and not just as per his own self-description)
an ‘ontologist’, then Lukács is a ‘metaphysician’. For, what does metaphysics
(in Adorno’s sense) do? Well, it attempts to bring the Platonic Idea down to
earth, to see it realised in the material world. Crucially, that is: it attempts to
realise the Idea as something dynamic, as opposed to something which statically
persists in Heaven.
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But for Adorno, that is not yet good enough, since – for all the pretensions of
metaphysics to see the Idea realised dynamically in the material world – what is
supposed to get ‘realised’ is, nevertheless, still the Idea! It is thus, at some level,
eternal – and hence (whether resident in ‘Heaven’ or otherwise) characterised
by stasis. The material development of this thing is supposed to tend towards
a standard of perfection which has already been pre-set in advance. This is the
‘ontological residue’ that Adorno identifies in Aristotelian metaphysics – which
is, likewise, a ‘pre-secular’ residue.
So this is what I think Adorno is accusing Lukács’ picture of involving, when
he suggests that Lukács can only conceptualise ‘this charnel house’ (which I
think must mean, ‘this process of interpretation that is supposed to re-awaken
meaning’) in ‘theological’ terms. To ‘re-awaken’ meaning must be to somehow
bring it back down to earth, back to the material world. But Lukács, Adorno
is suggesting, can (for whatever reason) only conceptualise the re-awakening
of meaning as involving our relating the dynamic, changing, material world
to something eternal and essential. And this – or so I think the story goes – is
what is preventing Lukács from pushing, through ontology, into true ‘natu-
ral-historical’ thought.

4.  Transience and the Secularisation of Metaphysics: Benjamin on

Allegory
So, the question then must be: how could Lukács have done so? What do we spe-
cifically need, in order to make good on the insights contained in his thought?
Well, I think a big clue is provided to us by the first of the two quotes from
Adorno’s History and Freedom lectures that I gave at the start of section 1 above.
It bears repeating here:
What you will discover in this programme [of natural-history] … is the trans-
mutation of metaphysics into history. It secularizes metaphysics into the ultimate
category of secularity, that of decay. (Adorno 2006b, 126)
 12    T. Whyman

As per the Adornian architectonic I’ve been employing in this paper: Lukács’
thought remains metaphysics because he attempts to ground historical meaning
in something eternal and unchanging. If metaphysics is to be fully ‘secularised’,
then we will need a way of grounding historical meaning in something that is
itself historical. Adorno, it seems, finds this in the category of ‘decay’ – some-
thing which appears in the 1932 essay under the label of ‘transience’. According
to Adorno, it is Walter Benjamin who provides us with ‘the decisive turning
point in the formulation’ of this insight; particularly in his 1925 study The Origin
of German Trauerspiel (Adorno 2006a, 262).
Adorno commences his exposition of this point by presenting two quotations
from Benjamin:
In nature the allegorical poets saw eternal transience, and here alone did the
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saturnine vision of these generations recognise history. (Adorno 2006a, quoted

from Benjamin 1998, 179)
When, as is the case in the German Trauerspiel, history comes onto the scene, it
does so as a cipher to be read. ‘History’ is writ across the countenance of nature in
the sign language of transience. (Adorno 2006a, quoted from Benjamin 1998, 177)
To these two passages, Adorno gives the following gloss:
The deepest point where history and nature converge lies precisely in this element
of transience. If Lukács demonstrates the retransformation of the historical...
into nature, then here is the other side of the phenomenon: nature itself is seen
as transitory nature, as history. (Adorno 2006a, 262)
This then is how Benjamin’s position is going to help us to solve the problem
of the interrelation of nature and history. Lukács, as a ‘metaphysician’, is only
able to allow us to understand ‘historical being as natural being’ – not the other
way around. Adorno, as per the conclusion drawn from his critical discussion
of Heidegger, needs a way of understanding historical being as also natural
being, yes; but as well as this he also needs to be able to secure its reverse. This
is what Benjamin, Adorno thinks, can provide us with. The trick then is going
to consist in his helping us to find some way of grasping both aspects of the
natural-historical relationship simultaneously.
So, how can Benjamin help us to do that? The answer Adorno gives is that
we can grasp this natural-historical relationship by means of an aesthetic device
which occupies a prominent place in Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book: namely,
‘allegory’.
In the 1932 essay, this notion of allegory is – as with most of the important
concepts addressed there – horribly undetermined. So it bears some unpacking
here.14 Strictly speaking, an allegory is just any representation of a thing that
involves substituting it for some other thing: an allegory is whenever some
one thing is meant to stand for another (Tambling 2010, 6). So for instance in
Medieval art, a pelican was supposed to stand for Christ; in Caravaggio’s paint-
ing ‘Amor Victorious’ the god Cupid stands for Love. Allegory has been utilised
as a mode of artistic representation since the classical period: Cicero discusses
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   13

it, and examples of it can be found in St Paul (19ff). Outside of the German
Trauerspiel, allegory was an especially prominent mode of expression during
the Middle Ages, where aside from its application in religious art, it was utilised
in literary works such as Piers Plowman and The Romance of the Rose (Ch. 1).
But in Romantic aesthetics, allegory was denigrated in comparison with
‘symbolism’. Romantic theorists (such as Coleridge) associated allegory with
stereotyped, ‘mechanical’ representations that serve only as a fairly shallow
abstraction from their meaning (Tambling 2010, 77–78). By contrast, a ‘symbol’
was held to be the expression of some general, higher truth grasped ineffably
via an image infinitely united with said meaning. The unification of a symbol
with its meaning is not something that can be expressed in conceptual terms,
because the meaning of a symbol is supposed to be somehow beyond con-
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ceptual thought. So, whereas we can see an image of a pelican in a cathedral

and know that it means Christ, the image of the albatross which the Ancient
Mariner shoots in Coleridge’s poem has a significance that precisely cannot be
satisfactorily unpacked on any given interpretation (or set of interpretations)
of the poem (79).
So, from this: imagine that we were to understand all meaning as ‘symbolic’,
as this term was used in Romantic aesthetics. Well, this would imply something
like a Lukácsian, ‘metaphysical’ conception of meaning: true meaning would
always be united with something infinite and eternal. ‘Allegory’, insofar as it
is opposed to symbol, thus stands opposed to such an essentialist picture of
meaning. This then is how what Benjamin is attempting to do with the concept
of allegory can be seen to be apposite to Adorno’s purposes in the 1932 essay.
As Adorno (2006a, 262–263) puts this point there:
Benjamin shows that allegory is no composite of merely adventitious elements;
the allegorical is not an accidental sign for underlying content. Rather there
is a specific relation between allegory and the allegorically meant, ‘allegory is
expression.’ Allegory is usually taken to mean the presentation of a concept as
an image and therefore it is labelled abstract and accidental. The relationship
of allegory to its meaning is not accidental signification, but the playing out of
a particularity; it is expression. What is expressed in the allegorical sphere is
nothing but a historical relationship.
It is easy to see how this might work by considering again the example of
the pelican – as an allegory for Christ – against that of the albatross from
Coleridge’s poem. By virtue of what does the albatross mean what it means?
Supposedly, from how the image of the albatross is united with some ‘infinite’
meaning, the ontological truth of the image of the albatross. And by virtue of
what does the (Medieval) image of a pelican – for instance a pelican engraved
on a misericord in Norwich Cathedral – mean Christ? Simply because this is
what pelicans meant in the context of Medieval art.15 But this tells us little or
nothing about what pelicans actually are in-themselves or how they might
be considered beyond how they were conceived in the Medieval imagination.
 14    T. Whyman

Allegory is thus expressive of a certain sort of historical relationship, nothing

more. But this historical relationship is nevertheless a concrete one; it is still
in an important sense a real one: this really is what the meaning of the image
of the pelican on the misericord was. And moreover, it really did shape social
practices; for instance both aesthetic and religious ones – Medieval Christianity
would have been what it was, it would have been something else, were it char-
acterised by a different collection of imagery.
Hence, it seems that drawing on the concept of allegory can help us ‘secu-
larise’ meaning, insofar as it allows us to see that what something means, need
not be something eternal, but can instead be a historical relationship alone.
Meaning can thus be ‘re-awakened’, not as Lukács anticipates this as occurring –
by our seeing how historical signifiers in fact ‘stand for’ some eternal, symbolic
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form – but precisely by our seeing that historical signifiers need nothing more
than their historical concreteness, in order to mean anything in particular.
Now, on the surface, this might just seem like a re-statement of the prob-
lem of historicist relativism as discussed in section 1 above. Meaning, Adorno
is telling us, is historical. But so what? Doesn’t this precisely leave open the
possibility of a slide into a problematic relativism? Wasn’t that why we needed
to import an ‘ontological’ conception of nature into the picture to begin with?
And yet, for all this, Adorno clearly seems to think that invoking the concept
of allegory can act as a solution to this problem. How? In the following section,
I’m going to attempt to puzzle out an answer.

5.  Natural-History as Philosophical Therapy

In the 1932 essay, Adorno (2006a, 265–266) certainly seems to be well aware of
the problem that I have just addressed at the end of section 3 above.
One might object that I am proposing a sort of bewitchment of history and
passing off the historical, in all its contingency, as the natural and then original-­
historical. The historical is to be transfigured as something meaningful because it
appears allegorical. That is, however, not what I mean. Certainly the starting point
of the problem’s formulation, the natural character of history is disconcerting.
But if philosophy wanted to be nothing more than the shock that the historical
presents itself at the same time as nature, then such a philosophy would be subject
to Hegel’s criticisms of Schelling’s philosophy as the night of indifferentiation in
which all cats are grey.
‘How does one avoid this night?’ Adorno asks, immediately following this pas-
sage. ‘That is’, he tells us, ‘something I would like to clarify’ (Adorno 2006a, 266).
Adorno then spends most of the rest of the third and final section of the 1932
essay (where these remarks appear), attempting to provide this clarification.
The crucial move, in my view, appears towards the beginning of this attempted
clarification, where Adorno states that:
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   15

The differential procedure required to arrive at natural-history, without antici-

pating it as a unity, consists, first, in accepting these two problematic and inde-
terminate structures in their contradictoriness, as they occur in the language of
philosophy. (Adorno 2006a, 266)
So, Adorno tells us, we are supposed to engage in ‘natural-historical’ thought, by
somehow reading nature as historical and vice versa, without then ‘anticipating’
these two necessarily interlinked poles of nature and history ‘as a unity’. This is
something we are supposed to accomplish by simply as it were holding in our
heads the idea that these two things are (also) contradictory. Adorno spends the
rest of section 3 attempting to spell this out in some way, but in practice what
this involves is a rather intense rush of pregnant speculations that falls well short
of constituting the sort of ‘clarification’ that might actually have proved helpful.
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A far meatier clue to natural-history’s workability is given to us in section

3 of the 1932 essay just prior to Adorno’s (Adorno 2006a, 265) articulation of
this ‘night of indifferentiation’ problem, where he states that:
The positions of Lukács and Benjamin with regard to the idea of natural-history
are related in the problem of the image of the charnel house. For Lukács it is
something simply puzzling: for Benjamin it is a cipher to be read. For radical
natural-historical thought, however, everything existing transforms itself into
ruins and fragments, into just such a charnel house where signification is dis-
covered, in which nature and history interweave and the philosophy of history
is assigned the task of their intentional interpretation.
In the first instance, this remark can help us to make sense of what Adorno is
saying in the ‘clarification’ that he offers later on. What I think Adorno is saying
there, is really that the context in which we have to hold ‘nature’ and ‘history’
apart from each other (yet somehow interlinked) is specifically that of an act of
interpretation. This thought has an affinity with what Adorno will claim years
later, in the History and Freedom lectures – in particular in the quote given at
the start of section one above. As Adorno claims there, we have seen, natu-
ral-historical thought is supposed to act as a ‘model’ for the critical-theoretical
interpretation of reality (Adorno 2006b, 138).16
Now, in the ‘clarification’ Adorno is specifically attempting to differentiate
what he is saying from the view that he has, in the first section of his essay,
attributed to Heidegger: whose position would usher us into precisely that same
undifferentiated night, where all the cats are grey, all the cows are (presumably)
black, and nature and history get utterly assimilated to each other (and hence
would wind up as, effectively, nothing at all).
This is something that Adorno’s Heidegger ends up doing because he is
attempting to describe the fundamental ontological structure of reality. For this
reason, he needs to be able to make claims of the form: ‘history is x’, or ‘nature
is y’. Adorno, however, makes it (at least, somewhat) clear that he himself is
interested, rather, in the sort of ‘model’ of reality that we must assume in order
to engage in the activity of its interpretation. The key difference is that this would
 16    T. Whyman

mean that he does not need to be in the business of making any definitive claims
about what history or nature precisely are, or what their interrelation exactly
is. Rather, we are afforded the scope to consider history and nature as elements
that we can read out of the phenomena under investigation, in order to assume
a critical stance on them.
So for instance: say we want to develop a critique of the laws of the capital-
ist economic system. These are something that, as Adorno sees them (largely
through Marx’s eyes), have assumed a pseudo-natural character, are a human
social construct (‘metamorphosed by economists’) that have become ‘a pre-
tended law of Nature’ (Marx quoted in Adorno 2006b, 118). This means that
we need to be able to capture the way in which:
The organic nature of capitalist society is both an actuality and at the same time a
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socially necessary illusion. The illusion signifies that within this society laws can
only be implemented as natural processes over people’s heads, while their validity
arises from the form of the relations of production within which production takes
place. (Adorno 2006b, 118)
If we want to understand capitalism, Adorno is telling us, we need to understand
the way in which its laws stand over us with natural necessity, have developed
into something that is for all intents and purposes ‘natural’: seemingly immuta-
ble, self-sustaining, eternal, and encompassing everything within its grasp. And
yet, for all that, we need to be able to keep in our heads the thought that these
‘natural’ laws of society have developed historically, are thus not immutably
necessary, have a certain sort of contingency to them, and can potentially be
undone by what is coming in the future – events which we are at the very
least not entirely passively oriented towards (‘The “natural laws of society” are
ideology inasmuch as they are claimed to be immutable’: Adorno 2006b, 118
ibid.). A ‘natural-historical’ perspective is thus an entirely appropriate one to
assume here, insofar as it can help us to get these two thoughts simultaneously
in view: the thought that, on the one hand, we are attempting to discern what
capitalism is precisely as some natural thing; but then, equally, that whatever is
‘natural’ has always itself formed historically, is to this extent within history, and
thus can in principle always be transformed, be made subject to the effects of
historical change. But again, that ought not mean that we should reach beyond
agnosticism about how these things ultimately are, whether the phenomena
under investigation really are (in the final analysis) ‘natural’ or ‘historical’, or
(more broadly than this) precisely how ‘nature’ and ‘history’ as such are inter-
woven. Citing ‘natural-history’ as the answer to this question probably would
be a lapse into ontology – indeed, into an ontological position that Adorno
has himself already offered arguments against. This is why we need to see it,
rather, as a principle limited in its jurisdiction to a specific sort of philosophical/
critical-theoretical interpretation.
Invoking the notion of interpretation can also, I think, help us to solve the
main problem under consideration in this section. How can natural-history
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   17

help us to solve the problem of historical relativism? Adorno, as we have seen,

claims that ‘the positions of Lukács and Benjamin with regard to the idea of
natural-history are related in the problem of the image of the charnel house’
(Adorno 2006a, 265). Recall from above that Adorno associates this image of
the charnel house with Lukács’ holding what is effectively (what I have described
as) a ‘metaphysical’ picture of meaning. Such a picture of meaning cannot afford
us the possibility of engaging in the critical-theoretical interpretation of reality.
This is because it ultimately lapses into all the problems that Adorno associates
with ‘ontology’ (see section 1 above), a position which ends up reinforcing
coercive elements in society and culture. The invocation of Benjamin’s concept
of ‘allegory’ is intended to break apart this picture of meaning, hence affording
us the genuine, full possibility of the critical-theoretical interpretation of reality.
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Allegory, if it does this at all, must be doing this by helping us to see – in

contrast to Lukács, where all meaning had to be united with something eter-
nal and ahistorical – that things really can get their meaning by virtue of their
specifically historical formation. Thus, that we can engage in critical-theoretical
interpretation without deferring to a transcendent, ahistorical picture of mean-
ing. Much as with the indifferentiation problem above: if this were intended by
Adorno as a comprehensive, standalone account of precisely what all meaning
is, it would simply constitute a re-statement of the problem of historicist rel-
ativism. But, understood as a framework for the interpretation of reality, this
‘allegorical’ account of meaning seems like it might be something much more
innocuous: a therapeutic move.
Now, on the surface, this assertion – that Adorno is engaged in a form of
philosophical therapy – must seem strange. Philosophical therapy is, of course,
something typically associated with Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein – for what
it’s worth – is a figure towards whom Adorno is not at all sympathetic. Despite
Wittgenstein’s philosophical celebrity, Adorno in all of his writings hardly men-
tions Wittgenstein at all – and in the few places in which he does (the most
extended discussion that I know of can be found in The Positivist Dispute in
German Sociology, Adorno 1986), he is largely disdainful, dismissing his work
as quietistic, ultimately conservative, and lacking in the true (that is, critical)
spirit of philosophy.17 Now, in part this seems to be the result of Adorno’s being
only really familiar with the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, hence having mis-
taken Wittgenstein for the logical positivist he only arguably was even then. If
he had read the Investigations properly, Adorno might have found himself more
sympathetic to Wittgenstein’s work – if nothing else, he would have discovered
a thinker equally intent upon eliminating the scourge of ‘Platonism’ from phi-
losophy. At any rate, the idea that there are certain philosophical anxieties that
need to be exorcised is something that fits well with what Adorno is trying to
do with the concept of natural-history – as I will now show.
As Adorno (, 261) himself claims, the Lukács of The Theory of the Novel is
able to get most of what is important about ‘natural-historical’ thought in view.
 18    T. Whyman

In particular, this means that he is interested in the problem of ‘how it is pos-

sible to know and interpret’ an ‘alien, reified, dead world’, and that he attempts
to solve this problem by means of a ‘change of perspective’ on the relationship
between history and nature. But equally, Lukács’ thought as Adorno describes
it seems to be driven by an anxiety, namely the anxiety that the ‘meaning’ we
are supposed to re-awaken, through any given interpretative procedure, might
be simply arbitrary. Having outlined all of this, Adorno then introduces the
concept of allegory, apparently as a way of somehow transcending Lukács whilst
remaining true to much of the substance of his thought. Suddenly, once we place
nature and history in an ‘allegorical’ relationship, we can see how things can be
meaningful, without this meaning being united with something eternal. This
seems like it makes sense as a solution to the problem of historicist relativism, if
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we suppose it to be intended simply as a way of exorcising this Lukácsian anxiety.

Through the invocation of Benjamin and allegory, the problem of historicist
relativism has been revealed to be a pseudo-problem: the fact that meaning is
historical does not make it simply random or arbitrary.

6. Conclusion
In this paper, I have attempted to provide what I believe is the most coher-
ent, plausible reading of Adorno’s concept of natural-history. I started out,
in section 1, by orienting my reading towards the problem of the relativity
of historically-formed meaning, which Adorno invokes the concept in order
to solve. I demonstrated how this problem informs Adorno’s 1932 essay on
natural-history, as well as how the problem is bound up with Adorno’s later
critique of ontology and metaphysics. I also made clear how Adorno thinks
that solving this problem would help us to undertake the critical-theoretical
interpretation of reality.
This laid the foundations for the reading of the 1932 essay that I pursued in
sections 2 and 3. I offered an understanding of Adorno’s remarks on Heidegger
and Lukács in that essay, who both (apparently) present either failed or only
partly successful solutions to the problem of historicist relativism; this failure
is the result of their lapsing into either what Adorno would label ‘ontology’
or ‘metaphysics’. The real solution to the problem of historicist relativism is,
according to Adorno, to be found in Walter Benjamin’s Trauerspiel book, via
the concept of ‘allegory’. I offered a sense of how Adorno thinks this solution
is supposed to work by unpacking this concept of allegory and showing how
it allows us to see that something can be historically specific yet nevertheless
concretely meaningful. This, likewise, can be seen to represent the ‘secularisa-
tion’ of metaphysics, thus representing in some way the culmination of Adorno’s
critique of ontology.
In section 4, I explained how, against initial appearances, this move really can
constitute a solution to the problem of historicist relativism as Adorno describes
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   19

it. Adorno’s account would not be able to do this, I argued, were it supposed to
involve a substantial account of what nature and history, exactly, are. But it can
constitute a solution, I have argued, if we see it as involving a sort of therapeutic
move, within the context of the critical-theoretical interpretation of reality.
Ultimately the understanding of the concept of natural-history which we have
arrived at is as a framework within which we can do critical theory, allowing us
to gain critical understanding of the conditions we exist under without our then
needing to defer to a transcendent, ‘ontological’ picture of meaning – a picture
of meaning which would, at least potentially, illegitimately constrain critical
theory in advance. Thus, Adorno seems vindicated in thinking that solving the
problem of historicist relativism would also allow us to place critical theory on
something like a firm interpretative footing – this, in the final analysis, is the
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true significance of his concept of natural-history.

Notes
 1. Although it is worth mentioning that in his book, Freyenhagen (2013) fails to
mention the concept of natural-history in this context, perhaps for the quite
understandable reason of wanting to steer clear of this particular exegetical
hornet’s nest.
 2. This fear will of course be a perennial theme of Adorno’s work, in particular
his later writings on the Holocaust. Obviously, in 1932, Adorno could not have
been writing about the Holocaust: but he was of course existing in an intellectual
context that had been deeply marked by the Great War.
 3. Mannheim and Scheler were both Professors at Frankfurt during this period
(though Scheler only very briefly, before his untimely death). Troeltsch’s work
was, according to Buck-Morss, discussed in seminars at the Goethe-Universität.
 4. This of course leaves open the possibility that when we discover something
really existent that does not exercise a coercive influence over us (for instance,
something that is a transcendental condition on the possibility of experience),
we should precisely leave it as it is – and indeed I think Horkheimer has this
point in view in the 1937 essay when he sketches a distinction between ‘logical’
and ‘real’ necessities (228–229).
 5. The final third of the lectures – which has received by far the most attention in
the secondary literature – maps on to Model III (‘Meditations of Metaphysics’)
of Negative Dialectics.
 6. In what follows, I’m going to be reporting Adorno’s readings of Plato and then
Aristotle. These are deeply controversial readings and, whilst I do think that
Adorno’s understanding of both thinkers represents an important philosophical
contribution, I do not want to give the mistaken impression that I believe he is,
in any scholarly sense, right about either of them. Note also that even though I’m
unpacking all this stuff (as Adorno does) in relation to Plato and Aristotle, the
problems in their thought are supposed to have infected philosophical thinking
ever since: for instance, ontology is still present in Heidegger (Adorno 2000, 22),
and even Hegel ends up, in the final analysis, being a ‘metaphysician’ (96).
 7. For a more comprehensive account of Adorno’s critique of ontology, please see
my ‘Adorno’s Aristotle Critique and Ethical Naturalism’ (Whyman, forthcoming).
 8. And I stress – by Adorno’s lights. See note x below.
 20    T. Whyman

 9. This is a thought that Adorno expresses at points in the Metaphysics lectures

(Adorno ); the most interesting formulation of it is on p. 57.
10. Of course, Heideggerians probably wouldn’t have much trouble offering a
response here. For instance: they could reply by saying that Heidegger is only
trying to describe the basic ontological structure of (historical) meaning. And
what, after all, really stops that structure from later being filled out contentfully?
I’m not sure Adorno really has a compelling response to this objection – at
any rate, we can’t derive a convincing one from the 1932 essay. As Heidegger
criticism, Adorno’s remarks in the 1932 essay go by far too quickly – and, as
per note 6 above in relation to Plato and Aristotle, I do not want to give the
impression that I am in agreement with Adorno about Heidegger’s actual
thought. All I really want to demonstrate is that the position he sketches in
the 1932 essay with reference to Heidegger is prima facie a problematic one –
whether or not Heidegger or anyone else really holds it, is a different matter.
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11. This thought of course chimes strongly with Adorno’s later work, for instance
his very powerful description of the late capitalist social world as the ‘wrong
form of life’ in Minima Moralia.
12. Note how this links up with themes already explored in section 1 above.
13. Compare p. 261: ‘This fact of a world of convention as it is historically produced,
this world as estranged things that cannot be decoded but encounters us a
ciphers, is the starting point of the question with which I am concerned here.’
14. I will be drawing upon Jeremy Tambling’s (2010) critical introduction to the
concept of allegory, which actually dedicates a whole chapter to Benjamin’s
Trauerspiel study.
15. The affinity was derived from the idea, popularised by bestiaries of them time,
that the pelican could revive its young by cutting a hole in its side with its beak
and dripping them with its blood.
16. These remarks, it should be noted, take place in the context of four whole
lectures on the concept of interpretation.
17. Characteristic remarks can be found in Adorno 2000, 196 (where the editor of the
lecture series, Rolf Tiedemann, gives a quote from Philosophische Terminologie).

Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Fabian Freyenhagen for his extensive comments on earlier drafts
of this paper. I would also like to acknowledge my debt of gratitude to David McNeill;
we shared a number of lively conversations pertaining to this material back in 2013,
and his way of thinking continues to exercise a profound influence on my own. Thanks
also to Jaakko Nevasto, who offered helpful comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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Adorno, T. W. (1973) Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, London: Continuum.
 International Journal of Philosophical Studies   21

Adorno, T. W. (1976). ‘Introduction’, in Adorno et al (ed.) The Positivist Dispute in

German Sociology, trans. Adey and Frisby, New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks.
Adorno, T. W. ([1933] 1989) Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Hullot-
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