Adorno’s „The Idea of Natural History“: Sources and Perspectives

Adorno’s 1932 essay “The Idea of Natural History” is as convoluted as it is central to Adorno’s Critical
Theory. The concept of Natural History (Naturgeschichte) it develops will act as a continous leitmotif of
Adorno’s works. Natural History connects his criticism of phenomenology and ontology on the one hand,
and his philosophy of history and of interpretation (Deutung) on the other. It is the guiding concept for his
scrutiny of social processes and totality.
The essay’s exposition is, however, difficult to reconstruct for two reasons. First, its internal structure defies
any linear reconstruction and the preliminary definitions that inaugurate each section of the text have to be
developed instead of being taken as conclusive descriptions—a recurrent mistake of secondary literature
on the essay.
Second, Adorno’s understanding of Natural History evolves between the 1932 essay and Negative
Dialectics, which was published in 1966. In this later version, the sources of the early essay (Benjamin and
Lukács) are replaced by an appeal to Hegel and Marx.
The aim of this seminar is to develop a genealogy and an interpretation of the constellation surrounding
Adorno’s idea of Natural History. In order to do so, the seminar will work with the sources of Adorno’s
essay (Benjamin, Lukács) and expose its central ideas as well as its composition. The seminar also underlines
the relevance of Natural History for Adorno’s work as well as recent reappraisals of the text in approaches
that, inter alia, try to discern natural history in Sociology or develop a critical analysis of the relation of
social structures and normativity. We will also take a look at the debates about Critical Naturalism that inform
recent trends of the interplay of social research and philosophy.