The End of Bourgeois Humanism and the Mindfulness of Nature in Adorno’s Writings of the 1950s and 1960s

Before discussing Adorno’s position on humanism and nature in more detail, particularly in his post-Dialectic of Enlightenment writings, it is useful to briefly review the attention that critical literature has devoted to these themes in Adorno, specifically that of nature. The last thirty years have seen a renewed interest in the conception of nature in Adorno’s work, also in view of its possible use in ecological discourse. This interest was already evident in the 1990s in the works of Jameson and Vogel: while the former considers Adorno and the other members of the Institute for Social Research as precursors of the ecological movement and animal rights struggles, the latter believes that Adorno (and Horkheimer) fails to conceive of a dialectical interaction between nature and society, remaining tied to a vague and ambiguous notion of nature: Nature is regarded as a given reality that humans seek to dominate, but it is also what enlightenment would like to return to.1