Natural History and History

Abstract

For Adorno, the only possibility for understanding history is to relate it to the natural through his idea of natural-history. Agreeing with Whitehead, for Adorno the natural lacks temporal existence and can only be accessed through a temporally affective sense – which can be illuminated through Charles Hartshorne’s distinction between existence and actuality – in his 1932 article Idea of Natural History. Adorno’s conception is related to the historical by demonstrating how standard interpretations of history, which can be cast within three broad approaches, are not historical since they fail to acknowledge the significance of ‘second nature’. Given that demonstration,  it can then be shown how ‘all history is natural’ by employing Walter Benjamin’s notion of a constellation. A return can then be made to Hartshorne’s distinction to show how a past event’s existence can be related to Benjamin’s claims by means of his ‘dialectics at a standstill’