The Institute of Social Research 149interpretation and the changing of reality as part of the programme
of an enlightened science.
In July 1932, Adorno gave a lecture to the Frankfurt Kant Society
which gave him the opportunity and also a suitable forum to acknow-
ledge Walter Benjamin explicitly as a source and inspiration for his
ideas. The lecture bore the title ‘The Idea of Natural History’. This
topic – the relationship between nature and history – was cleverly
chosen since it coincided with a dispute that had broken out in Frank-
furt between the phenomenologists and the historical materialists about
their respective conceptions of history. In addition, the idea of natural
history occurred also in a little essay Adorno had written for the Blätter
des Hessischen Landestheaters in Darmstadt.^60 The highly original
sketches on such topics as ‘Applause’, ‘The Gallery’, ‘The Stalls’ and
‘Boxes’ were produced entirely in the style in which Benjamin had
written about baroque tragedy; they were a further attempt by Adorno
to appropriate Benjamin’s allegorical way of seeing, as Benjamin noted
with approval in a letter after reading the text.^61 Adorno’s borrowings
were not restricted to Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama.
He also relied on Georg Lukács’s The Theory of the Novel. As in the
Kierkegaard book, he attempted to define his own conception of nat-
ural history by developing it from the contrast with these two other
philosophies of history. He began by clarifying the concept of natural
history, at first sight a bewildering amalgam of categories that are norm-
ally held to be incompatible. As against tradition, Adorno proposed
to ‘abolish the customary antithesis of nature and history’.^62 We do not
understand nature if we think of it as pure factuality, nor, on the other
hand, should we regard history purely as the world history of the spirit,
a progressive or evolutionary process as was believed in the Enlighten-
ment. Thus Adorno resisted a type of philosophical thinking that
hypostatized existence and history in an existential fashion. He exem-
plifies this with reference to Heidegger’s concept of ‘historicity’, to which
he has a twofold objection. An ontological conception of historicity is
unable to accommodate the problem of historical contingency. So as to
escape the danger of ascribing an absolute value to existence, Heidegger
gives priority to the overall design of history to which historical events
must be subordinated. This solution, which was one of the ideas actively
debated in Frankfurt at the time, is in Adorno’s view no more than
a new version of idealism. He pointed out that this just meant that the
traditional idea of the identity of subject and object would recur in the
form of the identity of a subjectively conceived history and of factual
history.
In order to provide a foundation for his own view – the concept of
natural history – he took from Lukács the Marxist concept of a ‘second
nature’. Lukács had introduced it, according to Adorno, to designate
the idea that the world is a historical product: it is a world of things that
has become historically alien to man. Adorno was not content simply to