Change of Scene: Surveying the Ruins 363technologically, historically we are on the way down. At the same time,
we need to distinguish history from natural history. I suspect that, from
the point of view of natural history, mankind’s forward march continues
undaunted, and what we call history... will be no more than an epi-
sode.’^199 Adorno now took up this idea of Horkheimer’s. The ‘force
field’ he had mentioned in his lecture on ‘Progress’ was formed by two
poles: first, by reflection which decoded the validity claims of the con-
cept of progress, the antinomy of concept and thing; and, second, by the
critique of the progress that human beings have actually achieved soci-
ally. What progress has been achieved in man’s relations with nature?
Can we speak of progress in the way in which people live together or in
people’s relationships with one another? Over and above the discussion
of such questions, Adorno proposed a conception of progress that would
attempt to discover the conditions of its own possibility: ‘the idea of
reconciliation – the transcendent telos of all progress’.^200 As the author
of Dialectic of Enlightenment, and intimately familiar with Benjamin’s
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, Adorno took good care not to
impute to history surreptitiously any automatic development in the
direction of growing freedom or growing oppression. ‘Progress should
be no more ontologized, unreflectedly ascribed to Being, than should
decline, though indeed the latter seems to be the preference of recent
philosophy. Too little of what is good has power in the world for progress
to be expressed in a predicative judgement about the world, but there
can be no good, not a trace of it, without progress.’^201 As a way out from
the blind alley of optimism and pessimism, Adorno made it clear that
progress in living conditions has created the precondition for breaking
with the history of progress hitherto: ‘Progress means to step out of the
magic spell, even out of the spell of progress... In this way it could be
said that progress occurs where it ends.’^202 Adorno’s starting-point, his
normative point of reference, is the secular idea of mature subjects
living together in harmony. He thus criticized the notion that progress
could be reduced to the domination of nature. He objected also to the
way such an idea developed analogously to the dynamics of a natural
process. To equate progress with the control of nature is a blind faith
like that of the ancient myth that ought really to have been superseded
by knowledge of the laws of nature. This quid pro quo according to
which the subjugation of nature ensures that natural coercion is main-
tained is an idea he illustrated with the image of a giant of whom we are
reminded by the image of human progress: ‘For this giant, after sleeping
from time immemorial, slowly bestirs himself, and then storms forth
and tramples everything that gets in his way. Nonetheless his unwieldy
awakening is the sole potential for attaining political maturity – [the
assurance] that nature’s tenacity, into which even progress integrates
itself, will not have the final word.’^203 The only way to salvage progress,
in Adorno’s view, is to mediate between the extremes, to confront the
differing aspects of rationality that unfold in the course of progress:^204