The Idea
of Natural History
Perhaps I
should declare from the outset that what I am about to say is not a “lecture”
in the technically proper sense, not a disclosure of results or a succinct,
systematic explication but rather something on the level of an experiment, a
mere effort to assimilate and elaborate the problem outlined in the so-called
Frankfurt discussion. I am aware of how
many disparaging things have been said about this discussion, but I
am also aware that the focal point of this discussion has been quite firmly
fixed and that it would be wrong to keep starting from scratch.
I should say
a few things about our terminology. The
natural history that we shall be talking about here is not natural history in the
conventional prescientific sense; it is not, say, the history of the nature
that is the object of study of the natural sciences. The concept of nature that is at issue here
has nothing whatsoever in common with the concept of nature in the mathematical
natural sciences. I cannot specify in
advance what nature and history are going to end up meaning in the following
remarks. But I shan’t be giving away too much if I tell you that what I plan to
say will genuinely tend to sublate the traditional antithesis of nature and
history; that, in other words, I must never be understood as working with the
concepts of nature and history as definitively specified essences, that I shall
instead be pursuing the intention of driving these two concepts to a point at
which they will be sublated in their pure disintegration. There is so much to be said by way of
elucidating the concept of nature that I would like to unravel here that in the
course of this unraveling I shall be dealing with a concept that if I were of a
mind to translate it into the conceptual language of traditional philosophy might
best be translated as the concept of the mythical. Even this concept is quite vague, and its
precise specification cannot be yielded by previously tendered definitions but
rather and exclusively through a process of analysis. By the mythical we are to understand whatever
has been here from time immemorial, whatever human history carries within
itself as a fatefully established prescribed form of Being, whatever manifests
itself within this history, whatever within it is substantial. Whatever is demarcated by these expressions
is what I mean by nature here. The
question that we are faced with is that of the relationship of this nature with
what we understand as history, according to which history implies that human behavioral
pattern, that pattern of behavior handed down from generation to generation, that
is above all characterized by the fact that the qualitatively new is manifested
in it, that it constitutes a movement that is not carried out in pure identity,
in the pure reproduction of whatever has always already been here, but rather a
movement in which the new occurs and which attains its true character via that
within it which manifests itself as the new.
I would like to develop what I am terming the
idea of natural history on the basis of an analysis, or, rather—to put it more
aptly—an overview of the ontological
question intrinsically framed by today’s discussion. This entails our taking the “natural” as our
starting point. For the question of
ontology as it posed nowadays is nothing other than what I have meant by
nature. I shall therefore employ a different approach and try to develop the
concept of natural history from the problematic of the philosophy of history, a
problematic wherein this concept will already become standardized and
concretized to a considerable degree.
After these two interrogations have been adumbrated, I shall try to articulate
the concept of natural history itself and tease out for you the moments by
which it seems to be characterized.
I. First to the question of the
present ontological situation. If you pursue
the ontological interrogation as it has unfolded particularly within the
context of so-called phenomenology, and especially and specifically in the
context of Husserlian phenomenology, in other words from Scheler onwards, one
can say that the actual founding intention of this ontological interrogation is
the overcoming of the subjective standpoint of philosophy, the supersession of
a philosophy that aspires to dissolve all determinations of Being into
determinations of thought, and believes that it is able to base all objectivity
on determined foundational structures of subjectivity by an interrogation in
such a way that a different, a fundamentally different Being, a fundamentally
different region of Being, a trans-subjective, an ontic region of Being, is attained.
And ontology is in point here to the extent that the logos must be
acquired from this on. Now it is the fundamental paradox of all
ontological interrogation in present-day philosophy that the method by which philosophers
are attempting to acquire trans-subjective Being is nothing but the same
subjective ratio that was previously effected by critical idealism. The phenomenological-cum-ontological
endeavors make themselves out to be an attempt to acquire trans-subjective
being by means of the autonomous ratio and with the language of the ratio, for they
have no other means or language at their disposal. Now this ontological question is being articulated
twice over—once as the question of Being
itself, as that which since Kant has as the thing-in-itself been pushed
back behind the philosophical interrogation and is being hauled out again. But at the same time it is being articulated
as the question of the meaning of Being, of the meaningfulness of the existent
or as the meaning of Being as possibility tout court. This very doubleness attests to the
tenability of the thesis that I am expounding, the thesis that the ontological
interrogation with which we are dealing today abides by the starting position
of the autonomous ratio; only specifically when the ratio acknowledges the
reality that confronts it as something alien to it, as something lost to it,
material to it; only when it is no longer immediately accessible and when the
meaning of reality is not shared with the ratio—only then can the question of
the meaning of Being be posed at all.
The question of meaning is yielded by the starting position of the ratio,
but at the same time this question of the meaning of Being, a question that is
the focus of phenomenology in its early phases (Scheler), produces a very
expansive problematic in virtue of its subjectivistic origin; for this yielding
of meaning is nothing but an interpolation of significances as they are posited
by subjectivity. This insight that the question of meaning is
nothing but an interpolation of subjective significances into Being leads to
the crisis in that first stage. The drastic expression of this is the fact
of the volatility of the fundamental determinations that the ratio must make in
its attempt at acquiring an order of being qua experience. While it has turned out that the factors that
are acknowledged as foundational and meaningful—as in Scheler, for example—spring
from a different factual sphere, are not even possibilities in Being, but
rather are derived from the existent and therefore inhere in the
questionability of the existent, the entire question of Being is becoming
problematic within the context of phenomenology. Insofar as the question of meaning can still occur, it does not
signify the acquisition of a guaranteed sphere of significances opposed to the
empirical, a sphere that would be valid and perpetually accessible, but rather
means nothing more than the question ti
hn on, the question of what Being itself actually is. The term meaning (or significance) is fraught with equivocation here. Meaning can mean a transcendental content
that is signified by Being, lies behind Being and is singled out by
analysis. On the other hand, meaning for
its part cannot be the explication of the existent itself in terms of whatever
is characterized as Being without that explicated Being’s having been proved to
be meaningful beforehand. It is therefore
possible that the meaning of Being as the meaning of the significance of the category of Being—of what Being actually
is—is being interrogated, but that in the meaning of that first question the
existent is turning out not to be a meaningful but rather a meaningless one, as
is largely in keeping with the meaning of current developments.
Once this counterturn of
the question of Being has taken place, the one inaugural intention of the
original ontological counterturn, namely an intentional turn towards ahistoricality, vanishes.
Scheler, at least in his early work (and this was its decisively
influential phase), attempted to construct a heaven of ideas on the basis of a
purely rational view of the ahistorical and internal levels, a heaven that
sheds its light on everything empirical, a heaven which has a normative
character and by which the empirical is permeable. But at the same time in the origins of
phenomenology a fundamental tension is posited between this meaningful essence
that lies behind the historical phenomenon and the sphere of history itself. In the origins of phenomenology a duality is
posited. This duality (here nature is to
be understood as that domain of the ahistorical and Platonically ontological), along
with the inaugural intention of the ontological counterturn sited in it, has
corrected itself. The question of Being
no longer has the significance of a Platonic question of the scope of static
and qualitatively different ideas that stood face-to-face with the existent qua
the empirical domain in a normative or tensional relationship. Instead the tension is vanishing: the
existent itself is being transformed into meaning and Being’s foundation, the great
beyond of history, is being replaced by the blueprint of Being qua
historicality.
With these changes the site
of the problem is being displaced. First
and foremost the problematic of the relationship between ontology and
historicism is ostensibly vanishing.
From the perspective of history, of historical criticism, ontology
simply looks like a formal framework that has nothing whatsoever to say about
the content of history, a border that can be stretched around the concrete in
an arbitrary fashion; or alternatively the ontological intention, when it was a
material ontology as in Scheler’s work, seemed to be a gratuitous
absolutization of micro-historical facts, an absolutization which for
ideological purposes may even have been intended to retain the status of
eternal and universally valid values.
The converse has seemed to be the case from the ontological standpoint,
and this antithesis is the one that dominated our Frankfurt discussion, such
that all radically historical thought, in other words all thought that seeks to
trace back all emergent content exclusively to historical conditions,
presupposes a blueprint of Being itself, a blueprint through which history is
passed off as the structure of Being; presupposes that only thus, within the
framework of such a blueprint, is the allocation of individual phenomena and
content-items at all possible.
Now the most recent counterturn of
phenomenology—if one can still call this phenomenology—has executed a
correction, specifically as a result of its eradication of the antithesis of
history and Being. In virtue of its
eschewal of the Platonic heaven of ideas, of the fact that on the one hand in
contemplating Being, it is contemplating it as something living—as a result of
this, formalism is eradicated along with false stasis, for the blueprint seems
to assimilate the plenitude of the determinations of Being, and the suspicious
attitude towards the absolutization of a contingent one also seems to be on the
wane. For now even history itself in its
extreme turbulence has turned into the fundamental ontological structure. On the other hand, historical thought itself
seems to have undergone a fundamental counterturn, since it is being reduced to
a philosophically load-bearing structure of historicality qua structure of a fundamental
determination of existence, at least of human existence, which makes it
possible for history in general to exist without entailing the determination’s
counterposition by what history “is” qua something finished, fossilized, alien. This is the state of the discussion that I am
taking as my starting point. Here is
where the critical motifs join in.
It seems to me as if the approach attained
here, which unites the ontological and historical questions under the category
of historicality, is likewise inadequate to the mastery of the concrete
problematic, or is adequate to it only merely in virtue of the fact that it
modifies its own consistency and the fact that it assimilates as contents motifs
that do not necessarily emerge from the principle limned in the blueprint. I shall illustrate this only in connection
with two points.
In the first place, this blueprint
remains stuck in general determinations. The problem of historical contingency cannot be overcome via the
category of historicality. A general
determination of the structure of vitality is offering itself, but when one is
interpreting an isolated phenomenon—the French Revolution, for example—one can
indeed discover every possible moment of this vitality there, can discover for
example, how the bygone is returning, is being assimilated; one can verify the significance
of the spontaneity arising from the human individual, detect causal
connections, etc., but one will not succeed at bringing the facticity of the
French Revolution in its extreme factual Being into line with these
determinations; rather within its broadest circumference there will be a domain
of “facticity” that drops out. This is
obviously no discovery of mine, but rather something that has long since been
substantiated within the framework of the ontological discussion. But it has not so far been articulated with
the brutality with which it is being articulated here; or, rather, it has been
handled within the problematic in a last-ditch fashion—this as a result of the
fact that all facticity that is not included in the ontological blueprint
itself, is subsumed under a category—that of contingency, of randomness, and of
the fact that this category is assimilated into the blueprint as a
determination of the historical. But
this is highly consistent; it contains the concession in itself, such that the
mastery of the empirical materials has not succeeded. At the same time this turn offers the schema
for a turn within the ontological question.
This the turn to tautology.
By this I mean nothing other
than that the attempt of neo-ontological thought to reconcile itself to the
unattainability of the empirical is continually proceeding in conformity with
the schema, such that precisely when moments of any sort are not included in
the determinations of thought, are not capable of being made transparent, but
rather stand still in their thereness, such that this very standstill of the
phenomena themselves is transformed into a general concept and is imprinted on
the stasis as such an ontological value.
Such is the case with the concept of Heidegger’s concept of Being
Towards Death and also with the concept of historicality itself. In the neo-ontological interrogation, the
problem of the reconciliation of nature and history is only seemingly solved in the structure of
historicality, because although here it is certainly acknowledged that there is
a foundational phenomenon that is history, because the ontological
determination of this foundational phenomenon or the ontological exegesis of
this foundational phenomenon is now hamstrung as a result of the fact that it
itself is being transfigured into ontology.
For Heidegger, history, understood as a comprehensive structure of
Being, is tantamount to Being’s own ontology.
Here such feeble antitheses as history and historicality, antitheses in
which nothing is fixed but the fact that as a result of being taken away from
the existent any qualities of Being observable in existence [Dasein] are transposed into the domain
of ontology and transformed into ontological determination, consigned to
contributing to the exegesis of something that is basically only yet another
iteration. This moment of tautology is
unconnected to the contingencies of linguistic form; rather, it perforce
adheres to the ontological interrogation itself, which clings tenaciously to
the ontological efforts, but which thanks to its rational starting point is
incapable of ontologically construing itself as what it actually is, namely a
product and semantic echo of the starting point of the idealistic ratio. This remains to be explicated. If there is a way that can lead further, it
can in point of fact only predestinedly consist in a “revision of the
question.” Admittedly, this revision is
applicable not only to the historical interrogation but also to the
neo-ontological interrogation itself. Here I may at least faintly
hint at why it seems to me that it necessarily follows from this problematic
that the idealistic starting-point has not been left behind even in the
neo-ontological body of thought; namely, because here we are confronted by two
determinations that fall specifically to the share of the idealistic body of
thought.
The first is the determination of the comprehensive whole
vis-à-vis the particulars subsumed by it; a whole that is no longer understood
as being a wholeness of the system but rather is subsumed by the category of
structural wholeness, of structural unity or totality. But even as one supposes that one can unequivocally
amalgamate the entirety of reality, albeit in a structure, there lurks in the
possibility of such an amalgamation of all given reality within a structure the
claim that whoever comprehensively unites everything existent within this
structure has the right and the power to acknowledge the existent as adequate
on its own and to assimilate it into the form.
The moment this claim ceases to be put forward, all talk of a structural
whole is no longer possible. I know that
the contents of the new ontology are very different from what I have just
asserted. It might be said that the latest
turn of phenomenology is not rationalistic in character but rather an attempt to
draw in the irrational moment in an altogether unprecedented way, under the auspices
of “vitality.” But it really seems to
make a great difference indeed whether irrational contents are being incorporated
into a philosophy fundamentally based on the principle of autonomy or the
philosophy itself is no longer starting from the assumption that reality is
adequately accessible. I need only
remind you that a philosophy like that of Schopenhauer arrives at its
irrationalism through nothing other than the rigorous retention of the
fundamental motifs of rational idealism, of the Fichtean transcendental
subject. This seems to me to testify to
the possibility of an idealism with irrationalistic contents. The other moment is the moment of the
accentuation of possibility vis-à-vis
reality. The truth is that within the framework of the neo-ontological
interrogation this very problem of the relationship between possibility and
reality is perceived as the greatest difficulty. I wish to be circumspect here, and I have no
intention of firmly associating the new ontology with positions that are
intrinsically controversial. In any
case, it is very much an abiding position of this ontology that the “blueprint”
of Being always maintains a priority over the facticity dealt with by it, that such a prius is taken on board along with the fissure vis-à-vis facticity;
the facticity must be interpolated after the fact, and if it is not, it
devolves into the rightful possession of a philosophical critique. In the ascendancy of the kingdom of
possibilities I see idealistic moments, for within the framework of the
Critique of Pure Reason the antithesis of possibility versus reality is nothing
other than that of the categorical subjective stratum versus empirical multifariousness. Not only does this correlation of the new
ontology with the idealistic position explain the formalism, the necessary
universality of the neo-ontological determinations, into which facticity cannot
be integrated; it is also the key to the problem of the tautology. Heidegger says that there is nothing wrong
with walking in a circle, that the only thing that matters is entering that
circle in the right direction. Here I am
inclined to agree with Heidegger. But when
philosophy remains true to its mission, this entrance in the right direction can
amount to nothing but the fact that in the act of explication, Being that
defines itself as Being or explicates itself highlights the moments through
which it explicates itself as such a Being.
It seems to me that the tautology is explicable in terms of nothing but
the old idealistic motif of identity. It
emerges in virtue of the fact that a Being that is historical is being brought
under the umbrella of a subjective category of historicality. This historical Being involved in a
subjective category of historicality is supposed to be identical to
history. It is supposed to submit to the
determinations that are being imprinted on it by historicality. The tautology seems to me to be less a
sounding of the mystical depths of language than an occultation of the old classical
identity of subject and object. And the
recent turn towards Hegel in Heidegger’s work seems to bear out this
interpretation.
After this revision of the
question the approach itself must be revised.
It remains to be mentioned that the collapse of the world into natural
and spiritual Being or natural and historical Being as it is customarily conceived
by subjective idealism must be sublated and that it must be replaced by an
interrogation that intrinsically effects the concrete unity of nature and
history. But it must effect the concrete unity, a unity that is not
orientated towards the antithesis of possible Being versus actual Being but
that is rather created out of the determinations of actual Being itself. The blueprint of the new ontology will have a
chance of acquiring ontological dignity, the prospect of arriving at a genuine
exegesis of Being, only if it radically vectors itself not towards the
possibilities of Being, but rather towards the existent as such in its concrete
microhistorical determinateness. All selection
of natural stasis out of historical dynamism leads to false absolutization; all
segregation of historical dynamism from the indissolubly solid natural element
in it leads to bad spiritualism. It is
to the credit of the ontological interrogation that it has radically worked out
the indissoluble interpenetration of the elements of nature and history. On the other hand it is necessary to purify
this blueprint of the mirage of a comprehensive wholeness and further necessary
to criticize the separation of reality and possibility from the perspective of reality,
as the two of them have so far fallen asunder.
These are initially general methodological desiderata. But there is much more that must be
postulated. If the question of the
relationship between nature and history must be posed in all seriousness, the
only prospect of an answer lies in conceiving of historical Being itself as a natural Being in its
utmost historical determinateness, where it is as its most historical, if such
a conception is practicable; or in conceiving of nature as a historical Being where
it is apparently most deeply lodged in itself as nature, if such a conception
is potentially practicable. What is necessary is no longer the
conceptualization of the fact of history in general under the auspices of the
category of historicality as a fact of nature toto caelo, but rather the reconversion of the establishedness of
the microhistorical events into an establishment of natural events. What is needed is not a search for a pure
Being either underlying or inherent in historical Being but rather an
understanding of historical Being itself as an ontological Being; in other
words, a natural Being. The reconversion
of concrete history into dialectical nature is the task of the ontological reorientation
of the philosophy of history: the idea of natural history.
II. I am
going to take as my starting point the problematic of the philosophy of history
as it has already materially contributed to the development of the concept of
natural history. The conception of
natural history did not fall down from the sky; rather, it received its bona
fides in the context of the philosophy of history’s work on certain specific
material, above all aesthetic material.
The simplest way of giving you an idea of this kind of historical
conception of nature will be to cite the sources from which this concept of
natural history originates. I am
referring to the works of Georg Lukács and
Walter Benjamin. In his Theory of the Novel, Lukács employed a concept that is pointed in this
direction, that of second nature. The
context of the concept of second nature is as follows: Lukács has derived from the philosophy of history a general
idea of a world suffused with meaning and a world devoid of meaning (the
immediate world and the alienated world, the world of the commodity) and is
attempting to delineate this alienated world.
This world, as a world of the things created by human beings and lost to
them, he calls the world of convention.
“When no goals are immediately given, the entities that the soul
discovers in its incarnation as a site and substrate of its activity among human
beings lose their obvious roots in superpersonal, ostensible necessity; they
are simply something existent, perhaps something powerful, perhaps something mouldering,
but they are neither intrinsic bearers of the consecratedness of the absolute
nor reservoirs for the overflowing interiority of the soul. They constitute the world of convention: a
world whose omnipotence has only deprived the soul of its innermost core; a
world that is omnipresent in bewildering multifariousness; a world whose rigorous
legality, both in becoming and in being, for the perceiving subject is perforce
becoming evident but which amid all this lawfulness is showcasing itself
neither as meaning for the goal-oriented subject nor as matter in sensuous
immediacy for the action-oriented one.
It is a second nature; like the first”— admittedly for Lukács “first nature,” as an alienated nature,
nature as understood by natural science, is “definable only as the quintessence
of necessities that are recognized and devoid of meaning and for this reason ungraspable
and unrecognizable in their actual substance.”1 This fact of the world of convention as it has
been produced in the course of history, the world of things that have become
alien to us, things that cannot be decrypted but that present themselves to us
as ciphers—this is the starting point of the problematic that I am propounding
here. From the perspective of the
philosophy of history, this question initially presents itself as the question
of how it is possible to recognize, to interpret, this alienated, reified, dead
world. Lukács
has already taken notice of the alienness and the puzzle-like character of this
question. If I am to succeed at giving you a sense of
the idea of natural history, you should first learn something about the
thaumazein [i.e.,
Aristotelean θαυμάζειν, meaning astonishment or wonder (DR)] that this question signifies. Natural history is
not a synthesis of natural and historical methods but rather an alteration of perspective. The passage in which Lukács comes closest to
this question reads: “The second nature
of the human entity has no lyrical substantiality: its forms are too rigid to
adapt themselves to the symbol-creating moment; the contentual precipitate of its
laws is too determinate ever to be able to forsake the elements that in lyric
poetry are obliged to be transformed into occasions for essayistic speculation;
but these elements live so exclusively by the grace of the legalities, are so
utterly devoid of any sensuous valency of existence that is independent of
them, that in their absence they cannot but crumble away into nothing. This nature is not silent, sensible, and
senseless like the first one: it is an ossified, alienated, mental complex that
is no longer capable of awakening interiority; it is a Golgotha of putrefied
interiority and accordingly could be awakened only—if this were possible—by the
metaphysical act of a reawakening of the psychical element that it created or
preserved in some earlier or intended mode of existence, but could never be
experienced by a different mode of interiority.”2 The problem of this awakening that is validated
here as a metaphysical possibility is the problem that constitutes what is
understood here as natural history. Lukács
has sighted the transformation of the historical element as a transformation of
the bygone into nature; ossified history is nature, or the ossified living
element of nature is mere historical having-become-ness. In the discourse of Golgotha lies the moment
of the cipher; such that all this signifies something, but exactly what is
signified by it must first be fetched forth. Lukács cannot conceive of this Golgotha
other than within the category of theological reawakening, within the eschatological
horizon. Benjamin has executed the
decisive turn in the treatment of the problem of second nature by fetching
forth the reawakening of second nature from infinite distance into infinite
proximity and making it the object of philosophical interpretation. And as philosophy takes up the motif of the
awakening of the cryptic, of the ossified, it has beginning to develop a more
sharply defined concept of natural history.
To start with, there are two passages from Benjamin that complement Lukács’s
passage. “They (the allegorical writers)
conceive of nature as an eternal evanescence in which only the saturnine gaze
of those generations recognizes history.”3 “When with the advent of
this form of tragedy history wanders into the theater it does so as a writing
system. On the countenance of nature
‘history’ is contained in the hieroglyphic inscription of evanescence.”4
Lukács’s
philosophy of history has been augmented by something fundamentally different
here; in both passages the word evanescent
or evanescence appears. The deepest point at which history and nature
converge is sited in that selfsame moment of evanescence. If Lukács allows the historical to be changed
back into the bygone in nature, here one sees a different side of the
phenomenon—nature portraying itself as evanescent nature, as history.
The natural-historical
interrogations are not possible as general structures; they are possible only
as interpretation of concrete history.
Benjamin starts from the assumption that allegory is no mere tissue of
secondary contingencies; that the allegorical is not a contingent sign for its
underlying content, that there is an objectively significant relationship between
allegory and the allegorically signified, that “allegory is expression.”5
Allegory is traditionally defined as a sensuous representation of a concept,
and thereby regarded as abstract and contingent. But the relationship between
the allegorically phenomenal and the signified is by no means contingent and
symbolic; rather, something peculiar unfolds within it; the relationship is a
form of expression, and what unfolds within its space, what it expresses, is
nothing other than a historical relationship.
The theme of the allegorical is virtually history. Its essence as a relationship between the
phenomenal, phenomenal nature, and the signified, namely, evanescence, is
explicated thus: “Within the crucial category of time—and the conveyance of
this category into this domain of semiotics was the great romantic insight of
these thinkers—the relationship between symbol and allegory can be emphatically
and formulaically stipulated. Whereas in
the symbol with the apotheosis of the downfall the transfigured visage of
nature is fleetingly disclosed in the light of redemption, in allegory the facies Hippocratica of history is
exposed to the eyes of the beholder as a petrified primeval landscape. History
in all that is unseasonable, sorrowful, and misguided about it from the very
beginning finds expression in a visage—nay, in a death’s head. And thus all ‘symbolic’ freedom of expression,
all classic formal harmony, all that is human, falls short of such a death’s
head—it does not express merely the nature of human existence per se, but
rather and significantly the biographical historicality of an individual
existence in this its most dilapidated natural state, as a riddle. This is the kernel of allegorical
meditation, of the baroque, secular exposition of history as the history of the
world’s suffering; significantly it is only in the stages of its decay. There is as much significance as deathly decadence
because death buries the ragged line of demarcation between physis and
significance so deeply.”6 What is this talk of evanescence meant to
reaffirm, and what is the meaning of the primeval history of signifying? I cannot develop this concept in the
traditional manner. What is in point
here is of a fundamentally different logical form from development out of a
“blueprint” constitutively underpinned by moments of general conceptual
structure. This different logical
structure itself cannot be analyzed here.
It is that of the constellation.
It does not consist in an illumination of concepts by means of one
another but rather of a constellation of ideas, and specifically of the idea of
evanescence, of significance and of the idea of nature and of the idea of
history. These are not to be resorted to
as “invariants”; the intention of the question is not to seek them out; rather,
they cluster around the concrete historical facticity that is disclosed in the
nexus of these moments in their matchlessness. How do these moments hang together with one
another here? Benjamin himself regards
nature qua Creation as marked by the stigma of evanescence. Nature itself is evanescent. But in being so it contains the moment of
history. Whenever the historical walks
upon the scene, the historical repudiates the natural element that is vanishing
within it. Complementarily, whenever
“second nature” makes an appearance, whenever that world of convention accosts
us, it is deciphered as a result of its very evanescence’s being clarified by
its significance. In Benjamin’s work
this is initially conceived of in such a way that—and this bears further
exploration—there are such things as primeval, foundational historical
phenomena that were present at the very beginning, that have vanished and are
signified in the allegorical, that return in the allegorical, that return as the
literal. One must not merely point out that
primeval historical motifs keep cropping up in history itself; rather, one must
point out that primeval history itself as evanescence contains the motif of
history. The foundational determinant of
the evanescence of the terrestrial signifies nothing other than such a
relationship between nature and history; that all Being or all that is existent
is conceivable solely as an interleaving of historical and natural Being. As evanescence primeval history is absolutely
present. It is present in the sign of
“significance.” The term “significance”
means that the moments of nature and history do not arise within one another
but rather simultaneously break out of one another and are interleaved in such
a way that the natural walks upon the scene as a sign of history and history,
when it presents itself as most historical, as a sign of nature. Everything that is Being or at least has
become Being, everything that once was Being, metamorphoses into allegory, and
in the process allegory ceases to be a category employable exclusively by art
historians. At the same time, “signifying” itself is
transubstantiated from a problem of the hermeneutics of the philosophy of
history or even from its transcendent meaning in the moment; the constitutively
historical is transubstantiated into primeval history. Whence the expression “the primeval history
of signifying.” In the Baroque idiom, the
situation of, say, a tyrant is akin to that of the setting sun. This allegorical relation already encompasses
the intimation of a procedure that could successfully construe concrete
history’s features as nature and make nature dialectical in the sign of
history. The realization of this
conception is in turn the idea of natural history.
III. Now that I have adumbrated
the origin of the idea of natural history in these terms, I wish to go
further. The unifying thread of these
three passages is contained in the notion of Golgotha. In Lukács’s
work it is merely
an enigma; in Benjamin’s it turns into the cipher that must be read. But under the auspices of radical natural-historical
thought everything existent is transformed into ruins and fragments, into the
sort of Golgotha in which significance is unearthed, in which nature and
history interpenetrate each other and the philosophy of history acquires its
mission of construing intentions. It is
therefore a double-turn that is being executed.
On the one hand I have reduced the ontological problematic to a
historical formula; I have tried to show in what manner the ontological
interrogation must be radicalized in concrete historical terms. On the other hand under the sign of
evanescence I have shown how history itself is in a certain sense rushing towards
the execution of an ontological turn.
What I understand as an ontological turn here is something completely
different from what is usually understood as such a turn nowadays. My intention is therefore not to reclaim this
expression permanently but rather to adopt it in a thoroughly dialectical
fashion. The notion of natural history
that I have in mind is not “historical ontology,” not the attempt to single out
and ontologically hypostasize a nexus of facts that as the meaning or
infrastructure of an epoch supposedly comprehends the Whole, as, for example,
Dilthey attempted to do. This Diltheyan
attempt at a historical ontology has run aground; because it failed to follow
through with facticity adequately, it has been left stuck within the bailiwick
of intellectual history and, in the manner of non-binding concepts of styles of
thought, utterly failed to apprehend materially felt reality. What must replace this is not the acquisition
of constructions of historical archetypes conceived in terms of epochs but
rather an insight into historical facticity in its historicality even as a manifestation
of natural history.
Towards the articulation of my notion of natural history I
shall take up a second problem; I shall proceed from the opposite
direction. (This constitutes a direct
continuation of the spirt of the Frankfurt discussion.) One
could say that I am referring to a kind of enchantment
of history. Here the historical in all
its contingencies would abdicate in favor of the natural and primevally
historical itself. Here, because that
which is historically encountered appears in an allegorical form, it is
supposedly being transfigured as something meaningful. That is not the sort of thing I am referring
to. To be sure, the starting point of
the interrogation is the natural character of history, the alienating. But if philosophy wished to remain nothing
other than such a passive acceptance of the chok,
so that what history is would always simultaneously represent itself as
nature—then the situation would be like what Hegel accuses Schiller of
promulgating, the night of indifference, in which all cats are gray. How can we avoid sliding into this
night? I would like to adumbrate this
before I finish.
It must be assumed here that
history as it is received by us pretends to be something utterly discontinuous, not only insofar as it
contains disparate facts and states of affairs, but also as it contains
disparities of a structural variety. If
Reizler speaks of three mutually opposed and mutually implicated determinations
of historicality—Tyche, Ananke, and Spontaneity—I would not attempt to
synthesize this division of the structure of history into these determinations
via a so-called unity. Indeed, I believe
that in its conception of this establishedness the new ontology has achieved
something very fruitful. Now this
discontinuity—which, as I mentioned, I can see no warrant for converting into a
structural wholeness—initially presents
itself as a discontinuity between the mythic-archaic, natural material of
history, of the bygone, and whatever surfaces in history in a dialectically new
fashion, new in the pregnant sense.
These are categories whose problematic is clear to me. But the differential method of approaching
nature without anticipating natural history as a unity entails that one
initially accepts and acquiesces in these two problematic and undetermined
structures in their dichotomousness as they occur in the language of
philosophy. This is easier to do than it
seems, given that the philosophy of history has been repeatedly attaining such
an interleaving of the originally existing and the newly becoming thanks to
findings presented by research. Drawing on
the domain of research, I remind you that in psychoanalysis this dichotomy is
available in all its stark distinctness: in the difference between the archaic symbols to which no associations
are conjoined, and the intersubjective, dynamic, microhistorical symbols that
are all susceptible to elimination and that can be converted into psychic up-to-dateness,
into current knowledge. Now, the initial
task of the philosophy of history, that of working out these two moments, of
separating them and comparing them with each other, and only once this
antithesis has been explicated, is a chance of succeeding at constructing out
natural history. The evidence of this is
again afforded by the pragmatic findings that present themselves when for a
start one contemplates that archaic-cum-mythical itself and the
historical-cum-new. In the process it becomes evident that the underlying
mythical-cum-archaic element, this allegedly substantial, persistent mythical
element, does not statically underlie anything even in such a fashion, but
rather that the historical dynamic is already embedded in all great myths, probably
even in all mythical images that our consciousness still possesses, and
embedded there specifically in a dialectical form, such that the mythical
foundational givens are mutually contradictory and move mutually contradictorily
(recall the phenomenon of ambivalence, the “opposite direction” of the primeval
words). The Kronos myth is one of those myths in which the god’s utmost
creative power has been instantaneously instituted in such a twofold fashion
that he who exists annihilates his creations, his children. Alternatively, it may be said that the mythology
that underlies tragedy is invariably dialectical, because on the one hand it
contains within itself the fallenness of man in his culpability vis-à-vis the
nexus of nature and at the same time propitiates this destiny with its own
inner resources; such that man hoists himself aloft of his fate as man. The dialectical moment inheres in the fact that
along with the fall into culpability and nature the tragic myths also contain
the moment of propitiation, the fundamental moment of transcendence of the
nexus of nature. The dialectic of
abortive myths redirects the notion of a static—not merely static, but undialectically
static—world of ideas back to Plato as its well-spring. In Plato the world of appearances is
intrinsically fallow. It has been abandoned, but it is visibly ruled by ideas.
Despite this, ideas have no share in it, and by this same token they have no
share in the world; thanks to this alienation of the world of human experience
from ideas, the ideas are set in stone, set amongst the stars, for the sake of
arresting this dynamic altogether. They
become static—petrified. In the Platonic
moment consciousness has already become addicted to the questing of idealism: spirit, banished from the
world and alienated from history, attains absoluteness at the cost of its
vitality. But this is already the expression of a state of consciousness, a
state in which consciousness has already lost its natural substance as immediacy.
And the delusiveness of the static character of the
mythical elements is what we must divest ourselves of if we wish to arrive at a
concrete image of natural history.
On the other hand the
“currently new,” that which is in truth produced in history dialectically,
presents itself as archaic. History is “at its most mythical when it is
at its most historical.” Here is where
the greatest difficulties lie. Instead
of expounding this line of thought in general terms, I shall give you an
example: that of semblance; and I am speaking specifically about semblance in
the sense of a second nature, about which I spoke earlier. This second nature, in pretending to be
meaningful, is a nature of semblance, and its semblance is historically
produced. It is imbued with semblance
because its reality is lost to us and we believe we understand it in a
meaningful sense, whereas it has been evacuated of meaning, or because we
interpolate alienated subjective intentions into it as its significance, as in
allegory. But the remarkable fact is
that the microhistorical essence called semblance is of a mythical
character. As the moment of semblance
inheres in all myths; nay, as the dialectic of the mythical destiny, in the
forms of hubris and blindness, is always inaugurated by semblance, the
historically produced semblance-contents are always of a mythical character and
not only inasmuch as they hark back to an archaic, primevally historical
element and as in art everything of a semblance character is bound up with myth
(one thinks here of Wagner), but inasmuch as the character of the mythical
itself recurs in this historical phenomenon of semblance. The working out of the problem of semblance
would be an authentic problem of natural history. It
would consist, for example, in showing that when you ascertain the character of
semblance in certain dwellings, this semblance is twinned with the notion of
the eternally bygone, and that it is only ever re-recognized. The phenomenon of déjà-vu,
of re-recognition, would have to be analyzed here. Moreover, the mythical, primeval phenomenon
of anxiety recurs in the presence of such a microhistorical, alienated world of
semblance. Wherever we are confronted by
this semblance-world of convention, an archaic anxiety takes hold, as does the
moment of threateningness, which is always peculiar to this semblance; the fact
that semblance has the characteristic of drawing everything into itself as it
were a funnel is also such a mythical moment of semblance. Or the moment of the
reality of semblance vis-à-vis its sheer pictoriality: the fact that everywhere
we are confronted by semblance we perceive it as expression, that it is not
simply a semblance that must be eradicated but rather expresses something that
manifests itself in it but is indescribable independently of it. This is likewise a mythical moment of
semblance. And finally: the decisive, transcendent
motif of the mythos, the motif of reconciliation, is also peculiar to
semblance. Let me remind you that emotion
is always most closely conjoined with the most minor works of art and not with
the greatest. I am referring to the
moment of reconciliation, which is present wherever the world presents itself
in its most semblance-imbued manner; such that the promise of reconciliation is
most completely given when the world is simultaneously most thickly walled off
from all “meaning.” With these words, I am sending you back to the structure of
the primevally historical element of semblance itself, where semblance in its
essence proves to be something historically produced: in the conventional
language of philosophy: where semblance is yielded by the subject-object
dialectic. In truth the second nature is
the first. The historical dialectic is
not simply a resumption of newly interpreted primeval material; rather the
historical material itself metamorphoses into something mythical and
natural-historical.
I was
hoping also to speak about the relationship between these things and historical
materialism, but here I can only say this much: it is not the supplementation
of one theory by another, but rather the exegesis of a theory. I am making myself sound as if I am, so to
speak, the authoritative expert on the materialistic dialectic. It remains to be demonstrated that the
preceding lecture is only an exegesis of certain rudiments of the materialistic
dialectic.
19328
1. Georg
Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans [The Theory of the Novel], Berlin, 1920,
p. 52.
2.
Ibid., p. 52.
3.
Walter Benjamin, Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels [Origin of the German Tragic Drama], Berlin 1928, p. 178.
4.
Ibid., p. 176.
5.
Cf. ibid., p. 160.
6.
Ibid., pp. 164f.
7.
On the
following cf. Sören Kierkegaard, On the Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates,
tr. Hans Heinrich Schaeder, Munich, Berlin, 1929, pp. 78ff.
8. Translator's Note (the preceding notes are Adorno's): The editors remark that “Die Idee der
Naturgeschichte” is the text of a lecture that Adorno delivered to the
Frankfurt chapter of the Kant-Gesellschaft on July
15, 1932 and that it furnished some of the motifs of “Weltgeist und
Naturgeschichte” [“World-Spirit and Natural History”], the third part of Negative
Dialectics.
THE END
Translation
unauthorized but Copyright ©2018 by Douglas Robertson
Source: Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Werke, Rolf Tiedemann, ed. in collaboration with
Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss, and Klaus Schultz (Suhrkamp: Frankfurt am
Main, 1986; Directmedia: Berlin, 2003), Vol. I, p. 345ff.