March 31, 2010
Adorno argued that art is where nature is remembered, where the repression and denial of nature is remembered In the early lecture The idea of natural history, Adorno on the one hand emphasizes the importance of breaking through what has petrified into second nature, and on the other the need to see nature itself as historical.
In Dialectic of Enlightenment Adorno and Horkheimer argued that the process of civilization is intertwined with separation from nature, with human being's departure from the immediate restraints imposed by nature. It is through the domination both of inner human nature (desires, needs) and outer non-human nature that human beings have been able to escape nature's immediate hold. This domination is not, however, accomplished without repercussions for human beings themselves. The increasing exploitation of nature in modernity has led to a capitalist society that is just as coercive as nature, itself the object of mastery. Western capitalist society has become a "second nature" exploiting the first.
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