Adorno on Nature

Adorno on Nature

Deborah Cook

Language: English

Pages: 224

ISBN: 1844652629

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Decades before the environmental movement emerged in the 1960s, Adorno condemned our destructive and self-destructive relationship to the natural world, warning of the catastrophe that may result if we continue to treat nature as an object that exists exclusively for our own benefit. "Adorno on Nature" presents the first detailed examination of the pivotal role of the idea of natural history in Adorno's work. A comparison of Adorno's concerns with those of key ecological theorists - social ecologist Murray Bookchin, ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant, and deep ecologist Arne Naess - reveals how Adorno speaks directly to many of today's most pressing environmental issues. Ending with a discussion of the philosophical conundrum of unity in diversity, "Adorno on Nature" also explores how social solidarity can be promoted as a necessary means of confronting environmental problems.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cook, D. 2000. “Critical Stratagems in Adorno and Habermas: Theories of Ideology and the Ideology of Theory”. Historical Materialism 6(1): 67–87. Cook, D. 2001. “Adorno, Ideology, and Ideology Critique”. Philosophy and Social Criticism 27(1): 1–20. Cook, D. 2003. “Response to [Gordon] Finlayson”. Historical Materialism 11(2): 189–98. Cook, D. 2004a. Adorno, Habermas, and the Search for a Rational Society. London: Routledge. Cook, D. 2004b. “Ein Reaktionäres Schwein? Political Activism and

evolution decentration 48–9, 55–7; see also Whitebook deep ecology see Naess Deep Ecology Platform 122–3, 125–32 democracy 87, 141; see also public sphere Descartes, R. 54, 71 determinate negation 4, 78–86, 88, 107, 119–20, 163n4; see also critique, Hegel, Kafka, Marcuse, Marx, metaphysics, non-identity thinking, Spinoza and art 86, 111, 174n26 and emphatic concepts 73, 76–84, 86, 88, 109, 112, 158 and epistemological dualism 83–4 and freedom 78–9 and exchange relations 109 and

embedded “cultural, traditional and psychological systems of obedience and command” (1991a: 4), must first be dismantled before the public sphere is able to accommodate the “equality of unequals” (ibid.: 167). To establish a freer and more rational society, in which each individual participates “directly in the formulation of social policy”, we must confront and eradicate “the psychic problems of hierarchy as well as social problems of domination” (ibid.: 340–41). Yet Bookchin has no solutions to

and restore the health of the Earth’s Ecosystem”. Partnership is also invoked in the title of a Miami-based group, the Global Assembly of Women and the Environment – Partners in Life (ibid.: 218–19). At the same time, Merchant admits that “the implementation of partnership ethic is not easy”. In Reinventing Eden, she describes three major obstacles to the implementation of a partnership ethic. The greatest challenge comes from “the free-market economy’s growth-oriented ethic, which uses both

speculated that the ego might reconcile itself with the id by means of sublimation in work that he wrote before he advanced his hypothesis about the life and death instincts. 31. Hence, I disagree with Seyla Benhabib in Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory. For Benhabib contends that, in contrast to Horkheimer who “acknowledges that reason had an emancipatory force”, Adorno views reason as “inherently an instrument of domination” (1986: 164). 32. For my

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