The prior issue of Krisis (42:1) published Critical Naturalism: A Manifesto, with the aim to

instigate a debate of the issues raised in this manifesto – the necessary re-thinking of the role

(and the concept) of nature in critical theory in relation to questions of ecology, health, and

inequality. Since Krisis considers itself a place for philosophical debates that take contempo-

rary struggles as starting point, it issued an open call and solicited responses to the manifesto.

This is one of the sixteen selected responses, which augment, specify, or question the assump-

tions and arguments of the manifesto.

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Even for a naturalist, names matter. One should welcome the new label “critical naturalism”

and wish it good luck on the contemporary philosophical battlefield, where various opponents

nature” allows us to adopt “nature-skeptical” and “nature-endorsing” arguments (Soper 1995)

as it comes to grasp the historically changing and complex interrelationships of other-than-

human natures and all-too-human societies. Two claims are indeed central for a “second na-

ture” approach in critical social philosophy. On the one hand, it affirms that the realm of the

social is to be conceived as taking the secondary shapes of embodied habits, customs, rules,

and institutions, in which first nature – be it internal or external – exists insofar as it is socially

mediated. To put it with Adorno, “in truth second nature is primary” (Adorno 1984). On the

other hand, “second nature” firmly opposes constructivist and hybridist approaches where first

nature seems to vanish beneath its secondarization. Far from disappearing altogether, first na-

ture here is seen as persisting through its mediated forms in the second nature of the social.

here and there – in Adorno, for instance – as a direct target of social critique.

One example of how “second nature” becomes an object of critique rather than operating as a

critical tool is provided by Hegel in his anthropology (Hegel 1978). Putting into question the

mind-body dualism, the anthropology is also the place where Hegel develops some of his most

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to a non-reductive “second nature” naturalism. Whereas spirit in general stems from nature

without being reducible to it, some races and cultures have shown to be relatively more at-

tached to their natural environments and inner needs than others. Considered in environmen-

talist and culturalist terms, Hegel’s racism partakes of the core idea of “second nature.” Still

applying to every human being and to each “spirit of a people,” the Bildungs-process which

consists in transforming natural environments through work, and elevating one’s natural im-

dirty water of Hegel’s environmental and cultural racism. Adorno’s immanent critique of He-

gel aims to show that he has not been dialectical enough when thinking of the relations of

nature and spirit. The problem for Adorno lies not in the dualist autonomy of Hegel’s spirit

apart from nature, but precisely in its autonomization from it, which results in the affirmation

of spirit’s gradual superiority over nature. To Adorno, Hegel has failed in his own dialectical

terms to grasp the mediation between nature and spirit in the very moment he considered the

former as hierarchically superior to the latter.

If the diagnosis of the non-critical, ideological side of “second nature” in Hegel is correct,

Adorno also furnishes an antidote to it by way of the concept of “nature-history” (Naturge-

schichte) (Adorno 2006). In the steps of Marx’ critique of political economy, “nature-history”

as remaining on equal grounds. Quoting from Marx’ German Ideology, Adorno speaks of the

true “inner mediation” of nature and spirit instead of the subordination of the one to the other.

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social philosophy. The concept of “nature-history” implies to denounce ideologically abusive

“naturalizations” of socially contingent practices and institutions and to give nature its fair due

within its constant interrelationship with human history. In our present socio-ecological crisis

where the possibility of escaping the stranglehold of Capitalocene is bound up with the need

of inventing new ways of socializing with nature, this double-sided approach could contribute

to the “critical naturalism” program so generously sketched by the Manifesto and its authors.

References