Can There Be Reconciliation with Nature?

Among the concepts central to Adorno's philosophical thought, some seem to attract comparatively less attention than others, though not always because their importance remains unrecognized. It is rather as if they provoked a strange sense of embarrassment, a perplexity so strong that it interferes with attempts to take them seriously and to examine them properly. Or are they just taken for granted on the basis of an intuitive value attributed to them? One such concept is undoubtedly the concept of reconciliation, Versöhnung, and especially the use Adorno makes of it when he speaks of "Versöhnung mit der Natur," "reconciliation with nature," or, alternatively and more ambiguously, of "Versöhnung der Natur," "reconciliation of nature," an expression that hovers between the idea of a reconciliation brought about by man and a reconciliation brought about by nature itself. The English word "reconciliation" derives from Latin conciliare, which means bringing together, connecting, and uniting, but also winning over, making friendly. The German word Versöhnung derives from Sühne, which means atonement and expiation but also, in a legal context, trial and judgment, as well as settlement and peace-making.

Versöhnung is an inherited concept¹ that belongs to the Judeo-Christian tradition of monotheism. It plays, as is well known, an important role in Hegel's proto-Christian understanding of dialectics, especially in the context of a phenomenology of Spirit. In his early writings on the Spirit of Christianity, Hegel contrasts reconciliation, which he determines as a "modification of love,"² with the law—with judgment, punishment and justice—to which Judaism is said to adhere so as to regulate, standardize, and normalize a fateful life prone to transgressions, infractions, and violations. However, if reconciliation is inscribed in the "vital unity"³ of love, its unifying effect must be set apart from the unifying effect of a concept, and the question arises whether it can be called a concept in the first place. When used in discourse, it is a concept that signifies that which is itself not conceptual, inasmuch as the "vital unity" of love, the unity of reconciled life in its fullness, is a felt unity, the unity of a feeling. Reconciliation resides in the feeling of one who carries "all of human nature" within him and can therefore appeal to forgiveness. This is to say that, in Christianity, sensuousness, the sensuousness of feeling, is inseparable from faith and spirituality, and that the estrangement of life that calls for reconciliation and forgiveness must also be an estrangement from God. Conversely, the Christian linkage between "estrangement from God"⁴ and "reconciliation with God" cannot be conceived of "outside of nature," as Hegel puts it. Thus, reconciliation is not so much a concept, a concept for a conceptual operation, as it is a unifying achievement based on a feeling of unity that has both, and indistinguishably so, a natural and a spiritual dimension, precisely because unity is of the Spirit, something that cannot be achieved, once it has been lost, without Spirit permeating nature. But if reconciliation is by definition a unifying achievement whose spiritual dimension should not be conflated with the conceptual realm, then it is perhaps also true that reconciliation is at the very origin of Spirit, or that Spirit can only be accessed in its intuitive existence, in its individuality, if one knows how to reconcile oneself and how to be reconciled, how to speak the word of reconciliation, the word that offers or that means reconciliation because it expresses a reciprocal recognition, an acknowledgment that proves mutual. Derrida suggests as much in his commentary on a famous sentence to be found at the end of the chapter on Spirit in Hegel's Phenomenology. The sentence reads: "The word of reconciliation is the existing Spirit which immediately intuits [anschaut] in its opposite the pure knowledge of itself as the universal essence, intuits it in the pure knowledge of itself as individuality existing absolutely inwardly—a reciprocal recognition which is absolute Spirit."⁵ Derrida comments: "This may indicate that if I wish to access what Spirit is, what...