This is an uncorrected draft, the final version of which.pdfVIP

1 [This is an uncorrected draft, the final version of which appeared at: Journal of Critical Realism 8.3 (2009) 316-342, doi: 10.1558/jocr.v8i3.316. Citations should be to the final published version.] CAUSALITY AND CRITICAL THEORY: NATURE’S ORDER IN ADORNO,  CARTWRIGHT AND BHASKAR Craig Reeves Introduction It is perhaps understandable that Adorno is usually thought to be sceptical of science and opposed to a realist view of causality. His hostility toward scientific thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment 1 has lead to the impression that Adorno’s views of nature and natural science are either implausible or incoherent.2 It seems that Adorno’s generalised scepticism about instrumental reason and scientific rationality leads him to reject the reality of science’s causal descriptions.3 In fact, such an interpretation is misleading. It is certainly the case that Adorno’s views on matters of causality are unclear, and he did not explicitly and systematically thematise it. But things look very different when we focus our attention on Adorno’s mature work on the idea of freedom and consider Adorno’s comments on causality in the context of the broader themes of his philosophy. I argue that Adorno’s philosophy of freedom is implicitly committed to a picture of nature’s order that is neither strictly determinist nor blindly chaotic. In order to make full sense of his arguments about freedom, we must appreciate that a view of nature’s order is implicit even if un-worked-out in Adorno’s philosophy, and that such a view needs to be reconstructed in order to see his arguments in their best light. I explain how Adorno’s philosophy of freedom takes us to causality ( 1-2), before asking what Adorno’s picture of nature must roughly be lik