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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...