Autonomous thought is the only vehicle for giving voice to repressed nature.

Evidence

Their view was that there was a positive side to naturerunning from myth up to the Enlightenment and the age of reasonthat was ultimately based on a spontaneous and to that extent natural sense of what was right, good and true. Horkheimer and Adorno repeatedly emphasized that only self-reflective thinking could give voice to repressed nature; that giving support to nature was only possible by releasing its apparent opposite, independent thought. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 529

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is the operative sense of ‘nature’ in Negative Dialectics-era Horkheimer/Adorno: a normative good carried in what civilization represses, not a romantic wild.