Aesthetics

Theodor W. Adorno, Eberhard Ortland, Wieland Hoban

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780745694870
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Aesthetics in Philosophy

This volume of lectures on aesthetics, given by Adorno in the winter semester of 1958–9, formed the foundation for his later Aesthetic Theory, widely regarded as one of his greatest works.

The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from an intense analysis of the work of Georg Lukács to a sustained reflection on the theory of aesthetic experience, from an examination of works by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Benjamin, to a discussion of the latest experiments of John Cage, attesting to the virtuosity and breadth of Adorno's engagement. All the while, Adorno remains deeply connected to his surrounding context, offering us a window onto the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in post-war Germany.

This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in the development of critical theory.

Lecture 1
11 November 1958

Philosophical aesthetics, which you will learn various things about in this course of lectures – I almost said: of which I hope to give you a few ‘samples’ in these lectures – has a difficult time, especially in the field of philosophy. It has, in fact, fallen a little into disrepute and, compared to the development of a large number of other philosophical disciplines, has received only a desultory treatment during the last thirty years. If you pick up Fischer's recently published Encyclopedia of Philosophy and consult the entry for aesthetics, which, as far as I know, was contributed by Ivo Frenzel,¹ you will find some explanation of the reasons for this. For we are told there that, on the one hand, philosophical aesthetics is infinitely dependent on prior assumptions, that it depends on the respective overall philosophies underlying it, especially the epistemological ones, and that it is swept up almost without resistance in the changes affecting these tendencies; but, on the other hand, that it never entirely penetrates the work of art in its concretion and, in a sense, always falls short of the work. Philosophical aesthetics, the author states, lacks the secure foundation of other philosophical disciplines. Now, I would argue that the secure foundation of the other philosophical disciplines is a somewhat precarious matter too; if you look at how many things are mere assumptions there – with the exception of the most formal and, I would say, the most meaningless logical theorems – one will surely encounter no less of a vacuum.²

I think that the peculiar situation of aesthetics is due rather to the fact that there is not truly an internally continuous tradition of aesthetic thought of the kind found in the area of epistemology and logic, at least in connection with the theory of science, that aesthetics has generally followed a more or less erratic course, and that it fluctuates between attempting to develop aesthetic theories from particular philosophical positions or, conversely, simply leaving the works of art to themselves and perhaps expressing descriptively what is the case in these works, and arriving at such an aesthetics in this way. Although I cannot promise you that I will present anything resembling a fully developed aesthetics here – for the very simple reason that my own aesthetic thoughts are in flux, and by no means in a state today that would permit such a codification, but also for the simple reason that an occasion like this course of two-part lectures would, for reasons of time alone, not allow me to provide you with such a fully explicit theory – I do think that these lectures can at least give you an idea of how a theory of aesthetics, a philosophical aesthetics, is possible, even today, that it is required, and, using some models of aesthetic problems, at least to elaborate on what the nature of such an aesthetics should be. The course is ambitious, to the extent that it seeks to expound the possibility of philosophical aesthetics, which I feel is a very urgent matter today; on the other hand, it is not ambitious at all, to the extent that it does not presume truly to carry out such a philosophical aesthetics.

As far as the dependence of aesthetics on great philosophy is concerned, and hence the connection of different philosophical aesthetics on philosophical theories, I would like to explain this briefly right at the outset in order to give you an idea of the problem that exists concerning precisely the connection between philosophy and aesthetics. Kantian aesthetics, the Kantian definition of beauty – or one of the Kantian definitions of beauty, at least – is, as many of you will know, that of ‘disinterested pleasure’³ – that is to say, some objects or other give pleasure to us as subjects without the involvement of any interest on our part, in the sense of our appetitive faculty or will. For example, as soon as we have the intention to eat a tasty apple, we no longer act aesthetically but rather animally or naturally, thus violating Kant's definition of the aesthetic. This is surely clear enough. As clear as it is, however, and as little as philosophy can dispense with such a definition as this Kantian one, it necessarily stems from a series of definitions that are truly specific only to Kantian philosophy. That means it first of all contains what one could call ‘transcendental subjectivism’; the nature of beauty is recognized here from the perspective of the relationship between beauty and us as subjects, while the thought of something inherently beautiful, with a beauty that is independent from our specific forms of perception and only faces them autonomously, is not envisaged at all in this definition of beauty.⁴ And it is, furthermore, a definition of beauty in which a formal criterion such as enjoyment – where some forms exist which our need for sensory perception views as satisfying rather than unsatisfying – is presupposed. I think you need only a second to consider whether the things we understandably call beautiful always have this sensually pleasing element – or whether this concept of the sensually pleasing, at least, does not perhaps undergo such incredible refinement and complication that nothing is left of this originally plain idea – and to call to mind that, because of this precondition of Kantian philosophy, so plausible a definition of beauty as the one he provides here ultimately loses much of its plausibility. This means, then, that aesthetics is here indeed swept up in the entire problems of philosophy.

By contrast, I will now give you the definition of beauty found in the Aesthetics of Hegel,⁵ which, alongside Schelling's Philosophy of Art⁶ and the third book of The World as Will and Representation,⁷ is one of the most significant theoretical achievements in aesthetics that followed directly on from Kant under the banner of German Idealism. Hegel defines beauty thus: beauty is ‘the sensual appearance of the idea’.⁸ Here a concept of the idea is presupposed in an almost Platonizing sense as substantial, as something – one could almost say – given, as something that can appear; precisely this had been ruled out by Kantian philosophy, which forbade working with some idea or other as a finite positivity.⁹ And only if you take into account something that you cannot simply know, of course, namely that Hegelian philosophy criticizes exactly this Kantian doctrine, that Hegelian philosophy claims the ability to construct and adequately recognize the idea or the absolute after all – only then does something like this assertion that beauty is the sensual appearance of the idea gain meaning at all. And, naturally, such a thesis as this superb definition by Hegel becomes infinitely less plausible in an intellectual climate where many people consider it simply dogmatic or deluded to posit a concept such as the idea as effective,¹⁰ which does not help at all to gain an understanding of the actual work of art, in which such an idea is by no means always realized directly. I would like to say now, at the very start of this course, that I feel extremely close and indebted to the Hegelian approach in one respect at least: for when the aforementioned definition by Hegel mentions this ‘appearance of the idea’, or ‘of the absolute’,¹¹ it is already referring back – and this is once again due to the fundamental difference between the two great philosophies, the Kantian and the Hegelian – to the fact that beauty itself is not merely a formal thing, or merely a subjective thing, but rather something in the matter itself. There is no reflection on me as the observer or the effect that the art has on me.¹² On the contrary: in his Aesthetics, Hegel treated this entire view of aesthetics as a doctrine of art's effect, which was still inherited from the eighteenth century, with withering disdain – and, I would assume, with good reason; he starts from the assumption that beauty is something objective, something substantial, something in the matter itself, in the idea, which necessarily – to use the term in its traditional, Platonic meaning for a second – possesses such a form of objectivity compared to mere subjective consciousness.

Let me begin by saying that I will attempt to align the deliberations on aesthetics we are carrying out here with this notion of aesthetic objectivity, the notion that not only the nature of beauty but all aesthetic categories – and beauty, I would add, is only one aesthetic category that, in its isolation, is by no means sufficient to open up the entire realm of the aesthetic¹³ – must be disclosed in their objectivity, not as mere effects on us as subjects. On the other hand, I am very much aware that, in this context, I cannot simply posit Hegel's objective idealism and objective dialectics as true. What I can attempt is possibly and at most the following: to show you with an analysis of the categories that something resembling aesthetic objectivity does actually exist, and thus to do something that I increasingly recognize as the essential approach to dialectical philosophy, namely to render fruitful all the experience, the living experience that lies sealed within dialectical philosophy and show it to you. In other words, quite simply put: that objectivity of the aesthetic which I assume will occupy us here can result as objectivity only from an analysis of the facts, problems and structures of aesthetic objects – that is to say, the works of art. There is no other path to this objectivity than to immerse oneself in the works themselves,¹⁴ and I will not hesitate to show you at least with a few models how I think such an objectively oriented aesthetic investigation should actually be carried out; here our central methodological tenet should be – if I may use Hegel's words again – to devote ourselves as purely as possible to the matter¹⁵ without adding ...