This article argues that Immanuel Kant’s concept of disinterested contemplation is inadequate because it represses the historical suffering of nature, and thus the aesthetic object’s materiality. It also argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of natural beauty ought to be considered a response to Kant’s concept of disinterested contemplation and, finally, that Adorno must ground the aesthetic concept of natural beauty in a concept of temporality. Such temporality would be a mode of aesthetic experience that allows natural beauty to critically present the violence of history while also anticipating a future in which such violence does not exist. The article calls the new form of temporality that would engage properly with past and future metamorphic. Metamorphic time thus involves recollection and speculation that dialectically refer to each other.
Involuntarily and unconsciously, the observer enters into a contract with the work, agreeing to submit to it on condition that it speak. In the pledged receptivity of the observer, pure-self-abandonment-that moment of free exhalation in nature-survives" (Adorno, 1997).Among certain scholars of Theodor W. Adorno's philosophical aesthetics, the concept of interpretation has been assumed to be fundamentally conservative, because it cannot impart any concrete or practical insight. Interpretation has been defined in many different ways-some of them misleading or inaccurate. For example, Lydia Goehr views interpretation as a method for conceptually fixing the contents of artworks; Peter Uwe Hohendahl argues that it functions as an experience that leads to a theological experience of redemption or mystical ecstasy; Gunther Figal views interpretation as a mode of mimetic comportment; and Jay Bernstein argues that interpretation is primarily an epistemic method, as philosophy and art correspond to Kant's dichotomy between concept and intuition (Goehr, 2008,
In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno argues that, in modernity, art and philosophy are reciprocally dependent upon each other for legitimation and critical force. This claim has puzzled scholars and provoked controversy. I argue that Adorno’s thesis may be comprehended in the following manner: art requires philosophy because, without the latter, art would lack the power to critique social and historical reality (in particular, the ideological elements that often remain invisible as second nature), and to rationally interpret the material particularity expressed by such reality; and, conversely, philosophy requires art because the latter expresses historical experience to reason. Such material historical experience is necessary in order to prevent philosophy from falling into ideological convention; idle speculation; or abstract and reified instrumentality. Thus, the constellation of history, art, and philosophy is essential to Adorno’s aesthetics.
I argue that Samuel Beckett’s concept of imagination in the short story Echo’s Bones, written in 1933, may usefully provide an antidote to Adorno’s neglect of the same faculty in Aesthetic Theory. First, I discuss Adorno’s ideas concerning imagination and non-violent synthesis; second, I show how Echo’s Bones critically attends to these two concepts. In Beckett’s writing, the aesthetic imagination allows the reader to receive the work (without logical categories); to synthesize aesthetic material; and to transform tradition. Beckett’s concept of imagination is critical and receptive, and also shows how the artwork may unify historical and experiential material in the aesthetic object without coercion.
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