On the Dialectic of Nature and Art: Aesthetic Experience in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory

According to Adorno's Aesthetic Theory, aesthetic experience is a unique experience that, unlike the reified experience of life within the social totality, is not based on domination. This means that the subject does not relate to its object instrumentally, or the object is not merely a means to some external end, but rather the very end of the experience. He states that every work of art, in a certain sense, is the experience of "the world once again", namely the world cleansed of immediate purposes- or of what Adorno calls "the reality principle". Adorno is not the first philosopher to characterize aesthetic experience in this way. Many aestheticians, following Kant, have described it as some sort of free or disinterested experience in which we appreciate the object for its own sake. What is original about Adorno’s theory, however, is that he seeks to explain this openness or “freedom to the object” as an original, repressed mode or behavior, giving aesthetic experience a critical and political significance. He says that aesthetic experience is a “refuge” for “those impulses, forms of behavior, feelings or whatever else that otherwise fall victim to the progressive control over nature and to the rationality that progresses together with it.” In this paper, we aim to reconstruct this thesis as it appears in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory (1970) and his 1958-1959 Lectures on Aesthetics. This will demonstrate how Adorno, by offering a dialectical account of the relation between art and nature, successfully combines aesthetic formalism with social critique.