La natura rammemorata: Adorno, Kant e la preistoria dell’arte

Abstract

The contribution examines Adorno’s re-evaluation of Kant’s "natural aesthetics" as opposed to Hegel’s “philosophy of art”. Taking as a reference point the pages of Aesthetic Theory on natural beauty, on the one hand, and the discussion of the sublime in the Vorlesungen, on the other, the question of the relationship between art and nature is addressed based on a number of pivotal issues. These include the description of beauty as “determined indeterminability”; the mimetic interplay between reflective and determinative judgement; “purposefulness without purpose” as an apparition of natural history; and, again, the paradoxical “aesthetics of resistance” that Adorno sees foreshadowed in the experience of the sublime, whereby man, instead of setting himself up as master of nature, attempts to resist its overwhelming power by recognising himself as part of it. Both the experience of beauty and that of the sublime are thus essential to understanding the concept of an “anamnesis of nature within the subject”, which lies at the heart of Adorno’s later thinking.