Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno

Aesthetics, Ethics and Nature in Adorno Introduction: Habermas’s Critique of Adorno’s Aesthetics In response to Jürgen Habermas’s negative assessment of the import of Theodor Adorno’s aesthetics, I revisit Adorno’s thought in light of the issue of whether and to what extent there can be an aesthetics of nature, and its potential ethical and social-political import.1 For philosophers from Hegel to Gadamer and Habermas, there can be no ‘aesthetics of nature’ as the aesthetic in modernity primarily concerns human expressions and products, whereas nature is contrasted with Geist (spirit or human social activity) that overcomes it. Habermas continues the Neo-Kantian tradi- tion separating facticity and validity, and value-free nature from culturally formed value, such that aesthetic judgments consist of intersubjectively redeemable validity claims about authenticity, genuineness, sincerity, and taste. As these categories do not apply to the natural world, there can be at best an indirect aesthetic appreciation of natural phenomena. Likewise, the radical separation of moral from aesthetic validity claims entails that it is a confusion of spheres or languages to consider their mutual entwinement. In this context, Habermas has criticized Adorno’s ‘utopian aestheticism,’ i.e. the connection between art, emancipation and the promise of happi- ness in Adorno’s works, and Adorno’s use of unsystematically articulated 1 Habermas summarizes his critique in Habermas and Dews, Autonomy and Solidarity, 152–154. 320 ERIC S. NELSON speculative concepts, such as mimesis and non-identity, which have both aesthetic and social-political dimensions for Adorno.2 Habermas’s critique of Adorno is pursued...