DOCSLIB.ORG

{PDF} Negative Dialectics

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
{PDF} Negative Dialectics NEGATIVE DIALECTICS PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Theodor W. Adorno | 440 pages | 01 Dec 1997 | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC | 9780826401328 | English | London, United Kingdom Negative Dialectics PDF Book The idea that we could perfectly understand social reality, or that we could identify it as rational—in other words, the idea of a identity of the actual and the rational—was no longer imaginable. Society has come to be organized around the production of exchange values for the sake of producing exchange values, which, of course, always already requires a silent appropriation of surplus value. Negative Dialectics. How can this be, the authors ask. Aesthetic Theory , trans. Notable theorists. Geuss, R. As early as Plato , dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of the 'negation of the negation' later became the succinct term. He describes dialectics as the attempt to recognize the nonidentity between thought and the object while carrying out the project of conceptual identification. Gillespie et al. Conflict and consolidation marked the last decade of Adorno's life. Habermas, J. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Otherwise the failures of modernity will continue in a new guise under contemporary conditions. Adorno, O'Connor argues, is committed to the "concretion" of philosophy: his thesis of nonidentity attempts to show that reality is not reducible to appearances. Sherratt, Y. Adorno develops a bold vision of critical thought as something that is more productive and active than practice. The Hegelian enterprise has collapsed. Search Search. Hammer, E. According to Marx, bourgeois economists necessarily ignore the exploitation intrinsic to capitalist production. To summarize, " Thus, every concept has a history and is embedded within history. Adorno's diagnosis of the exchange society has three levels: politico-economic, social-psychological, and cultural. Negative Dialectics Writer This title became the subtitle when the book was published in These claims, in turn, consolidate and extend the historiographic and social- theoretical arguments already canvassed. It is fair to say that Adorno dedicated himself to this precise question over the course of the next decades and until the end of his life. Adorno and W. Biographical Sketch 2. All of his most important social-theoretical claims show up in these studies. Download as PDF Printable version. Yet he does see politically engaged art as a partial corrective to the bankrupt aestheticism of much mainstream art. Sherratt, Y. Academic Tools How to cite this entry. Adorno's purpose was to overcome the formal logical limits of the previous definitions of dialectics by putting into light that new knowledge arises less from a Hegelian unification of opposite categories as defined following Aristotelian logic than by the revelation of the limits of knowledge. Negative Dialectics 6. Negative Dialectics , Adorno's magnum opus on epistemology and metaphysics, appeared in The first section in the Introduction to Negative Dialectics indicates the direction Adorno's appropriation will take ND 3—4. Yet that does not diminish its importance or potential. Adorno regards authentic works of modern art as social monads. All Rights Reserved. There is a flip side to this: a lack or loss of freedom in society—in the political, economic, and legal structures within which we live—signals a concomitant failure in cultural enlightenment—in philosophy, the arts, religion, and the like. Adorno Anthologies The Adorno Reader , ed. Problems of Moral Philosophy , ed. Open access to the SEP is made possible by a world-wide funding initiative. Bernstein, London: Routledge, Vries, H. As commentary and criticism, Adorno's aesthetic writings are unparalleled in the subtlety and sophistication with which they trace work-internal tensions and relate them to unavoidable sociohistorical conflicts. By making the positive a condition for it, critique is tamed from the very beginning and loses its vehemence. Search Search. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments , M. Sign in with your library card Please enter your library card number. Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive. Adorno , Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. As concepts, for example, the a priori categories of the faculty of understanding Verstand would be unintelligible if they were not already about something that is nonconceptual. Enhanced bibliography for this entry at PhilPapers , with links to its database. Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords , , trans. Dialectic of Enlightenment 3. By this alone happiness reaches into the universal unhappiness. Robertson, Cambridge, Mass. Such imposition is driven by a societal formation whose exchange principle demands the equivalence exchange value of what is inherently nonequivalent use value. James Bohman. Negative Dialectics Reviews In more ordinary language, Hegel is arguing that existence as a whole constitutes a unity of all opposites, in which everything has its place and that the tension between these opposites gradually resolves itself into pre-existing whole. An economist by training who was supposed to contribute a chapter to Dialectic of Enlightenment but never did Wiggershaus , —19 , Pollock argued that the state had acquired dominant economic power in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and New Deal America. In Hegel the dialectic is widely seen as the means by which, through contradiction and tension, human history represents the unfolding of human freedom as the expression of the Weltgeist , or world spirit. Adorno asks this against the backdrop of Karl Marx's Theses on Feuerbach , which famously proclaimed that philosophy's task is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Conversely, the supposedly pure forms of space and time cannot simply be nonconceptual intuitions. Morris, M. Adorno's claims about art in general stem from his reconstruction of the modern art movement. Sherman, D. Although Adorno shares many of Marx's anthropological intuitions, he thinks that a twentieth-century equation of truth with practical fruitfulness had disastrous effects on both sides of the iron curtain. For Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , the dialectic was a process of realization that things contain their own negation and through this realization the parts are sublated into something greater. Delete Cancel Save. Ziarek eds. This website uses cookies as well as similar tools and technologies to understand visitors' experiences. Leppert, trans. Lee, L. Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link , trans. Gibson, N. In semblance nonsemblance is promised ND —5. Solomon, Cambridge, Mass. Mirror Sites View this site from another server:. From both sides Adorno tries to elicit the sociohistorical significance of the art and philosophy discussed. Shuster, M. When it comes to the Frankfurt school, the Anglo-Saxon tradition is confronted with all of its worst nightmares in one torrid night of speculative muscle flexing. It must ask, as Kant asked about metaphysics after Hume's critique of rationalism, How is philosophy still possible? Adorno himself followed it up immediately by acknowledging his inability to develop further, at least at the time, what exactly he had in mind. Germany Europe Walter Benjamin comment. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Preface. Negative Dialectics Read Online Adorno , London: Macmillan Press. London: Routledge. Bernstein, J. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. The artwork has an internal truth content to the extent that the artwork's import can be found internally and externally either true or false. Adorno's purpose was to overcome the formal logical limits of the previous definitions of dialectics by putting into light that new knowledge arises less from a Hegelian unification of opposite categories as defined following Aristotelian logic than by the revelation of the limits of knowledge. Don't have an account? Horkheimer and Adorno believe that society and culture form a historical totality, such that the pursuit of freedom in society is inseparable from the pursuit of enlightenment in culture DE xvi. Related topics. Human beings are a product of evolution but evolution is not there to create human beings. Thinking is not resignation, it is the opposite. The social functions emphasized in his own commentaries and criticisms are primarily intellectual functions rather than straightforwardly political or economic functions. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The Jargon of Authenticity , trans. The plays of Samuel Beckett, to whom Adorno had intended to dedicate Aesthetic Theory , are emblematic in that regard. And once Adorno had, in his way, undermined the Hegelian and Platonic dialectic, we are left with a far less systematic notion of contradiction. It is the very contradiction between what is and what might be that allows us to overstep the boundaries with which we are constantly presented in order to create our endpoint, rather than simply sleepwalk towards it. Susan Buck-Morss, in her book The Origin of Negative Dialectics , summarizes the negative dialectic in the following terms:. Negative Dialectics 6. Rather, such exploitation has become even more abstract than it was in Marx's day, and therefore all the more effective and pervasive. The only way to expose these antagonisms,
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Redemption of the Postmodern Subject
    University of New Orleans ScholarWorks@UNO Senior Honors Theses Undergraduate Showcase 5-2017 Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Redemption of the Postmodern Subject Franklin Fehrman University of New Orleans Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.uno.edu/honors_theses Part of the Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Fehrman, Franklin, "Negative Dialectics and the Aesthetic Redemption of the Postmodern Subject" (2017). Senior Honors Theses. 89. https://scholarworks.uno.edu/honors_theses/89 This Honors Thesis-Unrestricted is protected by copyright and/or related rights. It has been brought to you by ScholarWorks@UNO with permission from the rights-holder(s). You are free to use this Honors Thesis-Unrestricted in any way that is permitted by the copyright and related rights legislation that applies to your use. For other uses you need to obtain permission from the rights-holder(s) directly, unless additional rights are indicated by a Creative Commons license in the record and/or on the work itself. This Honors Thesis-Unrestricted has been accepted for inclusion in Senior Honors Theses by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks@UNO. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NEGATIVE DIALECTICS AND THE AESTHETIC REDEMPTION OF THE POSTMODERN SUBJECT An Honors Thesis Presented to the Department of Philosophy of the University of New Orleans In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Liberal Arts, with University High Honors and Honors in Philosophy by Franklin Fehrman May 2017 ii Acknowledgments I would like to thank the entire philosophy department at the University of New Orleans, including Dr. Edward Johnson, Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Aesthetic Theory
    Draft Introduction The concept of philosophical aesthetics has an antiquated quality, as does the con- cept of a system or that of morals. This feeling is in no way restricted to artistic praxis and the public indifference to aesthetic theory. Even in academic circles, essays relevant to aesthetics have for decades now noticeably diminished. This point is made in a recent dictionary of philosophy: "There is scarcely another philosophical discipline that rests on such flimsy presuppositions as does aesthet- ics. Like a weather vane it is 'blown about by every philosophical, cultural, and scientific gust; at one moment it is metaphysical and in the next empirical; now normative, then descriptive; now defined by artists, then by connoisseurs; one day art is supposedly the center of aesthetics and natural beauty merely preliminary, the next day art beauty is merely second-hand natural beauty.' Moritz Geiger's description of the dilemma of aesthetics has been true since the middle of the nineteenth century. There is a double reason for this pluralism of aesthetic theo- ries, which are often even left unfinished: It resides on the one hand in the funda- mental difficulty, indeed impossibility, of gaining general access to art by means of a system of philosophical categories, and on the other, in the fact that aesthetic statements have traditionally presupposed theories of knowledge. The problem- atic of theories of knowledge returns directly in aesthetics, because how aesthetics interprets its objects depends on the concept of the object held by the theory of knowledge. This traditional dependency, however, is defined by the subject matter itself and is already contained in the terminology."1 Although this well describes the situation, it does not sufficiently explain it; the other philosophical disciplines, including the theory of knowledge and logic, are no less controversial 332 DRAFT INTRODUCTION 333 and yet interest in them has not flagged to a similar extent.
    [Show full text]
  • Art and Society in Theodor Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
    ARTICLES Art and society in Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory Francisco Fianco Universidade de Passo Fundo Abstract The main theme of this text is the relations between art and society as woven by Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, giving special emphasis, among others, to the concepts of disartification of art, truth content, authentic art and dissonance. To fulfill this purpose, we shall use the text of Adorno already mentioned, as well as other texts by the same author on specific issues and the support of scholars such as Rodrigo Duarte, Marc Jimenez and Marcia Tiburi, among others. Keywords: art; society; Aesthetic Theory; Theodor Adorno; contemporary art. Introduction The relations between art and society have always been complex, especially regarding to the dependence or submission of one in relation to the other. If a work of art, like any other cultural production, cannot be separated from the social context in which it occurs, it cannot be summed up to it or instrumentalized by it. Contemporary aesthetic phenomena lead us to perceive, much more explicitly than could ever have been perceived in the long historical trajectory of influence between both these spheres, that when devoid of its intrinsic truth, its autonomy, when subjugated to the social context, art itself loses its character of spontaneous production and becomes ideological propaganda. Of course, it would be naive to pretend that only in the XXth century, with the mass media advent, art would have been limited or influenced, although not consciously and intentionally, by a determined network of values and conceptions, even preconceptions, supported by a specific social, economic and historical configuration, which ended up giving these art works their individuality, enabling them to differentiate from the thousands of other art works already produced.
    [Show full text]
  • The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises
    The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin, and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises Author Brincat, Shannon, Gerber, Damian Published 2015 Journal Title Antipode Version Accepted Manuscript (AM) DOI https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12140 Copyright Statement © 2015 Antipode Foundation. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin, and Dialectics in the Midst of Ecological Crises, Antipode, Volume 47, Issue 4, September 2015, Pages 871–893, which has been published in final form at 10.1111/anti.12140. This article may be used for non- commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving (http:// olabout.wiley.com/WileyCDA/Section/id-828039.html) Downloaded from http://hdl.handle.net/10072/124939 Griffith Research Online https://research-repository.griffith.edu.au The Necessity of Dialectical Naturalism: Marcuse, Bookchin and dialectics in the midst of ecological crises “… the environmental crisis involves a crisis of the imagination the amelioration of which depends on finding better ways of imagining nature and humanity’s relation to it.” - Lawrence Buell (1995: 2) Introduction Central to dialectics is its account of totality, the historical (temporal), environmental (spatial) and social (cultural) whole. For it is in this totality – that expansive concept of the whole and all its parts – that the complex interactions, tensions and contradictions that generate transformation, take place. As such, how dialectical approaches understand and conceive of the totality takes on acute ontological significance and function. Dialectical analysis, then, requires the utmost precision to ensure its ontological postulates (interconnectivity, contradiction, negation, sublation, flux, amongst others) are directly reflected in how it accounts for the temporal, spatial and cultural context in which transformations take place.
    [Show full text]
  • 04Eloy Ok.Indd
    46 I 47 A Habermasian Critique The thinkers presented in this paper, Jürgen Habermas, of Danto in Defense of Gombrich’s G.W.F. Hegel, Arthur Danto and Ernst Gombrich, de- Theory of Visual Communication vote signifi cant time to the problem of modernity. For all of the fi gures discussed save Gombrich, the issue of Stephen Snyder aesthetic modernity is linked to the changing role of philosophy. The aesthetic question discussed here cen- ters on the critical problems encountered when explai- ning the shift of art away from mimetic representation to a non-representative form in which it seems as if “anything goes”. From an art critical perspective, the locus of artistic evaluation moves from being a matter of taste to a matter of judgment. Following the criti- cisms Habermas levels at Hegel, I use the aesthetic di- mension of the problem of modernity as a point of de- parture for exploring the advantages that Gombrich’s empirically based aesthetic theory offers. Though Hegel is considered by most philosophers to be the last of the systematic metaphysicians, the other fi gures discussed in the paper are representatives of the post-metaphysical era. Coming from the Frankfurt School, Habermas is rooted in the philosophical tradi- tion of Marx and Hegel. Nonetheless, he seeks to brid- ge the gap between the Continental and the Analytic traditions. Danto, known for his Analytical Philo- sophy of History, explicitly rejects metaphysics and the idea that a philosopher can have future historical knowledge based on the presumption of a unifi ed no- tion of history.
    [Show full text]
  • Art and Emancipation: Habermas's
    New German Critique Art and Emancipation: Habermas’s “Die Moderne— ein unvollendetes Projekt” Reconsidered Gili Kliger The Fate of Aesthetics While, by Habermas’s own admission, his remarks on aesthetic modernity always had a “secondary character to the extent that they arose only in the context of other themes,” aesthetics and aesthetic modernity do occupy an important position in his overall oeuvre.1 Much of Habermas’s work is charac- terized by an effort to restore the modern faith in reason first articulated by Enlightenment thinkers. It was, on Habermas’s terms, problematic that the cri- tique of reason launched by the first generation of Frankfurt School theorists, notably Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, left them without a basis on which any reasoned critique of society could be pursued.2 For those theo- rists, Adorno especially, aesthetic experience held the promise of a reconciled relation between the sensual and the rational, posing as an “other” to the dom- inating force of instrumental reason in modern society and offering a way to I wish to thank Martin Ruehl, the Department of German at the University of Cambridge, Peter Gordon, John Flower, and the anonymous reviewers for their indispensable guidance and helpful suggestions. 1. Jürgen Habermas, “Questions and Counterquestions,” in Habermas and Modernity, ed. Rich- ard J. Bernstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 199. 2. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 138–39. New German Critique 124, Vol. 42, No. 1, February
    [Show full text]
  • Theodor Adorno and the Unhopeless Work of the Negative
    JOSEPH WINTERS University of North Carolina, Charlotte THEODOR ADORNO AND THE UNHOPELESS WORK OF THE NEGATIVE heodor Adorno is read, more often than not, as a somber theorist whose reflections on modern life lead to despair. According to this view, Adorno T examines the world and can only see in it instrumental reason, domination, and cultural conformity. Although influenced by Marx, he refuses to place his faith in the proletariat or some revolutionary group that might alter these conditions.1 He consequently ignores everyday forms of resistance that emerge from the “masses.” He only finds resistance to the status quo in occasional works of high art, a Beckett play or a Schonberg musical piece. For Adorno, our world is damaged, broken, and in ruins. There are no prospects for a different kind of future. The image of Adorno as despairing and hopeless has been advanced by many contemporary thinkers, most notably Jürgen Habermas. According to Habermas, Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment marks a radical break from Marx’s notion of ideology critique and an acceptance of Nietzsche’s radical skepticism toward reason. Whereas Marx’s notion of ideology exposes the “untruthfulness” of theories that conflate knowledge and power (thereby implying the possibility of knowledge that is not tantamount to power), Nietzsche reduces all forms of knowledge to the will to dominate. By adopting Nietzsche’s reduction of reason to power, Adorno’s thought turns into a debilitating form of despair.2 According to Habermas, Adorno cannot see the promising aspects of an alternative form of reason based on inter-subjective 1 On Adorno’s refusal to place hope in any collective revolutionary subject, see Susan Buck-Morss, The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W.
    [Show full text]
  • Adorno's Aesthetics Today
    Adorno’s Aesthetics Today SVEN-OLOV WALLENSTEIN Adorno in the Present In many respects, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory seems to belong to a past that is moving away from us at increasing speed. Adorno himself acknowledges this belatedness, for instance when in the draft introduction he says that already the very term philosophical aesthetics “has an antiquated quality”.1 In this parti- cular passage his suggestion is tied to what he sees as the nominalism of modern art, whose emergence he locates in Croce and Benjamin, but we may also think of Duchamp’s “pictorial nominalism”, which would render the observation even more acute.2 But while aesthetics must acknowledge that it no longer can subsume its objects, it can just as little opt for mere particularity; there is an inescapable antinomy between empty universality and the con- tingency of particular judgements. And from the vantage point of the present, this seems only to have been exacerbated: no theory appears to be able to delimit a priori what counts as artistic practice, as a work, and as an aesthetic experience—an emptying out that, at the same time as Adorno’s reflections on art were drawing to a close, was registered both in the arts themselves and in many strands of philosophy, notably in institutional art theory, although with- out the historical depth and socio-political urgency that we find in Adorno. If we add to this his infamous resistance to popular art, his highly selective canon of works drawn from an equally selective idea of tradition, and the fact that as time went by he became increasingly remote from the avant-garde of his own present, his obsolescence seems to be confirmed.
    [Show full text]
  • Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought
    CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture ISSN 1481-4374 Purdue University Press ©Purdue University Volume 13 (2011) Issue 3 Article 4 Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought Oleg Gelikman Soka University Follow this and additional works at: https://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, and the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons Dedicated to the dissemination of scholarly and professional information, Purdue University Press selects, develops, and distributes quality resources in several key subject areas for which its parent university is famous, including business, technology, health, veterinary medicine, and other selected disciplines in the humanities and sciences. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, the peer-reviewed, full-text, and open-access learned journal in the humanities and social sciences, publishes new scholarship following tenets of the discipline of comparative literature and the field of cultural studies designated as "comparative cultural studies." Publications in the journal are indexed in the Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature (Chadwyck-Healey), the Arts and Humanities Citation Index (Thomson Reuters ISI), the Humanities Index (Wilson), Humanities International Complete (EBSCO), the International Bibliography of the Modern Language Association of America, and Scopus (Elsevier). The journal is affiliated with the Purdue University Press monograph series of Books in Comparative Cultural Studies. Contact: <[email protected]> Recommended Citation Gelikman, Oleg. "Intermediality and Aesthetic Theory in Shklovsky's and Adorno's Thought." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 13.3 (2011): <https://doi.org/10.7771/1481-4374.1791> This text has been double-blind peer reviewed by 2+1 experts in the field.
    [Show full text]
  • The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS on POSTMODERN CULTURE
    The Anti-Aesthetic ESSAYS ON POSTMODERN CULTURE Edited by Hal Foster BAY PRESS Port Townsend, Washington Copyright © 1983 by Bay Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition published in 1983 Fifth Printing 1987 Bay Press 914 Alaskan Way Seattle, WA 98104 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Anti-aesthetic. I. Modernism (Aesthetics) -Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Civilization, Modern-1950-Addresses, essays, lectures. I. Foster, Hal. BH301.M54A57 1983 909.82 83-70650 ISBN 0-941920-02-X ISBN 0-941920-0 I-I (pbk.) Contributors JEAN BAUDRILLARD, Professor of Sociology at the University of Paris, is the author of The Mirror of Production (Telos, 1975) and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign (Telos, 1981). DOUGLAS CRIMP is a critic and Executive Editor of October. HAL FOSTER (Editor) is a critic and Senior Editor at Art in America. KENNETH FRAMPTON, Professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, is the author of Modern Architecture (Oxford University Press, 1980) . .. JURGEN HABERMAS, present~y associated with the Max Planck Institute in Starnberg, Germany, is the author of Knowledge and Human Interests (Beacon Press, 1971), Theory and Practice (Beacon Press, 1973), Legitima­ tion Crisis (Beacon Press, 1975) and Communication and the Evolution of Society (Beacon Press, 1979). FREDRIC JAMESON, Professor of Literature and History of Conscious­ ness, University of California at Santa Cruz, is the author of Marxism and Form (Princeton University Press, 1971), The Prison-House of Language (Princeton University Press, 1972), Fables of Aggression (University of California Press, 1979) and The Political Unconscious (Cornell University Press, 1981).
    [Show full text]
  • Kant's Aesthetic Theory
    CON-TEXTOS KANTIANOS. International Journal of Philosophy N.o 12, December 2020, pp. 43-51 ISSN: 2386-7655 Doi: 10.5281/zenodo.4304051 Kant’s Aesthetic Theory: key issues. An Introduction by the Guest Editor of the Special Issue JOÃO LEMOS*1 NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal Abstract This introduction presents an overview of the special issue of Con-Textos Kantianos devoted to Kant’s aesthetic theory. The articles in this issue have been organized into two sections: those written by keynote-authors, and those written in response to the general call for papers. Within each of these two sections, articles have been organized thematically, although the philosophical traditions that they engage with, as well as points of contact between articles, have also been considered. In the first section, keynote-authors address questions of aesthetic normativity; the role of aesthetics in the acquisition of empirical concepts; the emotional nature of aesthetics; subjectivity and disinterestedness; connections between aesthetics, anthropology, and politics; and aesthetic non-conceptualism. The second section begins with contributions dealing with matters of formalism and conceptualism in Kant’s aesthetics, as well as their relation and relevance to thinking about art, the arts, and contemporary art. It continues with papers that address key issues of Kant’s aesthetics, such as the free play and the role of imagination, as well as possible complementarities between the three Critiques. It closes with articles that focus on the reception of Kant’s aesthetic theory in the works of major philosophers of the 20th century, namely within critical theory and the phenomenological-hermeneutical tradition.
    [Show full text]
  • Expression in Adorno's Aesthetic Theory
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository Chapter 1 Introduction 1. General Considerations This thesis investigates Adorno’s notion of expression in Aesthetic Theory . It describes some of the features of his critique of the Western aesthetical-philosophical- historical tradition important for the comprehension of his Aesthetic Theory primarily involving theories about the relation between the individual and nature. Adorno suggests that the understanding of this relation amongst the Western aesthetical- philosophical-historical tradition, mostly coming from the ideas of Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche, contributed for a comprehension of aesthetics which emphasises either the individual or nature. In either case, Adorno perceives an unbalanced relation between individual and nature which, according to him, it is the root of suffering. For that reason, suffering is in Aesthetic Theory, the expression of the relation - or the unbalanced relation - between the individual and nature. Furthermore, he considers that all manners of conceiving expression, apart from expression as suffering, are contributing to the unbalanced relation between the individual and nature thus perpetuating suffering. His notion of expression as suffering has two different directions in his theory. On the one hand, it expresses the unbalanced relation between the individual and nature and on the other hand, it makes possible consciousness about this relationship motivating change minimising suffering. Therefore, Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory reveals his understanding of suffering as both positive and negative experience in which expression is a form of knowledge acquisition qualitatively different from knowledge acquired through reason.
    [Show full text]