On the Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Artistic Beauty

Abstract

Although philosophical reflection on the relationship between art and nature, or, more specifically, the relation between artistic beauty and natural beauty goes back to the time of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, post-Kantian German idealists such as Schelling and Hegel decisively shifted philosophical aesthetics in the direction of a philosophy of fine art. Hegel’s exclusion of natural beauty from deserving a scientific treatment is a result of the spiritualization of content in his system. What is common to Kant and Hegel is to conceive of the relation between natural beauty and artistic beauty in a hierarchical arrangement, the former regarding natural beauty to be superior to artificial beauty, the latter regarding the beauty of art to be higher than the beauty of nature. Theodor W. Adorno, on the other hand, destabilizes these hierarchies. In Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, natural beauty is neither superior to, nor subordinate to artistic beauty, though natural beauty is the precondition for an appreciation of artistic beauty. What is unique to Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory in this regard is the way in which Adorno conceptualizes the aesthetic experience of nature, as well as the aesthetic experience of works of art, as the perception of images of a beyond; that is, of that which is beyond exchange society. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Adorno’s use of the concepts of natural beauty and artistic beauty, both of which he appropriates from classical German aesthetic theory, transcends the one-sidedness of Kant’s and Hegel’s positions. Further, only an aesthetic theory that recuperates the concept of natural beauty that Hegel repressed, and that goes beyond a mere philosophy of art, is of value to an ecologically informed politics. By reclaiming the concept of natural beauty and neither subordinating it to artistic beauty a la Hegel, nor privileging natural beauty as Kant does, Adorno moves beyond the one-sidedness of Kant’s and Hegel’s positions.