The Metamorphic Temporality of Natural Beauty: Adorno’s Negation of Kantian Disinterested Contemplation

Abstract

AbstractThis article argues that Immanuel Kant’s concept of disinterested contemplation is inadequate because it represses the historical suffering of nature, and thus the aesthetic object’s materiality. It also argues that Theodor W. Adorno’s concept of natural beauty ought to be considered a response to Kant’s concept of disinterested contemplation and, finally, that Adorno must ground the aesthetic concept of natural beauty in a concept of temporality. Such temporality would be a mode of aesthetic experience that allows natural beauty to critically present the violence of history while also anticipating a future in which such violence does not exist. The article calls the new form of temporality that would engage properly with past and future metamorphic. Metamorphic time thus involves recollection and speculation that dialectically refer to each other.