Adorno on Natural Beauty

Rationalisierung ist noch nicht rational.

Adorno's Critique of Natural Beauty.

One of the more trenchant criticisms of Hegel's critique of natural beauty is found in
Theodor W. Adorno's Ästhetische Theorie, which, like Hegel's, was also published
posthumously. One of the great disciples, but simultaneously one of the great critics
of Hegel, his work remains one of the most forceful critiques of his work, particularly
of his theory of natural beauty,3.91 which subject seems hardly to be discussed any
longer, at least according to Adorno. As he puts it, the whole subject seems to rest on
a wound, the wound caused by the absolute opposition between humanity and nature,
and thus as well between the human art of nature, and nature itself. On the one hand
he agrees with Hegel that art is made by humans and not by nature, but on the other
he asserts, apparently in agreement with the ecological movement which was at that
time only beginning to demonstrate its presence, that humanity and nature are so
interdependent--even if antithetical to one another--that it becomes impossible to
consider one without the other, even when the question concerns the beauty of nature,
if not nature itself. As W. Martin Lüdke puts it,

Die Befreiung des Menschen ist damit an die Befreiung der Natur gebunden.... Die
Emanzipation des Subjekts vom Zwang der Selbsterhaltung impliziere die Befreiung
der Natur im Subjekt und suspendiere damit die Notwendigkeit der Herrschaft des
Subjekts über die Natur.3.92

Adorno sees the disappearance of concern about natural beauty as happening because
of the twin attacks of Schiller and Hegel and their introduction of freedom and human
worth3.93into the realm of aesthetics as categories, which in effect forced matters out
of the field of artistic discourse which were not directly concerned with people
themselves, including nature and its admiration (by humans). The result becomes a
kind of art-religion (Kunstreligion), and Adorno accuses Hegel of responsibility for
naming it. That Hegel uses the term Kunstreligion in the Phänomenologie is beyond
dispute, but it is equally certain that he did not originate such a concept--and that he
uses the term descriptively and critically. Whether there is any truth to das
Schulgeheimnis der deutschen Philosophie,3.94it is equally wrong to blame Hegel
alone for it. Hegel's use of the term smacks as much of pure description as anything in
the Phänomenologie. The concept of art-religion has a long and honored history both
before and after Hegel; indeed, one might claim it to exist between Homer (or at least
so Plato claims) and Nietzsche and Rilke at least, if not art-for-art's-sake as well. Too,
the act of naming could have a critical effect itself, in that the act of naming could
result in the summoning to consciousness of what had previously existed only as
instinctual forces in the unconscious, and would only then be subject to rational,
critical discourse. In any case, what benefits the subject harms the other (whether the
other subject or object), which truth Hegel certainly pointed out in the master-servant
dialectic well before Adorno, and for which even Sartrean existentialism can claim
prior credit, at least prior to this late work.
Still, the needs of nature had to retreat before the onslaught of the dictatorship of the
ideal subject, especially in aesthetics. Yet this dictatorship of the subject is the same
subjectivity which has brought us the aforementioned freedom and worth at least in
aesthetics, but which Adorno thinks is mainly freedom for the few and worth for the
worthies, at least as far as German idealist aesthetics are concerned. If this is the case,
it may well be worth another look at natural beauty.

The specific discussion of Würde (Worth) takes place in Schiller,3.95but there it

contains a critical ``eighteenth century'' dimension that Adorno notes, but which
appears to argue against his position, especially since Schiller himself says about
Würde that it incorporates within it an ``Ausdruck des Widerstandes,''3.96which Adorno
should have appreciated since he otherwise praises the concept of Widerstand
(resistance) repeatedly. He finally characterizes Würde as

die Selbsterhöhung des Tiers Mensch über die Tierheit. [Die Würde] enthüllt sich, im
Angesicht der Erfahrung von Natur, als Usurpation des Subjekts.... Nicht sind die
Menschen mit Würde positiv ausstaffiert, sondern sie wäre einzig, was sie noch nicht
sind.3.97
Alle Menschen werden Brüder (all people become brothers) at the expense of the
other animals, appears to be what Adorno is saying, apparently anticipating
antivivisectionism as well. Human class society is seen as replicating itself throughout
the animal world, which assumes though that what existed before the bourgeois era
was a golden age, and not another, even more absolute class, even caste system--
monarchy. Presumably, most were then treated like animals, and few like humans
with Freiheit and Würde. The Hegelian historical paradigm appears to reformulate
itself, with the symbolic stage where only one was free being represented by the
monarchic stage of European civilization and the classical stage where a few are free
being represented by the bourgeois era. But perhaps animals and people were more
equal in their misery in this earlier golden age.

Art, in any case, is in a setting or arrangement, a thoroughly human one as it

turns out; but this human arrangement is itself located in physical or material
nature, transcending the merely subjective until it becomes a kind of Kantian ``Ding
an sich'' (thing in itself) as Adorno puts it, i.e. indisputably there but unknowable in
any real sense. Adorno thus appears to want to seem here a kind of closet Kantian in
the sense that the ultimate and only mediating principle for the unbridgeable gap
between subject and object--since Hegelian identity has to be given up along with
idealism--becomes art. Hegel though is incapable of seeing this because of the needs
of the ``terror of idealism'' by the subject. He is also incapable of seeing the necessity
to incorporate the ``heteronomy'' of natural beauty within the structure of natural
beauty itself, rather than banishing it into exile from the beauty of art. He points out
concrete examples of the need for natural beauty in art, for example Proust's hawthorn
hedge, Mozart's Figaro, the last act of which is played outdoors, and an important
moment in Weber's Freischütz where Agatha becomes aware of the starry night.

Kant, according to Adorno, is one of the last professional aestheticians to look

admiringly at natural beauty, and he chooses the following passage written by Kant in
what Adorno calls a thoroughly ``Rousseauean'' spirit. (He must not have thought
much of Rousseau.)
Dieser Vorzug der Naturschönheit vor der Kunstschönheit, wenn jene gleich durch
diese der Form nach sogar übertroffen würde, dennoch allein ein unmittelbares
Interesse zu erwecken, stimmt mit der geläuterten und gründlichen Denkungsart aller
Menschen überein, die ihr sittliches Gefühl kultiviert haben. Wenn ein Mann, der
Geschmack genug hat, um über Produkte der schönen Kunst mit der größten
Richtigkeit und Feinheit zu urteilen, das Zimmer gern verläßt, in welchem jene, die
Eitelkeit und allenfalls gesellschaftlichen Freuden unterhaltenden, Schönheiten
anzutreffen sind, und sich zum Schönen der Natur wendet, um hier gleichsam Wollust
für seinen Geist in einem Gedankengange zu finden, den er sich nie völlig entwickeln
kann; so werden wir diese seine Wahl selber mit Hochachtung betrachten, und in ihm
eine schöne Seele voraussetzen, auf die kein Kunstkenner und Liebhaber, um des
Interesse willen, das er an seinen Gegenständen nimmt, Anspruch machen kann.3.98
The--to us hackneyed--views expressed in this passage, especially in the latter part of
it, were still being replicated more than thirty years later when the young, still
somewhat epigonous Heine wrote the famous introduction to the Harzreise which
expresses, if more briefly, poetically and ironically, almost exactly the same
sentiments. But more about Heine later.

What is meant by natural beauty is not cultural landscape, a concept which apparently
goes back to the romantic ``Kultus der Ruine'' (cult of ruins) and seems primarily to
consist of ``Freude an jedem alten Mäuerchen, an jeder mittelalterlichen
Häuserfamilie'' (joy in each little old wall, in each medieval settlement), the result of
which today after the decay of romanticism is primarily ``Reklameartikel für
Orgeltagungen und neue Geborgenheit'' (advertisements for organ festivals and the
new seclusion.)3.99in the era of the dominant urbanism, which at least does not bear
``die Stigmata der Marktgesellschaft...auf der Stirn'' (the stigmata of the market
society...on the forehead),3.100whether all this is accompanied by mauvaise foi or not.
Yet the figure of the cultural landscape is permeated by ``vergangenem realen
Leiden'' (past real suffering), which leads to the assertion that ``Ohne geschichtliches
Eingedenken wäre kein Schönes'' (Without historical remembrance there would be no
beauty), so that we are led not to the position of being required to assert the authority
of either nature or history, of space or time, but their confluence, the assertion that one
needs the other. This requires as well that our concept of natural beauty change as
well with time, and Adorno points out one way it has.

Bei Kant begann die Angst vor der Naturgewalt anachronistisch zu werden durchs
Freiheitsbewußtsein des Subjekts; es ist dessen Angst vor der perennierenden
Unfreiheit gewichen.3.101
This assertion that the fear of natural force was then becoming anachronistic is found
in spite of Kant's emphasis on the sublime as a central category of his aesthetic
beliefs. This assertion--based at least in part on the assumption that knowledge, reason
and rationality were constituent elements of human freedom--undermines the belief in
the freedom of the subject. Within the late enlightenment scheme of things, the
element of the sublime subverts this consciousness of freedom, since it is predicated
on the notion of the aesthetic appreciation of precisely that which is not or cannot be
understood. This may account for Hegel's critique of the sublime as an aesthetic
category, since he consigns it to the symbolic sphere, the region of the least adequate
art.
Unlike Hegel, natural beauty for Adorno is not so much superseded by the beauty of
art as it is linked to it. The interrelation of natural and artistic beauty refers to nature
as appearance and not as object of work or knowledge. According to Adorno,

Kunst ist nicht, wie der Idealismus glauben machen wollte, Natur, aber will einlösen,
was Natur verspricht.3.102
When referring to idealism, Adorno is clearly excepting Hegel, since art is nature for
Kant but ideal for Hegel.

Yet, Adorno does not always disagree with Hegel.

Soviel ist wahr am Hegelschen Theorem, Kunst sei durch ein Negatives, die
Bedürftigkeit des Naturschönen inspiriert; in Wahrheit dadurch, daß Natur, solange
sie einzig durch ihre Antithese zur Gesellschaft definiert wird, noch gar nicht ist, als
was sie erscheint. Was Natur vergebens möchte, vollbringen die Kunstwerke: sie
schlagen die Augen auf.... Kunst vertritt Natur durch ihre Abschaffung in effigie; alle
naturalistische ist der Natur nur trügend nahe, weil sie, analog zur Industrie, sie zum
Rohstoff relegiert.3.103
Adorno then agrees with Hegel that it is the beauty of art which transforms the natural
into what it becomes in the work of art, with the exception that the raw material of
nature is not devalued or discarded but mediated into the process as a whole. Indeed,
it seems to represent in some sense the theory of Hegel's real practice, since the art
which Hegel invariably prefers is the art which is generally appropriated by the
mimetic tradition rather than the transformative, at least according to current
conceptions of the terms, and could represent the logical and/or historical culmination
of Hegel's theory for the late twentieth century.

But if there is any art which resists nature it is the art of high modernism which
Adorno terms ``autonomous'' art.

Denn was an dieser aufgeht, koinzidiert so wenig mit der empirischen Realität wie,
nach Kants großartig widerspruchsvoller Konzeption, die Dinge an sich mit der Welt
der ``Phänomene'', der kategorial konstituierten Gegenständen.3.104
Modernism represents the most radical break from natural beauty, although it is
almost certainly not what Hegel would have had in mind.

Adorno agrees with Hegel in another way, that

Die Anamnesis der Freiheit im Naturschönen führt irre, weil sie Freiheit im älteren
Unfreien sich erhofft. Das Naturschöne ist der in die Imagination transponierte,
dadurch vielleicht abgegoltene Mythos.3.105
The memory of freedom in natural beauty is misleading because it expects to find
itself replicated in the realm of the older unfreedom. Freedom is not the realm of
natural beauty--any freedom it may remember was originally itself an illusion. He
uses tellingly the example of the bird's song--it seems a beautiful song of nature, but it
conceals something terrible because it is not a song at all but a mere sound imprisoned
in its own dynamic. This is a truth which the ancient Greek fortune-tellers knew but
which has since been forgotten, especially since the news was often bad. But now,
natural beauty has transformed itself from the realm of myth into the imagination
under the influence of subjectivity, which deprives myth of its claim to objectivity and
leaves only subjective imagination.

The reception of the Rousseauean dictum retournons leads to the false and vulgar
thesis of the Kluft (gap) between nature and technology.

Technik, die, nach einem letztlich der bürgerlichen Sexualmoral entlehnten Schema,
Natur soll geschändet haben, wäre unter veränderten Produktionsverhältnissen ebenso
fähig, ihr beizustehen und auf der armen Erde ihr zu dem zu helfen, wohin sie
vielleicht möchte.... Der Begriff des Naturschönen, einmal gegen Zopf und
Taxusgang des Absolutismus gemünzt, hat seine Kraft eingebüßt, weil seit der
bürgerlichen Emanzipation im Zeichen der angeblich natürlichen Menschenrechte die
Erfahrungswelt weniger nicht sondern mehr verdinglicht war als das dix-huitième.3.106
The antagonism between nature and civilization is far from an inevitable antinomy,
but the result of an historical development which took place because of factors
intrinsic neither to nature nor to civilization, and the current post-modern world is
more reified than was the world of the eighteenth century. He finds that natural beauty
too has become ideological;
Ideologie ist das Naturschöne als Subreption von Unmittelbarkeit durchs
Vermittelte,3.107
because nature has become national parks, i.e. managed or pseudo-nature, an ``alibi''
in which the claim to appreciate the beauty of nature either in the Personals or in
Hebbel's justifiably hated ``O wie schön (oh how pretty)'' communicates the same
self-congratulatory lie about one's own sensitivity. Instead, natural beauty is best
contemplated in ``bewußtlose Wahrnehmung (unconscious perception).''

If art, in accord with the Kantian view, is the unifying moment for theory as a whole,
the unifying moment for subject and object, for epistemo-ontology and ethics, it is
also, in agreement with Hegel, completely subject to analysis.

Konsequent fortschreitend erschließt alles Schöne sich der Analyse, die es wiederum
der Unwillkürlichkeit zubringt, und die vergebens wäre, wohnte ihr nicht versteckt
das Moment des Unwillkürlichen inne. Angesichts des Schönen stellt analytische
Reflexion den temps durée durch seine Antithese wieder her. Analyse terminiert in
einem Schönen, so wie es der vollkommenen und selbstvergessenen bewußtlosen
Wahrnehmung erscheinen müßte. Damit beschreibt sie subjektiv noch einmal die
Bahn, welche objektiv das Kunstwerk in sich beschreibt: adäquate Erkenntnis von
Ästhetischem ist der spontane Vollzug der objektiven Prozesse, die vermöge seiner
Spannungen darin sich zutragen.3.108
So we have finally perhaps the definitive statement of the Adornian method: analysis
and spontaneity or, perhaps better, spontaneous analysis. But the analysis is one of
reflection which restores the temporality of the signifeé, which results in a beauty that
derives from the subjectively spontaneous analysis of the specific objective reality in
the work of art.

And if art, like all human endeavor, is fundamentally temporal and historical, natural
beauty represents nevertheless a kind of arrested or suspended history, a history which
seems anti-historical. A fundamental example of this is what Kant came to call the
sublime in natural beauty. But like Hegel, Adorno doesn't have much use for it. Hegel
consigns das Erhabene (the sublime) to the purgatorio of the aesthetic system, the
symbolic art form where it is treated respectfully enough, if relatively perfunctorily.
Hegel, after quoting Kant's famous definition of das Erhabene,

das eigentlich Erhabene kann in keiner sinnlichen Form enthalten sein, sondern trifft
nur Ideen der Vernunft, welche, obgleich keine ihnen angemessene Darstellung
möglich ist, eben durch diese Unangemessenheit, welche sich sinnlich darstellen läßt,
rege gemacht und ins Gemüt gerufen werden (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 3. Aufl., S. 77,
Par. 23),3.109
says of it,
Das Erhabene überhaupt ist der Versuch, das Unendliche auszudrücken, ohne in dem
Bereich der Erscheinungen einen Gegenstand zu finden, welcher sich für diese
Darstellung passend erwiese.3.110

Adorno, if anything, has even less respect for the sublime. He thinks of it as
historically conditioned--and historically ``ephemeral''--even if its principle was to see
itself specifically as the opposite of that, as anti-history, or at least as the attempted
domination of space over time. And the spaces must be gargantuan, overwhelming in
their beauty, or so overwhelming that they are no longer beautiful--so much so that
they awaken in the viewer, the receptive subject, the dilettante or the artistically
inclined mystic or visa-versa, a feeling of awe before the object, the example of
natural beauty. While Hegel gives at least lip service to the sublime, Adorno wants
nothing to do with it at all. Rather, it needs to be debunked, as did Karl Kraus and
Peter Altenberg. He explains the whole phenomenon as a kind of historically
conditioned psychological need which has since run its course.

Auch die abstrakte Größe der Natur, die Kant noch bewunderte und dem Sittengesetz
verglich, wird als Reflex des bürgerlichen Größenwahns, des Sinns für Rekord, der
Quantifizierung, auch des bürgerlichen Heroenkults durchschaut.3.111
He cites Nietzsche as being especially susceptible to this Größenwahn
(megalomania).
So mochte auch Nietzsche in Sils Marie sich empfinden, ``zweitausend Meter über
dem Meer, geschweige über den Menschen.''3.112

The result of Adorno's critique of natural beauty is that natural beauty as an

exclusively spacial, nontemporal characteristic becomes ridiculous, like Husserl's
beautiful lawn, and that whoever speaks about natural beauty in such a way runs the
risk of engaging in pseudo-poesie (Afterpoesie).3.113Also, although distinguishing
between the beautiful and the ugly in nature can only be called pedantic, the concept
of natural beauty would be empty without this process. And although practically no
concrete proposed measure for the differentiation between the two exists, i.e. no
definition is satisfactory, he finally offers the following one, vague and unsatisfactory
as he indicates it is.

Schön ist an der Natur, was als mehr erscheint, denn was es buchstäblich an Ort und
Stelle ist.3.114
Once again he emphasizes the central point about natural beauty, the claim to which
was precisely what Hegel held against it:
das Naturschöne deutet auf den Vorrang des Objekts in der subjektiven Erfahrung.3.115
The message of natural beauty is precisely the priority of the object in subjective
experience, which realization has had a decisive effect on artistic beauty and leads in
turn to the next Adornian slogan,
Kunst [ist], anstatt Nachahmung der Natur, Nachahmung des Naturschönen.3.116
Karl Markus Michel says of Adorno's theory of natural beauty that
Adornos Kunst, die ``nicht Natur nach(ahmt), auch nicht einzelnes Naturschönes,
sondern das Naturschöne an sich"(113), ist ebenso verbesserte Natur, wie seine Natur
verbesserte Kunst ist: `verbessert' durch Kunst wird die zweite, d.h. die beherrschte,
unterdrückte Natur; `verbesserte' Kunst aber ist die erste (oder utopische), d.h. die
errettete, erlöste Natur, die im Naturschönen sich ankündigt ....3.117
The principle of mimesis transforms itself into the principle of art-mimesis, which
becomes what we now call high modernism. Again, this time Adorno himself:
Kunst ahmt nicht Natur nach, auch nicht einzelnes Naturschönes, doch das
Naturschöne an sich. Das nennt, über die Aporie des Naturschönen hinaus, die von
Ästhetik insgesamt. Ihr Gegenstand bestimmt sich als unbestimmbar, negativ.
Deshalb bedarf Kunst der Philosophie, die sie interpretiert, um zu sagen, was sie nicht
sagen kann, während es doch nur von Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht
sagt.3.118
We see as well a concrete justification for the inroads of aesthetics into the realm of
art, to explain what is not to be explained by art itself. It is a clever justification; there
must be a role for the expository after all, for prose to explain poesie while trying not
to lose the ineffable in the course of explaining it.3.119

Natural beauty is still profoundly historical, even if it is always immediately apparent.

Im Naturschönen spielen, musikähnlich und kaleidoskopisch wechselnd, naturhafte

und geschichtliche Elemente ineinander.... Naturschönes ist sistierte Geschichte,
innehaltendes Werden.3.120
Natural beauty is ``arrested history, suspended becoming,'' i.e. the historical is caught
as a fleeting moment.
Wann immer man Kunstwerken mit Recht Naturgefühl zubilligt, sprechen sie darauf
an. Nur ist jenes Gefühl, bei aller Verwandtschaft mit der Allegorese, flüchtig bis zum
déjà vu und ist wohl als ephemeres am triftigsten.3.121
So if natural beauty is arrested history and becoming at pause, it must be most
ephemeral at its best.

The decline of natural beauty was certainly connected to the decay of the philosophy
of nature, Adorno says. Nevertheless,

Das Urteil Solgers und Hegels, die aus der heraufdämmernden Unbestimmtheit des
Naturschönen dessen Inferiorität folgerten, ging fehl.3.122
Natural beauty is certainly not inferior to the beauty of art, at least not on the basis of
its indefiniteness. Yet he also did not intend the pantheistic abyss of nature philosophy
as a solution.
Die Grenze gegen den Fetischismus der Natur jedoch, die pantheistische Ausflucht,
die nichts als affirmatives Deckbild von endlosem Verhängnis wäre, wird dadurch
gezogen, daß Natur, wie sie in ihrem Schönen zart, sterblich sich regt, noch gar nicht
ist.3.123
Pantheism is not the answer because of its affirmative endlessness, a criticism which
echoes Hegel's critique of irony.
Adorno cites Goethe's simple and beautiful ``Wanderers Nachtlied,'' though he doesn't
mention which one,3.124as an example of the kind of nature poetry he has in mind,

weil darin nicht so sehr das Subjekt redet--eher möchte es, wie in jedem authentischen
Gebilde, durch dieses hindurch darin verstummen --, sondern weil es durch seine
Sprache das Unsagbare der Sprache von Natur imitiert. Nichts anderes dürfte die
Norm meinen, im Gedicht sollten Form und Inhalt koinzidieren, wofern sie mehr sein
soll als die Phrase der Indifferenz.3.125
It is difficult to find more to say.

Then follows Adorno's best known statement about natural beauty:

Das Naturschöne ist die Spur des Nichtidentischen an den Dingen im Bann
universaler Identität.3.126
In a way, this is a position with which Hegel would not disagree; yet, the difference
between them is that for Hegel such a statement would have amounted to a
demonstration of the insufficiency of natural beauty, while for Adorno3.127this
becomes a token of its excellence.

Still, however tenuously, Adorno cannot long remain in agreement with Hegel.

Wider den Identitätsphilosophen Hegel ist Naturschönheit dicht an der Wahrheit, aber
verhüllt sich im Augenblick der nächsten Nähe.3.128
Once again the motif of the inexpressibility of authentic art, art which participates not
merely in the ``jargon of authenticity'' but in that nameless beyond where truly
authentic--one might add now more than twenty years later--art of modernity is found.
But Hegel doesn't see this, because everything is explainable and knowable, including
the incommensurabilities of art itself. In this sense, Hegel may be less mystical than
Adorno. Adorno grasps for his part toward the hermetic character of art,
ihre von Hölderlin gelehrte Absage an jeglichen Gebrauch, wäre es auch der durchs
Einlegen menschlichen Sinnes sublimierte. Denn Kommunikation ist die Anpassung
des Geistes an das Nützliche, durch welche er sich unter die Waren einreiht, und was
heute Sinn heißt, partizipiert an diesem Unwesen.... Das Schöne an der Natur ist
gegen herrschendes Prinzip wie gegen diffuses Auseinander ein Anderes; ihm gliche
das Versöhnte.3.129
Adorno thus shows his alliance with the dominant high modernism of his day. By
insisting on the rationality and usefulness of art Hegel, oddly enough, might be closer
to the post-modern spirit--in the sense that it most often seems to insist on usefulness
and a submersion of the subject as one of its criteria.3.130

Adorno sees in Hegel's analysis of natural beauty an example of what he calls

Konsequenz-Ästhetik, by which he means Hegel's (in)famous equation of the real with
the rational,3.131the rationalization of the empirical and the powerful, which would
seem to favor the view of the Hegelian system as an objective idealism. 3.132But only a
little later he asserts of the Ästhetik that

Hegels objektiver Idealismus wird in der Ästhetik zur krassen, nahezu unreflektierten
Parteinahme für subjektiven Geist.3.133
One should note though, that this is possibly one of the spots where the unfinished
nature of this work is particularly evident, and this for two reasons. First, as we have
already seen, Hegel did not regard his system as a subjective or objective but an
absolute idealism, and secondly, in the Negative Dialektik Adorno appears to take
precisely the opposite tack.
Hegels inhaltliches Philosophieren hatte zum Fundament und Resultat den Primat des
Subjekts oder, nach der berühmten Formulierung aus der Eingangsbetrachtung der
Logik, die Identität von Identität und Nichtidentität.3.134
This statement, however, is likely based on the fact that Hegel's logic is indeed a
subjective logic, i.e. the realm of subjective mind, while the philosophy of nature is
the realm of objective mind and the philosophy of mind--where Hegel's aesthetic
theory is housed--that of absolute mind. Within the realm of the philosophy of mind,
however, aesthetics represents the subjective moment.

The realm of the aesthetic is indeed that of subjective appearance, and for better or
worse this is the structural reality of the system. This Hegelian conception of
aesthetics brings with it the disadvantage that nature, as the objective moment of the
subjective part of the system, gets short shrift. This is the reality to which Adorno has
been objecting all along.

Adorno objects further that the dialectical moment is missing in the transition from
natural beauty to the beauty of art.

Im Hegelschen Übergang von Natur zu Kunst dagegen ist die vielberufene

Mehrsinnigkeit von `Aufheben' nicht zu finden. Das Naturschöne verlischt, ohne daß
es im Kunstschönen wiedererkannt würde. Weil es nicht vom Geist durchherrscht und
bestimmt sei, gilt es Hegel für vorästhetisch.3.135
There seems to be no place for the natural in the system once one has arrived at the
level of mind, whether it be the philosophy of mind or the beauty of art which
transcend respectively nature and the beauty of nature. Hegel even terms natural
beauty prosaic--a harsh criticism by Hegelian standards.3.136Yet, one must wonder
whether nature, the objective, does not indeed survive in some deeply sublated
manner to which there has already been allusion, especially in the Hegelian practice
of aesthetics--which is to say in the judgement of specific works of art, as is argued in
this work. The aesthetic represents certainly the subjective moment in the philosophy
of spirit, but not the unrestrained, arbitrary subjectivity so thoroughly criticized by
Hegel.

Yet Adorno is wrong, it seems to me, when he claims that

Die Entwicklungstendenz war zu Hegels Zeit noch nicht voll absehbar; keineswegs
fällt sie mit Realismus zusammen, sondern bezieht sich auf autonome, von der
Beziehung auf Gegenständlichkeit wie auf Topoi befreite Verfahrungsweisen. Ihr
gegenüber blieb Hegels Ästhetik klassizistisch reaktionär.3.137
To claim Hegel for high modernism and not for the realist period which in fact
followed him almost immediately is to forget almost the entire post-Hegelian
nineteenth century and a good bit of the twentieth. Adorno also appears to argue here
against his own earlier position. Since one of his critical motifs against Hegel's
conception of natural beauty is precisely that it does not allow for the free
development of autonomous art, natural beauty would apparently point not to
autonomous, to the modern art of radical subjectivity, but to the older and more
objectified form of classically mimetic art. Nevertheless, he argues here that Hegel
prepared the way for Adorno's own form of modernism and not for the realistic
tradition. The truth, empirically enough it seems to me, is that Hegel prepared the way
for both moments, the realist and the modernist--the realist, or at least a proto-realist
directly after his death, and the modernist as the Hegelian, Adorno, has demonstrated.
This is one reason, as Foucault pointed out at the beginning of this monograph, that it
is so difficult to avoid Hegel.

There is another contradiction here as well. For if Hegel is the apostle of pure
subjectivity in aesthetics to the point or repressing everything objective or natural,
then he must be precisely that very apostle of high subjective modernism which
Adorno says correctly he is not. So the truth must lie somewhere else. In any case,
Adorno provides one of the most provocative and powerful analyses of Hegel's theory
of natural beauty that we have. It is a great shame that his work ``seems hardly to be
discussed any longer,''--as Adorno says of Hegel's theory of natural beauty--especially
when his successors are also mostly his inferiors.