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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017
This volume of lectures on aesthetics, given by Adorno in the winter semester of 1958-9, formed the foundation for his later Aesthetic Theory, widely regarded as one of his greatest works. The lectures cover a wide range of topics, from an intense analysis of the work of Georg Lukács to a sustained reflection on the theory of aesthetic experience, from an examination of works by Plato, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard and Benjamin, to a discussion of the latest experiments of John Cage, attesting to the virtuosity and breadth of Adorno's engagement. All the while, Adorno remains deeply connected to his surrounding context, offering us a window onto the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in post-war Germany. This volume will appeal to a broad range of students and scholars in the humanities and social sciences, as well as anyone interested in the development of critical theory.
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Table of Contents
Title page
Copyright page
Editor's Foreword
Lecture 1
Notes
Lecture 2
Notes
Lecture 3
Notes
Lecture 4
Notes
Lecture 5
Notes
Lecture 6
Notes
Lecture 7
Notes
Lecture 8
Notes
Lecture 9
Notes
Lecture 10
Notes
Lecture 11
Notes
Lecture 12
Notes
Lecture 13
Notes
Lecture 14
Notes
Lecture 15
Notes
Lecture 16
Notes
Lecture 17
Notes
Lecture 18
Notes
Lecture 19
Notes
Lecture 20
Notes
Lecture 21
Notes
Adorno's Notes for the Lectures
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Start Reading
Lecture 1
Index
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Copyright page
First published in German as Ästhetik (1958/59), © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 2009
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
The translation of this work was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International – Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, the collecting society VG WORT and the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (German Publishers & Booksellers Association).
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Editor's Foreword
Adorno had been planning for some time to write a systematic book on aesthetics; his notes and drafts go back to at least 1956. A decisive factor in the genesis of the book, which was meant to become his central work, were the lectures on this subject that he gave a total of six times between 1950 and 1968.
The present course of lectures from the winter semester of 1958/59 is the fourth in this series. It is also the earliest to be documented in full by transcripts made from tape recordings at the Institute of Social Research. As the editorial traces in the typescript show, Adorno worked further on this text while preparing later lectures, and also while working on what would later become the Aesthetic Theory.
We have little information about Adorno's first aesthetics course after his return from American exile, except for the fact that it took place in the summer semester of 1950 on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 4 to 5 pm. As for the second course, from the winter semester of 1950/51, the Theodor W. Adorno Archive contains typewritten elaborations on key points, as well as a summary that indicates the range of topics discussed and a number of central theses. The third course, from the winter semester of 1955/56, is documented by handwritten drafts and notes, as well as a transcript elaborated from stenographic notes. Alongside the present fourth course, there exists also a complete tape transcript of the fifth, which Adorno gave in two parts in the summer semester of 1961 and the winter semester of 1961/62. The final course, also spread across two semesters – the summer 1967 and winter 1967/68 semesters – was given when large parts of the Aesthetic Theory had already been written and survives only in various drafts, notes, stenographic notes and partial tape transcripts. Excerpts from tape transcripts of a few lectures from the second semester were published in 1973 in an unauthorized edition that fell severely short of academic standards. The editor of this pirate edition, who signed his preface merely with the initials C. K., states that the quality of the tape recordings was ‘extremely poor’.
The course of lectures from the winter semester of 1958/59 is instructive in several respects. It is a document of its time, intertwined in many ways with the artistic, intellectual and political confrontations that shaped life in West Germany during the Cold War. It documents a form of academic teaching that would be inconceivable in the framework of current BA or MA programmes. The unity of research and teaching, which, at the time it was practised, never required a word of commentary or discussion, can be reconstructively observed in these lectures at a distance of half a century. It did not consist merely in the professor presenting those elements of their research findings which they considered relevant; for Adorno, the course itself was a kind of laboratory in which he first developed his ideas, or could at least – due to the necessity of making himself understood – give them a structure and vividness that first had to be wrested from the complexity of the specific issues interwoven within them. The productivity of this ‘gradual formulation of thoughts while speaking’, as Kleist put it, becomes especially clear if one examines the relationship between the recorded sessions and the notes with which Adorno prepared his lectures, as well as the published texts to which he refers, and if one observes how Adorno himself went through the transcripts of his unscripted words, marking passages that struck him as particularly incisive.
Various topics that would later be elaborated in the Aesthetic Theory are mentioned, some of them developed in greater detail; fundamental motifs were already clear to Adorno, but some evidently reached a clear formulation only through the lectures themselves. At various points, the lectures go beyond what would later be taken up into the Aesthetic Theory. This applies not only to his engagement with Georg Lukács, which became a stronger focus during the autumn and winter of 1958/59 than he considered necessary while editing the texts intended for the Aesthetic Theory. One should especially emphasize Adorno's reflections on the theory of aesthetic experience, which are probably even more relevant now with respect to certain developments in philosophical aesthetics since the 1970s. Another notable aspect is Adorno's intensive engagement with the classical interpretation of beauty in Plato's Phaedrus, as well as the great interest he showed during the autumn of 1958 in the experiments of John Cage, which he evidently found somewhat confusing but deeply challenging and would later increasingly view as a questionable invitation to regression and ‘ego weakness’.
This edition is based on 246 pages of tape transcripts preserved in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive under the numbers Vo 3497–3742. Marginal notes and other editing traces on the typescript attributable to Adorno are mentioned in the notes. While editing, care was taken to preserve the character of unscripted speech as well as Adorno's stylistic, lexical and syntactical idiosyncrasies. Obvious transcription errors were corrected as far as the content dictated. In a few cases, and only when there was no nuance of meaning involved, repetitions and phrase markers such as ‘and’, ‘so’ and ‘now’, as well as gap-fillers such as ‘actually’ or ‘if you like’, were removed. Occasionally, for the sake of readability, run-on sentences meandering via various associations had to be separated into two or more sentences. The punctuation, which had to be inserted by the editor, served primarily to make the structure of the sentences as clear as possible despite their occasional interruptions by passing thoughts. Gaps in the text owing to changes of tape or technical problems are marked with […] and mentioned in the notes. Occasional omissions from texts quoted by Adorno are likewise marked with […]. Additions to the text by the editor are indicated by square brackets. The notes are intended essentially as explanations of names, works and events mentioned in the lectures, as well as concepts which can perhaps no longer be taken as understood. In cases where a complex issue is touched on only in passing, or where Adorno's meaning does not become clear, references are given to correspondences in his published writings.
The lecture transcripts are followed by attempts to reproduce, as diplomatically as possible, the handwritten notes and structural outlines preserved in the Theodor W. Adorno Archive under the numbers Vo 4235–4255. The material comprises nineteen consecutively numbered sheets as well as two structural outlines without page numbers. The sequence of pages does not always correspond to the order in which the respective topics are treated in the lectures; some things were initially passed over by Adorno and taken up later. Accordingly, some pages show several layers of editing, indicated with smaller type and a restriction to the free space in the margins or between the lines. Dates in the notes usually refer to the day of the corresponding lecture. Two points where individual words or abbreviations could not be deciphered are indicated by [?].
The ‘overview’ provided is intended simply as an aid to the reader, not to impute a construction, much less any systematic approach, that is not actually there.
I extend my thanks to the Hamburg Foundation for the Support of Science and Culture and to all those who provided help and advice in the course of my editorial work. I would especially like to mention Michael Schwarz, Tilman Borsche, Lydia Goehr, Andrew Bowie, Christian Thorau, Marin von Koppenfels, Nikolaus Urbanek, Martina Seeber, Andreas Haug, Gesine Palmer, Christoph Ziermann and Michael de Groot, as well as Raimund Groß and Alena Gärtner.
Lecture 111 November 1958
Philosophical aesthetics, which you will learn various things about in this course of lectures – I almost said: of which I hope to give you a few ‘samples’ in these lectures – has a difficult time, especially in the field of philosophy. It has, in fact, fallen a little into disrepute and, compared to the development of a large number of other philosophical disciplines, has received only a desultory treatment during the last thirty years. If you pick up Fischer's recently published Encyclopedia of Philosophy and consult the entry for aesthetics, which, as far as I know, was contributed by Ivo Frenzel,1 you will find some explanation of the reasons for this. For we are told there that, on the one hand, philosophical aesthetics is infinitely dependent on prior assumptions, that it depends on the respective overall philosophies underlying it, especially the epistemological ones, and that it is swept up almost without resistance in the changes affecting these tendencies; but, on the other hand, that it never entirely penetrates the work of art in its concretion and, in a sense, always falls short of the work. Philosophical aesthetics, the author states, lacks the secure foundation of other philosophical disciplines. Now, I would argue that the secure foundation of the other philosophical disciplines is a somewhat precarious matter too; if you look at how many things are mere assumptions there – with the exception of the most formal and, I would say, the most meaningless logical theorems – one will surely encounter no less of a vacuum.2
I think that the peculiar situation of aesthetics is due rather to the fact that there is not truly an internally continuous tradition of aesthetic thought of the kind found in the area of epistemology and logic, at least in connection with the theory of science, that aesthetics has generally followed a more or less erratic course, and that it fluctuates between attempting to develop aesthetic theories from particular philosophical positions or, conversely, simply leaving the works of art to themselves and perhaps expressing descriptively what is the case in these works, and arriving at such an aesthetics in this way. Although I cannot promise you that I will present anything resembling a fully developed aesthetics here – for the very simple reason that my own aesthetic thoughts are in flux, and by no means in a state today that would permit such a codification, but also for the simple reason that an occasion like this course of two-part lectures would, for reasons of time alone, not allow me to provide you with such a fully explicit theory – I do think that these lectures can at least give you an idea of how a theory of aesthetics, a philosophical aesthetics, is possible, even today, that it is required, and, using some models of aesthetic problems, at least to elaborate on what the nature of such an aesthetics should be. The course is ambitious, to the extent that it seeks to expound the possibility of philosophical aesthetics, which I feel is a very urgent matter today; on the other hand, it is not ambitious at all, to the extent that it does not presume truly to carry out such a philosophical aesthetics.
As far as the dependence of aesthetics on great philosophy is concerned, and hence the connection of different philosophical aesthetics on philosophical theories, I would like to explain this briefly right at the outset in order to give you an idea of the problem that exists concerning precisely the connection between philosophy and aesthetics. Kantian aesthetics, the Kantian definition of beauty – or one of the Kantian definitions of beauty, at least – is, as many of you will know, that of ‘disinterested pleasure’3 – that is to say, some objects or other give pleasure to us as subjects without the involvement of any interest on our part, in the sense of our appetitive faculty or will. For example, as soon as we have the intention to eat a tasty apple, we no longer act aesthetically but rather animally or naturally, thus violating Kant's definition of the aesthetic. This is surely clear enough. As clear as it is, however, and as little as philosophy can dispense with such a definition as this Kantian one, it necessarily stems from a series of definitions that are truly specific only to Kantian philosophy. That means it first of all contains what one could call ‘transcendental subjectivism’; the nature of beauty is recognized here from the perspective of the relationship between beauty and us as subjects, while the thought of something inherently beautiful, with a beauty that is independent from our specific forms of perception and only faces them autonomously, is not envisaged at all in this definition of beauty.4 And it is, furthermore, a definition of beauty in which a formal criterion such as enjoyment – where some forms exist which our need for sensory perception views as satisfying rather than unsatisfying – is presupposed. I think you need only a second to consider whether the things we understandably call beautiful always have this sensually pleasing element – or whether this concept of the sensually pleasing, at least, does not perhaps undergo such incredible refinement and complication that nothing is left of this originally plain idea – and to call to mind that, because of this precondition of Kantian philosophy, so plausible a definition of beauty as the one he provides here ultimately loses much of its plausibility. This means, then, that aesthetics is here indeed swept up in the entire problems of philosophy.
By contrast, I will now give you the definition of beauty found in the Aesthetics of Hegel,5 which, alongside Schelling's Philosophy of Art6 and the third book of The World as Will and Representation,7 is one of the most significant theoretical achievements in aesthetics that followed directly on from Kant under the banner of German Idealism. Hegel defines beauty thus: beauty is ‘the sensual appearance of the idea’.8 Here a concept of the idea is presupposed in an almost Platonizing sense as substantial, as something – one could almost say – given, as something that can appear; precisely this had been ruled out by Kantian philosophy, which forbade working with some idea or other as a finite positivity.9 And only if you take into account something that you cannot simply know, of course, namely that Hegelian philosophy criticizes exactly this Kantian doctrine, that Hegelian philosophy claims the ability to construct and adequately recognize the idea or the absolute after all – only then does something like this assertion that beauty is the sensual appearance of the idea gain meaning at all. And, naturally, such a thesis as this superb definition by Hegel becomes infinitely less plausible in an intellectual climate where many people consider it simply dogmatic or deluded to posit a concept such as the idea as effective,10 which does not help at all to gain an understanding of the actual work of art, in which such an idea is by no means always realized directly. I would like to say now, at the very start of this course, that I feel extremely close and indebted to the Hegelian approach in one respect at least: for when the aforementioned definition by Hegel mentions this ‘appearance of the idea’, or ‘of the absolute’,11 it is already referring back – and this is once again due to the fundamental difference between the two great philosophies, the Kantian and the Hegelian – to the fact that beauty itself is not merely a formal thing, or merely a subjective thing, but rather something in the matter itself. There is no reflection on me as the observer or the effect that the art has on me.12 On the contrary: in his Aesthetics, Hegel treated this entire view of aesthetics as a doctrine of art's effect, which was still inherited from the eighteenth century, with withering disdain – and, I would assume, with good reason; he starts from the assumption that beauty is something objective, something substantial, something in the matter itself, in the idea, which necessarily – to use the term in its traditional, Platonic meaning for a second – possesses such a form of objectivity compared to mere subjective consciousness.
Let me begin by saying that I will attempt to align the deliberations on aesthetics we are carrying out here with this notion of aesthetic objectivity, the notion that not only the nature of beauty but all aesthetic categories – and beauty, I would add, is only one aesthetic category that, in its isolation, is by no means sufficient to open up the entire realm of the aesthetic13 – must be disclosed in their objectivity, not as mere effects on us as subjects. On the other hand, I am very much aware that, in this context, I cannot simply posit Hegel's objective idealism and objective dialectics as true. What I can attempt is possibly and at most the following: to show you with an analysis of the categories that something resembling aesthetic objectivity does actually exist, and thus to do something that I increasingly recognize as the essential approach to dialectical philosophy, namely to render fruitful all the experience, the living experience that lies sealed within dialectical philosophy and show it to you. In other words, quite simply put: that objectivity of the aesthetic which I assume will occupy us here can result as objectivity only from an analysis of the facts, problems and structures of aesthetic objects – that is to say, the works of art. There is no other path to this objectivity than to immerse oneself in the works themselves,14 and I will not hesitate to show you at least with a few models how I think such an objectively oriented aesthetic investigation should actually be carried out; here our central methodological tenet should be – if I may use Hegel's words again – to devote ourselves as purely as possible to the matter15 without adding too much of ourselves. And the more purely we devote ourselves to the matter, the movement of the concept,16 the more emphatically, I would think, our own subjective needs will be honoured.
On the other hand, it is clear – and I know I am here in agreement with the critics of traditional aesthetics, for example Moritz Geiger17 – that it has been an idle pursuit when people constantly tried to construct aesthetics from above, as it were, simply to delineate and define the nature of aesthetic categories – let us say the tragic, as ventured by Johannes Volkelt18 – once and for all through decretory conceptual definitions. Those of you who have a relationship with living art would rightly harbour the greatest distrust towards such a high-handed subsumption of art. Usually this view from above, this observation in general terms, tends already through the character of formality that is implicit in its generality – that is, owing to its conceptual formality – to apply whatever entirely formal criteria for the purpose of recognizing beauty. For example, we are told that particular mathematical proportions dominate in art, or that the work presents itself to us as something gratifying in a particular manner, perhaps in the form of a surface line (or whatever one wishes to call it), as Hildebrand termed it,19 and thus on the basis of whatever formal rules. I think I can advance the opinion, in agreement with Hegel, that all of these categories have something extremely inadequate and something extremely superficial about them in comparison to the living work of art. But please do not misunderstand me. I do not mean to say, for example, that these aspects do not matter, and when, later on, we turn to the problem of formal and contentual aesthetics, we will have to engage thoroughly with the fact that these two categories are mutually conditioned, that the so-called forms are sedimented content, and the aesthetic content, for its part, is something that is affected to its innermost core by the form, and by no means the same as what one appropriates as raw material from the empirical world and somehow stuffs into the work of art. It is undoubtedly the case, for example, that all the problems which have current relevance in today's art under the name ‘construction’, and which are now asserting themselves very energetically in all artistic media, would be inconceivable without something of these formal constituents, perhaps even mathematical proportions. So I do not want to eliminate this aspect here, only to tell you that, as soon as one isolates it, and does not see it in its living relationship – that is to say, its dialectic with the concrete artistic substance – one truly finds oneself in a harmfully formal view and ultimately arrives at the schoolmasterly attitude that presumes to judge if a work of art is worth anything or not, based on whether it fulfils some such formal proportions. To be sure, there will always be something of these elements in great works of art, but only in the way these elements present themselves in the specification of the aesthetic substance with which they are respectively dealing, and not as an abstract definition that can be separated from it and applied once and for all.
I would also like to tell you that it is not my intention to say a great deal about methodological matters in this course of lectures or to reveal much about the epistemological foundations of aesthetics. I could comfortably fill these lectures with such observations, and I know that there is no lack of philosophers who, when treating a matter such as aesthetics, would feel they were violating some standard of purity by going beyond the so-called preliminary considerations. Nor do I wish to underestimate this temptation; but I do wish to resist it. If you will forgive me for such declarations at this very early point, I too am a good Hegelian in the sense that I assert one can really become a smith only by working in the smithy; that is, one does not genuinely grasp a method, does not assure oneself of a method from the inside, by first of all representing it abstractly and then, as some eloquently put it, ‘applying’ it to whatever objects. This is already a dubious procedure in any area of knowledge; in relation to art, it also opens itself up to the suspicion of philistinism, and I will be sure to avoid doing any such thing. For here, in aesthetics, there is indeed no method that could be presented in isolation from the matter itself. I will attempt to acquaint you with the method I am using by explaining the individual aesthetic categories, instead of placing this so-called method abstractly at the start.20 I do not rule out the possibility that some of you might have the impression of something rhapsodic and haphazard, as I am not laying out and applying this method fundamentally, once and for all, but all I can do to counteract that is to point out that, in my little books, I attempted to defend myself against precisely this separation of method and matter and to develop this motif – which, incidentally, is already prefigured in Hegel – from the perspective of contemporary consciousness. You can find these things, if they are of value to you, in the introduction to Against Epistemology,21 as well as in the study ‘The Essay as Form’,22 which probably goes furthest in this direction. But in these matters, too, I am not a rigorist; nor would I claim, of course, that I am simply drawing all the categories purely from the matter itself, purely from the works of art. Rather, as long as there exists a difference between subject and object, between the perceiver and the matter, there is naturally also no absolute or perfect coincidence of matter and method of the kind I have, with a little exaggeration, just stipulated. And, mindful of a certain liberality that is appropriate here, I do wish to point out that, at least on one occasion, I have given something resembling a short description of what I envisage as an aesthetic method: in the introduction to the Kranichstein lecture ‘Criteria of New Music’.23 While this deals only with music, it should not be difficult for you to extrapolate from the reflections you will find there in such a way that they can be applied to the aesthetic problem complex as a whole.
Here, of course, we are dealing in particular with a problem that, taking into consideration the need for epistemological justification, will immediately come to mind for very many of you, namely the old problem – already formulated by Kant – of the contingency or necessity of judgements of taste24 – in other words: the problem of so-called aesthetic relativity, whose content we must also address in this course. And I would like to point out directly that the deliberations we will carry out are equidistant from both poles without being a thing in the middle. It is thus not my intention dogmatically to dictate or posit anything like absolute aesthetic ‘values’; rather, the concept of such a philosophy of values, which proceeds from rigid, immutable values that confront the subject, strikes me as irreconcilable precisely with historical experience and in particular with the experience of what takes place in a binding form in art itself. On the other hand, I am equally disinclined to submit to the bourgeois convention of the contingency of the judgement of taste25 – that is, the claim that art is a matter of taste where one person can like this and another person can like that. The reason I refuse to submit to this view – without wishing to examine its specific merits – is that, wherever this view manifests itself, it is never truly meant seriously. It is very peculiar that the people who claim most often that there is no accounting for taste are the ones who argue most about taste; and the man who says of a modern picture or a piece of modern music that he does not understand it, who exempts himself from the binding nature of a judgement, as it were, is usually the very person who thinks that, by not understanding something, he has already said something withering about the thing he has not understood.26 But to share an even simpler thought on the same question with you: one can see how little serious is the idea of the relativity of the judgement of taste in, firstly, the fact that people are constantly caught up in disputes over aesthetic qualities,27 which is taken to extremes in Germany; one can say that, in Germany, the greatest philosophical controversies, for example concerning Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, came directly from questions of aesthetic quality, namely that of Wagner's Parsifal.28 In addition to this, one can say that, in general, no one would seriously claim that there is no such thing as tuition in art, that art cannot be learned, to a large part at least. And the possibility that I could give a person the most basic lessons in harmony, that I could show them when a chorale is harmonized well and when badly, when a counterpoint is placed properly and when it is not, or that someone with the necessary skill can demonstrate to a young person when the perspective in a picture is rendered correctly and when incorrectly – this alone already points to a decidability of aesthetic questions that is completely irreconcilable with the claim of that relativism. Well, if someone replies: ‘Yes, naturally those are all mere questions of technique, one can learn technique, but one cannot learn art’, this is just another of those idle platitudes that one hears repeated all the time, and which I hope no one will repeat to me once they have had the courtesy to listen to my lecture.29 Concerning this idle platitude – ‘that is mere technique, but the absolute worth of the work of art cannot be decided’ – we can say that the separation of so-called artistic substance from technique is something completely dogmatic – that is to say, there is only such a thing as binding, objectively valid artistic substance to the extent that the work in itself is technically consistent in its execution. We can, furthermore, say that all these aspects I have just named – those of harmony or perspective – are elementary, and that a mature work of art, a mature composition, a mature picture, naturally has nothing to do with that, for it is not only permitted to override traditional harmony or traditional perspective but virtually obliged to do so.30 Now, that is most certainly true; but I would say – and I think this will at least give you a first insight into the problem of the objective quality of the work of art – that the path leading to a serious decision about whether something is an autonomous and substantial work free from all school rules, that this path is one which in fact leads on with a certain continuity from those so-called elementary problems of being correctly harmonized or correctly drawn. This means that even the highest – I am reluctant to say the highest, I want to be careful – but almost the highest aesthetic questions can essentially be decided according to categories of coherence [Stimmigkeit], which, though quantitatively infinitely different from those primitive things I mentioned, fundamentally belong to the same level of decidability; and I hope that in this course of lectures I can fully develop this very aspect for you, which truly strikes me as the key to the objectivity of aesthetic judgement. At any rate, the question of the contingency of judgements of taste will not trouble us. Allow me to say in passing, however, that I am not referring to the empirical contingency of judgements of taste. This means that, for any given work of art, what Mr X and Miss Y think of it is indeed a rather contingent matter. And if one wished to add together or take the logarithm of its aesthetic quality from these subjective reactions, one would certainly not arrive at any objectivity; for the only way to arrive at objectivity is through the inner composition of the matter, the categorial fabric, if I may call it that, which every work of art constitutes in itself.31
I would like to add a few words about the widespread resistance against aesthetic theory, as it will perhaps help our communication somewhat if you reflect a little on a few of these resistances and do away with them, and then perhaps feel more inclined to accept the imposition that you will, however, face: namely that engaging with art is not a Sunday enjoyment but, rather, something very serious and very obliging – or, as Hegel put it, that art is a manifestation, a progressive manifestation of truth.32 First of all, one must consider that, in the general, pre-philosophical awareness, art is viewed as something like a domain of irrationality, a domain of the unconscious, a realm in which the criteria of logicality do not apply. Let me say right away that the logic or stringency of the work of art, to which I referred earlier with the word ‘coherence’, naturally has nothing to do with ordinary logic, the ordinary extensional logic of the concept, nor should it be understood as a causal-mechanical logic; rather, it is a logic sui generis, the logic of an internally motivated complex of meaning, and that, if one speaks of aesthetic logic at all, one must address this specific nature of aesthetic logic.33 On the other hand, however, I do wish to say that – although today, in the world of manipulated mass culture, controlled consumption, as it is termed, the thought of an ‘irrationality of art’ in general is really already abused to catch customers; that is, abused in order to make people stupid and lull them – I am far from overlooking the element of truth that even this notion of the irrationality of art contains. And during the next session, when we begin to talk about the relationship between natural and artistic beauty, I hope I can bring out this element of truth for you to some degree. This means that art is indeed largely the area whose substance includes those very impulses, forms of behaviour, feelings or whatever else that otherwise fall victim to the progressive control over nature and to the rationality that progresses together with it. Art, then, cannot simply be subsumed under the concepts of reason or rationality but is, rather, this rationality itself, only in the form of its otherness, in the form – if you will – of a particular resistance against it.34 But, having conceded this, I believe that the fact of this element of irrationality in art itself – or, if I might indulge in a little pathos for a moment, the riddle character of all art35 – to which we will return at the end of the lecture, does not automatically rule out a theoretical, reasonable engagement with art. This is no more ruled out than, for example, the irrationality of our inner lives initially rules out our examining, as reasonable people, our inner lives – that is to say, practising psychology. I believe that you can embark on theoretical aesthetic investigations productively only if you free yourselves from the fear – a fear that is certainly not limited to art, but which could be said to crystallize through art – that the fact of becoming aware will destroy the thing of which one becomes aware, that it is ruined, that, as soon as you gain insight into a work of art, this work will cease to ‘give’ you anything, as people say, or to make you happy. It may then lose certain qualities it has for the naïve awareness,36 for example those qualities of so-called sensual enjoyment of which I have already spoken, and to which countless people cling. But it will gain other qualities at the same time, and whatever qualities it has must, if a philosophical awareness is appropriate to it, then be held, indeed truly preserved, in this philosophical awareness, not simply destroyed by it. For reflection on a matter does not immediately turn the matter itself into something reflected.37 Some time ago, I had to give a lecture in Hamburg about ‘Questions of Contemporary Opera Theatre’,38 and during the discussion someone rose to speak and said with great fervour that all these reflections I was engaging in were certainly not what guided Mozart; he never thought about any of all that – and, anyway, could I compose anything as beautiful as Mozart?39 I replied to the man that unfortunately I had been asked to give the lecture, and that, if someone had invited me to speak theoretically about art, I could not be reproached for doing so. But I think that the fervour found here is genuinely so strong that the mere theoretical reflection on the work of art is already misinterpreted from the outset, as if it somehow referred to what had been going on inside the artist themselves while producing the works. For this reason, I think it is important – as banal as it is, and although I am almost embarrassed to say so – to point out to you in these lectures that, in my deliberations on art, I never say anything about artists, about the psychology of artists, unless some context expressly demands it; that I generally do not intend to speak psychologically here, not even in very specific contexts of a historico-philosophical character, and, above all, that none of the aspects I attempt to highlight as the objectivity of the work of art are the same as the so-called intentions harboured by the artists when they created them.40 For the work of art becomes something objective precisely by asserting itself to the composer as an independent and internally organized thing. And I am almost inclined to say: the more fully it succeeds in this, the less it is a mere document of the artist, the more it is something that speaks in its own right – the greater the value of the work will be in general.
But I would add one more thing, namely the naïveté stipulated time and again in relation to art, which – largely because of the famous controversy between Goethe and Schiller, documented in Schiller's highly significant essay ‘On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry’41 – is almost a dogma:42 historically, this naïveté has probably always been something quite problematic if one reflects on it in absolute terms. The artists were generally far cleverer than the operetta composers imagine when they speak about Mozart. Incidentally, the man who raised the objection was not an operetta composer, as I initially suspected, but was in fact the leaseholder of an operetta theatre, so I had not been far off in my guess about him.43 That is to say: the view that the work of art is a pure expression of human naïveté is one that directly augments the interests of commerce or the administered world, or of the world dominated by mercantile interests.
But whatever the case may be – perhaps I can still say something to justify an examination of such theoretical questions as the one we intend here: in the current artistic situation, where literally all the conditions for artistic material have become problematic and there are no longer any substantial givens in art, where every artist instead finds themselves vis-à-vis de rien, one could say, the kinds of things one would describe as basic research in a field such as physics are urgently needed in the realm of art too. And I think it is better if such a theoretical consideration of art is carried out by people who imagine they know something about art and theory than by artists alone, for example, who do not, in fact, have the conceptual apparatus entirely at their disposal and consequently very often merely set up some apologetic support structures for their own practice, often drawing on rationalist theories that fall far short of what one actually finds in the works of art.
Notes
1
See Ivo Frenzel, ‘Ästhetik’, in
Das Fischer Lexikon
, vol. 11:
Philosophie
, ed. A. Diemer and I. Frenzel (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1958), p. 35. In the ‘Draft Introduction’ to
Aesthetic Theory
, Adorno quotes at length from the entry; see Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory
, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 439. The publicist Ivo Frenzel (1924–2014) studied philosophy and sociology with Nicolai Hartmann, Helmuth Plessner and others. In his review of
Negative Dialectics
(‘Ist Philosophie noch möglich?’,
Süddeutsche Zeitung
, 2/3 September 1967), Frenzel praised Adorno's book: it had ‘given philosophy a possibility of self-assertion, restored a part of its dignity’.
2
Adorno used the tape transcript of this lecture when preparing later lectures and working on
Aesthetic Theory
. When going over the typescript he marked certain passages, in some cases adding handwritten notes. These traces of revision are indicated in the present notes. Here he marked the text from ‘If you’ to ‘vacuum’.
3
See Immanuel Kant,
Critique of the Power of Judgement
, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (Cambridge University Press, 2000), §§2–5 (pp. 90–6).
4
Marked by Adorno from ‘Kantian aesthetics’ to ‘definition of beauty’.
5
G. W. F. Hegel,
Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art
, 2 vols, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1998–9).
6
See F. W. J. Schelling,
The Philosophy of Art
, trans. Douglas W. Stott (Minnesota University Press, 1989).
7
See Arthur Schopenhauer,
The World as Will and Representation
, 2 vols, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1969).
8
The definition of beauty as the ‘sensual appearance of the idea’, which was central for the reception of Hegel's aesthetics, does not feature in any of the surviving transcripts of Hegel's lectures on aesthetics in Berlin (1820/21, 1823, 1826, 1828/29). It is now assumed that this phrase was not coined by Hegel himself but by his student and editor H. G. Hotho; see the editors’ introduction in G. W. F. Hegel,
Philosophie der Kunst: Vorlesung von 1826
, ed. Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, Jeong-Im Kwon and Karsten Berr (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005), p. 21. The reference to the respective aesthetics of Hegel, Schelling and Schopenhauer is marked by Adorno in the typescript.
9
See Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Pure Reason
, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 409:
It can be said that the object of a merely transcendental idea is something of which we have no concept, even though this idea is generated in an entirely necessary way by reason according to its own laws. For in fact no concept of the understanding is possible for an object that is to be adequate to the demand of reason, i.e., an object such as can be shown and made intuitive in a possible experience. But we would express ourselves better and with less danger of misunderstanding if we said that we can have no acquaintance with an object that corresponds to an idea, even though we can have a problematic concept of it.
10
Marked by Adorno from ‘only then’ to ‘as effective’.
11
Marked by Adorno from ‘the Hegelian approach’ to ‘of the absolute’.
12
Marked by Adorno from ‘beauty itself’ to ‘on me’.
13
Marked by Adorno from ‘let me begin’ to ‘the aesthetic’.
14
Marked by Adorno from ‘that objectivity’ to ‘works themselves’.
15
In the preface to his
Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807), Hegel explains the relationship between philosophical knowledge and the ‘matter’ [
Sache
], the recognition of the latter being the task and challenge of philosophy. Responding to the demand to state in advance the aim and result of his philosophical deliberation, he counters:
This concern with aim or results, with differentiating and passing judgement on various thinkers is therefore an easier task than it might seem. For instead of getting involved in the matter itself, this kind of activity is always away beyond it; instead of tarrying with it, and losing itself in it, this kind of knowing is forever grasping at something new; it remains essentially preoccupied with itself instead of being preoccupied with the matter and surrendering to it. (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller [Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1977], p. 3 [translation modified])
Adorno reads this as a fundamental methodological demand that he adopts as his own and concretizes in Negative Dialectics: ‘To yield to the object means to do justice to the object's qualitative aspects’ (Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton [New York: Continuum, 1972], p. 43 [translation modified]).
16
According to Hegel, the ‘matter’ with which thought must occupy itself, on which it must dwell, is the ‘movement of the concept’ (
Phenomenology of Spirit
, p. 20). In the preface to
Phenomenology
he describes this movement as a fluidization of an initially still rigid, ‘fixed thought’:
Thoughts become fluid when pure thinking, this inner immediacy, recognizes itself as an aspect, or when the pure certainty of self abstracts from itself – […] by giving up the fixity of its self-positing, by giving up not only the fixity of the pure concrete, which the ‘I’ itself is, in contrast with its differentiated content, but also the fixity of the differentiated aspects which, posited in the element of pure thinking, share the unconditioned nature of the ‘I’. Through this movement the pure thoughts become concepts, and are only now what they are in truth, self-movements, circles, spiritual essences, which is what their substance is.
(Ibid. [translation modified])
Adorno takes up this basic Hegelian principle in his study on the experiential content of Hegel's philosophy:
Hence the concept that remains true to its own meaning must change; if it is to follow its own conception, a philosophy that holds the concept to be something more than a mere instrument of the intellect must abandon definition, which might hinder it in doing so. The movement of the concept is not a sophistical manipulation that would insert changing meanings into it from the outside but rather the ever-present consciousness of both the identity of and the inevitable difference between the concept and what it is supposed to express, a consciousness that animates all genuine knowledge.
(Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen [Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993], p. 71)
17
Moritz Geiger (1880–1937), a student of Theodor Lipps, Wilhelm Wundt and Edmund Husserl, was professor of philosophy in Munich (1915–23), where his students included Walter Benjamin, and Göttingen (1923–33). He emigrated to the USA in 1933 and taught at Vassar College, New York, until his death. Geiger became known for his phenomenological investigations into aesthetics (see ‘Beiträge zur Phänomenologie des ästhetischen Genusses’,
Jahrbuch für Phänomenologie und philosophische Forschung I
[Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1913], pp. 567–684) and epistemological works. Here, Adorno is referring primarily to Geiger's book
Zugänge zur Ästhetik
(Leipzig: Der neue Geist, 1928), which deals with amateurism in artistic experience, the surface and deep effects of art, and phenomenological aesthetics.
18
Johannes Volkelt (1848–1930) was professor of philosophy in Leipzig (1894–1921); after his book
Ästhetik des Tragischen
(Munich: C. H. Beck, 1897), which Adorno mentions here as a deterrent example, he wrote the extensive
System der Ästhetik
(3 vols, Munich: C. H. Beck, 1905–12). Adorno had already examined Volkelt intensively in his first aesthetics lectures of 1931; see
Frankfurter Blätter I
, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Munich: edition text + kritik, 1992), pp. 39–84.
19
Adolf von Hildebrand (1847–1921) was considered the most important German sculptor from around 1880 until the end of the First World War; in his book
Das Problem der Form in der bildenden Kunst
(Strasbourg: Heitz, 1893) he also addressed aesthetic questions. Reprinted in
Gesammelte Schriften zur Kunst
, ed. Henning Bock (Cologne and Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1969).
20
Marked by Adorno from ‘Nor do I’ to ‘at the start’.
21
Adorno,
Against Epistemology: A Metacritique
, trans. Willis Domingo (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982).
22
In Adorno,
Notes to Literature
, trans. Samuel Weber and Shierry Weber Nicholsen, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 3–23.
23
This lecture was given in the summer of 1957; published in Theodor W. Adorno,
Sound Figures
, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 145–96. It begins thus:
The question of criteria by which to judge new music calls for reflection not directly on the criteria themselves, but on the methods needed to discover them, if we are to avoid the standard strategies of resistance. But we can scarcely begin by discussing methods in a fundamental sense. For the methods cannot be separated from the subject and treated as something ready-made and external, but must be produced in the course of a process of interaction with their subject.
24
See Kant,
Critique of the Power of Judgement
, §§18–22.
25
Marked by Adorno from ‘the deliberations’ to ‘taste’.
26
Marked by Adorno from ‘It is very peculiar’ to ‘understood’. See also Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory
, p. 363.
27
Marked by Adorno from ‘one can see’ to ‘aesthetic qualities’.
28
Parsifal
, by Richard Wagner (1813–1883), was premiered at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in 1882. See Adorno's essay ‘On the Score of
Parsifal
’, in Adorno,
Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962
, trans. Wieland Hoban (London: Seagull, 2009), pp. 71–80. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, ‘The Case of Wagner’ and ‘Nietzsche Contra Wagner’, in
The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols and Other Writings
, ed. Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, trans. Judith Norman (Cambridge University Press, 2005).
29
Marked by Adorno from ‘Well, if’ to ‘my lecture’.
30
Marked by Adorno from ‘all these aspects’ to ‘to do so’.
31
Double marked by Adorno from ‘I am not’ to ‘constitutes in itself’.
32
See Hegel,
Aesthetics
, vol. 2, pp. 1236f.:
For in art we have to do, not with any agreeable or useful child's play, but with the liberation of the spirit from the contents and forms of finitude, with the presence and reconciliation of the Absolute in what is apparent and visible, with an unfolding of the truth which is not exhausted in natural history but revealed in world history. Art itself is the most beautiful side of that history and it is the best compensation for hard work in the world and the bitter labour for knowledge.
33
Marked by Adorno from ‘nothing to do’ to ‘aesthetic logic’. See Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory
, pp. 187–9.
34
This sentence is marked by Adorno with four lines.
35
The
riddle character
of art is one of the central motifs in Adorno's
Aesthetic Theory
:
All artworks – and art altogether – are enigmas; since antiquity this has been an irritation to the theory of art. That artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it expresses this riddle character from the perspective of language. This characteristic cavorts clownishly; if one is within the artwork, if one participates in its immanent completion, the riddle character makes itself invisible; if one steps outside of the work, breaking the contract with its immanent context, this riddle character returns like a spirit.
(p. 160; translation modified)
Adorno already used the term in 1953, in his essay ‘On the Current Relationship Between Philosophy and Music’ (in Night Music, pp. 426–73), and also in 1956, in the essay ‘Music, Language and Composition’ (in Essays on Music, selected with introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, with new translations by Susan H. Gillespie [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002], pp. 113–26), where he further develops the ideas presented in that text.
36
Marked by Adorno from ‘I believe’ to ‘naïve awareness’.
37
Marked from ‘in this philosophical’ to ‘something reflected’. Marginal note in Adorno's writing: ‘Addition to the main text on reflection’. See Adorno,
Aesthetic Theory
, pp. 16ff., 109f.
38
‘Fragen des zeitgenössischen Operntheaters’, first published in
Neue Deutsche Hefte
, no. 31, January 1957, pp. 526–35; then in 1966, in a revised version, in the programme book of the Bayreuth Festival for Wieland Wagner's production of
Tannhäuser
; now in
Gesammelte Schriften
, ed. Rolf Tiedemann with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), vol. 19:
Musikalische Schriften VI
, pp. 481–93.
39
Marked by Adorno from ‘contemporary opera theatre’ to ‘Mozart’.
40
Marked with three lines from ‘that I generally’ to ‘character’, and marked with three lines from ‘and above all’ to ‘created them’.
41
See Friedrich Schiller,
On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature
(1795/6), trans. Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly (Manchester: Carcanet New Press, 1981).
42
Marked by Adorno from ‘the less’ to ‘dogma’.
43
Marked by Adorno from ‘this naïveté’ to ‘about him’.
Lecture 213 November 1958
To facilitate your access to theoretical aesthetics, I promised to say a few words about some of the forms of resistance against this discipline whose existence I presuppose as widespread; here I proceed from the conviction, hardly unknown in the field of psychology, that very often such resistance is overcome when one reflects on it oneself – that is to say, through a certain form of self-reflection. After the resistance I addressed last time, namely that against a theoretical consideration of art as a form of nature reserve for irrationality, I would like to discuss a second kind. But perhaps I can first add that you should not, of course, take the theoretical consideration of art or with aesthetic questions directly as a sort of instruction for how to act towards works of art, or as an immediate help in understanding difficult works. If these lectures are at all successful, I hope they will contribute something to this by removing certain blinkers and shaking up certain conventions, but, at the same time, you should not simply take that as a formula for how to view works of art. Although the question of one's individual response to the work is ultimately determined by the objectivity of the matter itself, it is certainly something different from the treatment of this objectivity, which is also clarified by a fact that I will still be addressing today in a different context: that some of the greatest theoretical achievements in aesthetics come from people who were quite distant from an immediate experience of art. So theoretical reflection on art and the direct understanding or perception of art are not the same thing, and theoretical reflection can perhaps contribute something to this living relationship, but must not be misunderstood, as some of you are perhaps doing because you know that I have a very close connection to certain elements of modern art – as if one were receiving a kind of instruction manual for difficult modern music or difficult modern literature here – otherwise you will be disappointed.
