On the Dialectic of Natural Beauty and Artistic Beauty

Donald Burke

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 Kants 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. Hegels 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. 1 In Adornos 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 Adornos 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

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perception of images of a beyond; that is, of that which is beyond exchange society. In this essay, I will demonstrate how Adornos 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 Kants and Hegels 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 la Hegel, nor privileging natural beauty as Kant does, Adorno moves beyond the one-sidedness of Kants and Hegels positions. In the Critique of Judgment Kant contends that natural beauty is superior to artistic beauty in that the immediate interest the lover of nature takes in contemplating nature is indicative of a good soul and of one who has cultivated their moral feeling. Now I admit at once that the interest in the beautiful of art ... furnishes no proof whatever of a disposition attached to the morally good or even inclined thereto. But on the other hand, I maintain that to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature ... is always a mark of a good soul; and that, when this interest is habitual, it at least indicates a frame of mind favorable to the moral feeling if it is voluntarily bound up with the contemplation of nature. 2 ............. This superiority of natural to artificial beauty in that it alone arouses an immediate interest, although as regards form the former may be surpassed by the latter, harmonizes with the refined and thorough mental attitude of all men who have cultivated their moral feeling. (CJ 42, p. 142)

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Because he associates interest in natural beauty with the cultivation of morality, Kant regards it to be superior to artistic beauty. In his discussion of the sublime, Kant grants a more central role to nature than he does to art: Might is that which is superior to great hindrances. It is called dominion if it is superior to the resistance of that which itself possesses might. Nature, considered in an aesthetical judgment as might that has no dominion over us, is dynamically sublime. (CJ 28, p. 99) For Kant, in the experience of the sublime, the subject confronts the grandeur of nature, in comparison with which the human beings ability to resist is insignificant. As examples of natural phenomena that possess might yet have no dominion over us Kant lists the following: Bold, overhanging, and as it were threatening rocks; clouds piled up in the sky, moving with lightning flashes and thunder peals; volcanoes in all their violence of destruction; hurricanes with their track of devastation; the boundless ocean in a state of tumult; the lofty waterfall of a mighty river, and such like. (CJ 28, p. 100) Now, the human subject is powerless to resist the might of such natural phenomena, yet as aesthetical judgments must be pure, the subject cannot be in actual danger. Such phenomena have no dominion over us if they are considered aesthetically. Rather, we merely think a case in which we would wish to resist [such an object] and yet in which all resistance would be altogether vain (CJ 28, p. 100). Astonishment that borders upon terror, the dread and the holy awe which seizes the observer at the sight of mountain peaks rearing themselves to heaven, deep chasms and streams raging therein, deep-shadowed solitudes that dispose one to

melancholy meditations this, in the safety in which we know ourselves to be, is not actual fear but only an attempt to feel fear by the aid of the imagination, that we may feel the might of this faculty in combining with the minds repose the mental movement thereby excited, and being thus superior to internal nature and therefore to external so far as this can have any influence on our feeling of wellbeing. (CJ 29, p. 109) According to Adorno, Kants theory of the sublime is in complicity with the domination of nature. For even to think of resisting the might of nature, a thought that leads the Kantian subject to recognize the infinity of its own destiny, the subject elevates itself above nature. Adorno writes: by situating the sublime in overpowering grandeur and setting up the antithesis of power and powerlessness, Kant directly affirmed his unquestioning complicity with domination. 3 In the infinite striving of the imagination, the Kantian subject recognizes the infinite within in the form of the moral law, which elevates the subject above nature, above mere animality, thus repressing internal nature; that is, that humans are nevertheless part of a natural environment. Yet Kant is not simply in complicity with domination, for as Adorno notes a few lines further on With profound justification [Kant] defined the concept of the sublime by the resistance of spirit to the overpowering (AT 199). The subject recognizes the infinity of the human destiny, which entails both domination and resistance to power. Whereas Kant privileges natural beauty over artificial beauty because the former leads the subject to an awareness of her supersensible destination, Hegel erects a hierarchy between natural beauty and artistic beauty that works in the opposite direction. In the Introduction to his Aesthetics, Hegel writes:

The beauty of art is higher than nature. The beauty of art is beauty born of the spirit and born again, and the higher the spirit and its productions stand above nature and its phenomena, the higher too is the beauty of art above that of nature. 4 Hegel delimits his lectures on aesthetics to a philosophy of fine art (Philosophie der schnen Kunst): By adopting this expression we at once exclude the beauty of nature (HA 1:1). For Hegel, the beauty of art is higher than the beauty of nature taken in its immediacy, for the work of art is a spiritual product that is first conceived in the mind, which refashions natural material that is born again as a work of art imbued with spirit: Now art and works of art, by springing from and being created by the spirit, are themselves of a spiritual kind, even if their presentation assumes an appearance of sensuousness and pervades the sensuous with the spirit. In this respect art already lies nearer to the spirit and its thinking than purely external spiritless nature does. In the products of art, the spirit has to do solely with its own. (HA 1:12) For Hegel, the fact that in works of art the spirit has to do solely with its own implies that the work of art is higher than nature, that artistic beauty is higher than the beauty of nature, and that the latter must be repressed in philosophical aesthetics. Adornos conception of artistic beauty is fundamentally opposed to that of Hegel. Whereas Hegel maintains that artistic beauty is higher than nature, Adorno considers an appreciation for natural beauty to be the prerequisite for an appreciation of artistic beauty. Hegel obviously lacked the sensibility needed to recognize that genuine experience of art is not possible without the experience of that elusive dimension whose name natural beauty had faded 5 ... What Hegel chalks up as the deficiency of natural beauty the characteristic of escaping from fixed concept

is however the substance of beauty itself ... Because natural beauty is not thoroughly ruled and defined by spirit, Hegel considers it preaesthetic. (AT 63, 76, 76) Adornos criticism of post-Kantian idealist aesthetics is a dialectical, redemptive approach, in that he seeks to give a voice to nature that Hegel repressed. By viewing nature aesthetically and historicizing the concept of nature Adorno construes an affinity between artistic and natural beauty in that both are deemed evanescent. Another key term that Adorno uses in this connection is apparition (AT 88), though Adorno uses this French word in relation to the spirit of artworks, and not in conjunction with natural beauty. By rejecting the fleetingness of natural beauty, as well as virtually everything nonconceptual, Hegel obtusely makes himself indifferent to the central motif of art, which probes after truth in the evanescent and fragile (AT 76). By making an appreciation for natural beauty the precondition for an appreciation of artistic beauty, and by viewing both nature and art aesthetically, that is, as fleeting, ephemeral apparitions, Adorno recuperates the concept of natural beauty and introduces a non-dominating approach to nature based on a type of rationality that is aesthetic rather than instrumental and that recollects the way in which the natural environment is mediated by human productive activity. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment, Horkheimer and Adorno write: the control of internal and external nature has been made the absolute purpose of life. 6 Horkheimer and Adorno claim that the denial of internal nature is the price that is paid for the domination of external nature, and that this tendency has a history that reaches far beyond Kant. Indeed, the denial of internal nature, the domination of external nature, and the dominance of instrumental rationality form a triad that is detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity.

In class society, the selfs hostility to sacrifice included a sacrifice of the self, since it was paid for by a denial of nature in the human being for the sake of mastery over extrahuman nature and over other human beings. This very denial, the core of all civilizing rationality, is the germ cell of proliferating mythical irrationality: with the denial of nature in human beings, not only the telos of the external mastery of nature but also the telos of ones own life becomes confused and opaque. At the moment when human beings cut themselves off from the consciousness of themselves as nature, all the purposes for which they keep themselves alive social progress, the heightening of material and intellectual forces, indeed, consciousness itself becomes void, and the enthronement of the means as the end, which in late capitalism is taking on the character of overt madness, is already detectable in the earliest history of subjectivity. (DE 42-3) The remembrance of nature within the subject is the antidote to the enthronement of the means as the end. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno formulates a notion of aesthetic rationality that is not geared towards the domination of an object by a subject. Rather, art participates in the dialectic of enlightenment because it is entwined with rationalization (AT 54) since it relies on technology that emerged extra-aesthetically for its means of production, but also, borrowing from Walter Benjamin, art has emerged from its enslavement to magic and ritual. Art cannot shake off its magical antecedents, nor can it be sealed off from technological innovation. For Adorno, the aesthetic experience of natural beauty entails a relation between subject and object that is not that of domination or mastery. Here it is important to note the distinction between instrumental and aesthetic rationality. According to Adorno, aesthetic rationality is that

form of rationality that governs the coherence and unity of a work of art: art is not something prerational or irrational ... Rationality in the artwork is the unity-founding, organizing element, not unrelated to the rationality that governs externally, but it does not reflect its categorizing order (AT 55). Technology in the artwork is not based upon instrumental rationality; rather, aesthetic rationality is independent of the fetishization of means as ends that is the hallmark of instrumental rationality: Yet art mobilizes technique in an opposite direction than does domination (AT 54); within art, technology is geared towards purposes outside or beyond the domination of nature. 7 Although artistic techniques may indeed be parasitic on techniques that developed extra-aesthetically, and that might initially have been used for the domination of nature, the same techniques used in the construction of art objects do not serve to dominate nature along the lines of instrumental rationality. For example, electronics, which originated in quite a different context, was being used in music already in Adornos time. In electronics it is already possible to produce artistically by manipulating means that originated extra-aesthetically (AT 33); Stockhausens concept of electronic works which, since they are not notated in the traditional sense but immediately realized in their material, could be extinguished along with this material is a splendid one of an art that makes emphatic claim yet is prepared to throw itself away (AT 177-8). Adornos emphasis on aesthetic rationality and artistic techniques that initially developed within the broader context of the development of the forces of production of society as a whole is part of his historical materialist framework. As a Marxist, Adorno focuses his attention on artistic production rather than the reception of works of art. Adornos materialism is apparent both in his attempt to rescue the concept of natural beauty and in his analysis of artistic means of production. Adorno explores the relation between the technological development of the means of

production in a society more generally, and the way in which these means are used in artistic production. Technique used in the construction of art objects is a historical possibility that is dependent on the development of techniques that emerged extra-aesthetically. As opposed to the mastery of nature, the aesthetic experience of nature allows nature to express itself through its evanescent appearance. Once it no longer serves as an object of action, appearing nature itself imparts expression, whether that of melancholy, peace, or something else. ... A qualitative distinction in natural beauty can be sought, if at all, in the degree to which something not made by human beings is eloquent: in its expression. What is beautiful in nature is what appears to be more than what is literally there. (AT 66, 70-71) Because previous definitions of the concept of nature 8 are enmeshed in the domination of nature, Adorno introduces a utopian perspective on natural beauty: The image of what is oldest in nature reverses dialectically into the cipher of the not-yet-existing, the possible: As its appearance this cipher is more than the existing (AT 73) nature, as it stirs mortally and tenderly in its beauty, does not yet exist. The dignity of nature is that of the not-yet-existing; by its expression it repels intentional humanization (AT 74). It is in deciphering the expression of nature and allowing for the possibility of the dignity of nature that Adornos Aesthetic Theory can instruct us in developing ecological politics. The way in which nature expresses itself betrays the affinity between natural beauty and artistic beauty in Adornos aesthetic theory. An aesthetic experience is that of images, whether the images are furnished by works of art or by nature. Just how bound up natural beauty is with art beauty is confirmed by the experience of the former. For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff

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of labor and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images. Nature, as appearing beauty, is not perceived as an object of action. The sloughing off of the aims of self-preservation which is emphatic in art is carried out to the same degree in aesthetic experience of nature. (AT 65) Taking up an aesthetic attitude towards nature is a historical possibility that only arises when our orientation towards nature is no longer merely that of self-preservation: Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for natural beauty; as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which nature as it appears is an immediate object of action, allow little appreciation for landscape (AT 65). The aesthetic experience of natural beauty, on the other hand, is a sensuous experience of a beautiful appearance (schne Schein) in an image. For Adorno, the aesthetic experience of both natural beauty and artistic beauty is that of images (AT 65). In this regard, Adorno notes that the difference between these two forms of aesthetic experience is scarcely discernible. The image-character of artistic and natural beauty implies that the former is an imitation of the latter. Natural beauty is the prerequisite for artistic beauty, because art is an imitation of natural beauty as an image, and not of nature itself. Art is not the imitation of nature but the imitation of natural beauty ... Art does not imitate nature, not even individual instances of natural beauty, but natural beauty as such. This denominates not only the aporia of natural beauty but the aporia of aesthetics as a whole. Its object is determined negatively, as indeterminable. It is for this reason that art requires philosophy, which interprets it in order to say what it is unable to say, whereas art is only able to say it by not saying it. (AT 71, 72)

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Here Adorno claims that art is not the imitation of nature, because even natural beauty appears as an image. When he refers to natural beauty as such it must be kept in mind that for Adorno, the object of aesthetics, whether of natural beauty or artistic beauty, is indeterminable. An image is not a concept, nor does it communicate meaning; thus images of natural beauty and artistic beauty need to be deciphered. Through the remembrance of internal nature and granting expression to nature Adornos theory of natural beauty reorientates our relation to external nature, allowing it to appear as an image rather than an object to be mastered. Whereas Kants theory of natural beauty represses internal and external nature, and Hegels idealist aesthetics neglects nature itself, Adornos concept of natural beauty remains one largely untapped source of inspiration for radical ecological thought.

NOTES
1

I became aware of Rodolphe Gaschs The Theory of Natural Beauty and its Evil Star: Kant,

Hegel, Adorno (in Research in Phenomenology, 32 (2002): 103-122) in the final stages of writing this article. Gasch argues that any difference between [natural beauty and the beauty of art] implies some sort of hierarchy (104). If Adorno plays off Kant against Hegel, it is not to put the latters valorization of man-made art into question. Indeed, in spite of his scathing criticism of idealist aesthetics destructive bent, Adorno does not wish to overturn the hierarchy that the latter established between the two kinds of beauty (116). Although Adorno claims that an appreciation for natural beauty is the precondition for an appreciation of artistic beauty, he

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plays these two types of beauty off one another in such a way that implies pace Gasch that there is no hierarchy between the two.
2

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. J. H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Co.,

1951), 42, p. 141 (hereafter CJ).

3

Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of

Minnesota Press, 1997), 199 (hereafter AT).

4

G. W. F. Hegel, Hegels Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, 2 vols., trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1975), 2 (hereafter HA).

5

Here Gaschs observation that any articulation of a relation between natural and artistic

beauty implies some sort of hierarchy seems on the mark.

6

Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical

Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 24 (hereafter DE).
7

Heinz Paetzold, Adornos Notion of Natural Beauty: A Reconsideration, in The Semblance of

Subjectivity: Essays in Adornos Aesthetic Theory, ed. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997), 213-235, here 227.
8

Hans Robert Jauss, Aesthetic Experience and Literary Hermeneutics, trans. Michael Shaw

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), 20.