2  Aesthetics and Metaphysics II

From Kant to Adorno

With the birth of German idealism, and the emergence of the figure of the genius in particular, aesthetics seems to break decisively with mimetic art, and introduce the typically modern notion of (self)-creation. A few examples to illustrate this point should suffice.

In §47 of the Critique of Judgement, Kant famously declares that the artistic genius, whom he opposes to the pedant’s rigid adherence to rules, is “entirely opposed to the spirit of imitation [Nachahmungsgeiste]” precisely to the extent that the genius “gives rules to art,” that is, invents or produces a work that redefines the rules of the artistic game. What we witness in artistic beauty, as the product of the genius, is the free play of our cognitive powers, and what we feel is an increase of vitality that comes from the harmony between imagination and understanding. A few years later, in his Discourse of 12 October 1807 titled “On the Relation of the Fine Arts to Nature,” Schelling insists that the relation between art and nature is not one of servile imitation, but consists in the reproduction, on the part of the artist, of the creative force and life of Nature.1 Contrary to what Winckelmann believed, Schelling claims, art isn’t simply a matter of reproducing forms, and our appreciation of it isn’t reducible to our ability to recognise and admire them. In and of themselves, forms lack the force of life, which Schelling calls “spirit,” or “concept.” Nature itself is the product of such a force. Spirit is the true artist, which is at work in nature as well as art: spirit meditates and dreams in the products of nature. Nature is itself already a poem, which art makes explicit. In that respect, there is a superiority of art over nature. Art is the “the world of ideas entirely open” (V, 631), whereas Nature lacks a voice. We find something very similar in Schopenhauer, for whom the artist, “by recognising in the individual thing its Idea . . . understands nature’s half-spoken words. He expresses clearly what she merely stammers.”² He doesn’t imitate nature, but surpasses it.³ Let me add, in passing, that whereas for Schopenhauer the genius is driven by Ideas, which are a matter of pure perception, imitators and mannerists are driven by concepts, which, as abstractions generated by our faculty of reason, belong not in art, but in science. Schopenhauer does not seek to hide his disdain of such imitators: “Like parasitic plants, they suck their nourishment from the works of others; and like polyps, take on the colour of their nourishment.”4 Hegel’s own condemnation of mimesis, or Nachahmung, in the Introduction to the Aesthetics is formulated in even stronger terms, reminiscent of Plato’s own.⁵ Unlike Plato, though, Hegel’s strong condemnation of mimesis goes hand in hand with a revaluation of the role of art in relation to truth: if art were essentially a matter of imitation, it wouldn’t be worth anyone’s time, not even that of the artist, whose initial pleasure at having reproduced the appearance of an object would almost immediately turn into boredom and dissatisfaction. For what is imitation, if not the doomed effort to repeat (wiederholen) and reproduce identically what is already, and more perfectly, given in experience, the superfluous (überflüssige) and vain attempt to depict the flowers, landscapes, animals, or human events already there before us in our gardens or in the countryside beyond? Hegel mentions, with utter scorn, Zeuxis’ famous painting of grapes, which was proclaimed a triumph of art because doves pecked at them as though they were actual.⁶ Imitation will only ever provide a one-sided appearance (Schein) of the reality it depicts. As such, it can never make visible the liveliness (Lebendigkeit) of real life. It will only ever consist of an illusion of reality. Hegel concludes his criticism by saying that “by mere imitation, art cannot stand in competition with nature, and, if it tries, it looks like a worm trying to crawl after an elephant.”⁷

One can wonder the extent to which, despite this condemnation of mimesis, formulated in the strongest possible terms, the metaphysical paradigm that Plato had introduced remains firmly in place, thus forcing and reinstating mimesis at a more fundamental level, forcing it even more deeply underground, as it had for the Romantics. If the thinkers I just alluded to condemn a vulgar form of imitation, it is only, in the end, to appeal to a higher, more complete form of mimesis. In what follows, and by looking at some aspects of Kant’s Critique of Judgement, Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, and Hegel’s as well as Adorno’s Aesthetics, I would like to suggest the various, fundamental ways in which modern German aesthetics, and the philosophy of art that was born in the aftermath of Kant’s Copernican revolution, remained a metaphysics of art, and continued to be thought within the space broached by Plato and Aristotle.

1   Kant

The reconfiguration of mimesis in Kant has its roots in his conception of the role of the imagination, and its connection with the problem of (re) presentation, or Darstellung. Kant calls imagination (Einbildungskraft) the faculty that mediates or bridges the space between the sensible and the intelligible. The role of the imagination is to produce an image for a given concept,⁸ or an idea.⁹ At its most general, the question of the presentation (exhibitio) of concepts or ideas to intuitions is a matter of what Kant calls “hypotiposis.” According to whether hypotiposis is applied to concepts or ideas, it receives different names:

All hypotiposis, as making something sensible, is one of two kinds: either schematic, where to a concept grasped by the understanding the corresponding intuition is given a priori; or symbolic, where to a concept which only reason can think, and to which no sensible intuition can be adequate, an intuition is attributed with which judgement proceeds in a way merely analogous to that which it observes in schematization, i.e., it is merely the rule of this procedure, not of the intuition itself, and thus merely the form of the reflection, not the content, which corresponds to the concept.10

Whereas schematism, as the mode of presentation of the pure concepts of the understanding, is direct, the mode of presentation of the ideas of pure reason can only be indirect, insofar as no sensible intuition can ever correspond to them. The mode in question can only ever be analogical, or symbolic. This is how we are able to represent a monarchical state ruled in accordance with laws internal to the people as an organic body. A state ruled by a single absolute will, on the other hand, might be represented by a mere machine (like a hand mill). This, according to Kant, is how the analogy works: “For between a despotic state and a hand mill there is, of course, no similarity, but there is one between the rule for reflecting on both and their causality.”¹¹ The matter, then, is not one of similarity or resemblance—not one, therefore, of a straightforward imitation—but of a commonality of rule applied to two heterogeneous objects.

Let me now turn to Kant’s analysis of art. Fine art, we are told in §44 of the Critique of Judgement, is a species of the genus “aesthetic art,” which is characterised by the fact that the feeling of pleasure is its immediate end. Fine art differs from merely agreeable art in that in the latter pleasure is a matter of sensation, whereas in the former it is a matter of cognition. In that respect, Kant agrees with Aristotle’s insistence that art is a source of learning and knowledge, albeit not its highest form. And he even agrees with Plato, insofar as he situates the discussion of art and its value in the broader context of cognition. Where he departs from Plato and Aristotle, however, is in defining the cognition in question not as theoretical, but practical. This is how §49 of the Critique of Judgement describes those ideas that Kant calls aesthetic, the potential of which he sees fully realised in poetry:

One can call such representations of the imagination ideas: on the one hand because they at least strive toward something lying beyond the bounds of experience, and thus seek to approximate a presentation of concepts of reason (of intellectual ideas), which gives them the appearance of an objective reality; on the other hand, and indeed principally, because no concept can be fully adequate to them, as inner intuitions. The poet ventures to make sensible rational ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, the kingdom of hell, eternity, creation, etc., as well as to make that of which there are examples in experience, e.g., death, envy, and all sorts of vices, as well as love, fame, etc., sensible beyond the limits of experience, with a completeness that goes beyond anything of which there is an example in nature, by means of an imagination that emulates the precedent of reason in attaining to a maximum; and it is really the art of poetry in which the faculty of aesthetic ideas can reveal itself in its full measure.12

Despite his revolutionary account of beauty and the artistic genius, which echoes a number of themes central to Romantic aesthetics, in this passage Kant reveals how close he remains to the neoclassical, allegorical conception of art, for which the aim of art is to point beyond the sensuous and towards the rational, and be morally edifying.¹³ The value of the work of art, according to Kant, consists in this moral excess that imagination presents by means of aesthetic ideas. For what, asks Kant, can be said to exist beyond nature and the limits of experience, the representation of which is a source of pleasure, yet not one of interest, if not the good? What can produce such a feeling of disinterested pleasure in what is nonetheless a sensuous experience, if not the idea of the supersensible as such, that is, the idea of a world that we can know or intuit, not theoretically, but practically, and which signals our end and destiny as free, moral beings? The moral good, Kant claims, is the ultimate end of humanity. The sense of aesthetic ideas, and of art in general, consists in its own transcendence, or its ability to point beyond itself, and towards such an end, in a way that echoes Aristotle’s own claim regarding the ethical end of tragedy, and the cognitive end of painting. For Kant, the beautiful—whether in art or, more significantly still, in nature, where it appears as if it were the end of nature itself, albeit one without end, and thus as if it were a work of art—is thus “the symbol [Symbol] of the moral good” (§59). When envisaged from the point of view of the beautiful, nature and art are essentially symbolic: “through its beautiful forms” (and not its many charms, which are only empirical), Kant tells us, “nature speaks to us figuratively [figürlich]” (§42). If the pleasure that we experience in the beautiful exceeds that which we experience through our senses, it is precisely insofar as the beautiful is the (indirect) presentation of the intelligible, or the supersensible. This is the extent to which Kant is able to claim, as the title of §45 indicates, that “beautiful art is an art to the extent that it seems at the same time to be nature.” By that, Kant does not mean that art should resemble or imitate nature (or other artists or forms of art), in what would amount to a vulgar form of mimesis. It is only from the point of view of its form, and not its content, that art seems to be nature. That point of view is characterised by a distinctive purposiveness—a purposiveness without purpose—that is free not of rules as such (art, like nature, needs rules), but of arbitrary rules. In order for art to be recognised as beautiful, its rules must seem to be spontaneous, or natural. Although intentional, the purposiveness in the product of art must seem unintentional, or regarded as nature. And this is precisely the role of the genius in Kant’s analysis: the genius is the natural talent, that is, the product of nature, which exceeds nature by revealing a freedom of invention and the ability to create new forms through the harmonious play of imagination and the understanding. In that respect, Kant can be seen to have criticised and neutralised one form of mimesis—direct, superficial, and naive—only to replace it with another, which is indirect, analogical, and hidden. But it is a form of mimesis that works in both directions. For if we admire art as if it were nature, we also admire nature as if it were art. We admire both in relation to, or in terms of, the judgement of the beautiful. Nature and art can be brought together not directly, through a relation of representation, or imitation, but indirectly, by showing how both can be the object of the same judgement. It isn’t a matter, therefore, of art imitating nature, or nature imitating art, but of the conditions under which a feeling of pleasure can be indicative of something other than either a mere subjective sensation or a concept. If it is “universally communicable,”14 whilst not rooted in concepts, it is by virtue of the sensus communis that it postulates—a postulate that is legitimate because it emanates from reason from a practical point of view. It isn’t by chance that nature evokes art, “but as it were intentionally, in accordance with a lawful arrangement and a purposiveness without an end, which latter, since we never encounter it externally, we naturally seek within ourselves, and indeed in that which constitutes the ultimate end of our existence, namely the moral vocation.”¹⁵

If there is a relation of imitation, therefore, it is subtle and indirect, and displaces its allegorical, or neoclassical, as well its symbolic or romantic interpretations. It is not between art and nature (or even history), or nature and art, but between art and nature as the object of a judgement of taste, and of beauty in particular, on the one hand, and the moral good, on the other hand. The beautiful, then, appears as the bridge between the natural order and the ideas and demands of practical reason, or between the sensible and the supersensible. It is precisely as the “symbol of the morally good” that the beautiful “pleases with a claim to the assent of everyone” and that the mind feels “ennobled” and “elevated above the mere ability to feel a pleasure derived from sensible impressions.”¹⁶ Such is the reason why those who are interested in the beautiful are those “whose thinking is either already trained to the good or especially receptive to such training,”¹⁷ and why, simultaneously, “it is evident that the true propaedeutic for the grounding of taste is the development of moral ideas and the cultivation of the moral feeling.”¹⁸ Ultimately, taste is a matter of morality. Ultimately, the relation of analogy between beauty and the moral good is also, and primarily, a hierarchy, which subordinates the sensible (and the faculty of pleasure) to the supersensible (and the faculty of desire). In that respect, the Kantian account of art can be seen as a transition between neoclassical allegory and the romantic symbol, between the classical (and mostly French) problematic of taste and the romantic cult of the genius, between the rationalism of the classical period and the progressive emergence of the “feeling of life” (Lebensgefühl) and “lived experience” (Erlebnis) in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century philosophy. This is how Gadamer summarises Kant’s concept of symbolic representation, “one of the most brilliant results of Kantian thought:”

He thus does justice to the theological truth that had found its scholastic form in the analogia entis and keeps human concepts separate from God. Beyond this he discovers—referring specifically to the fact that this “business requires a more profound investigation”—the symbolic way that language works (its consistent metaphoricity); and finally he uses the concept of analogy, in particular, to describe the relationship of the beautiful to the morally good, a relationship that can be neither subordination nor equivalence.19

I cannot emphasise enough this characterisation of the presentation of ideas as analogy, for the following reasons. Firstly, and as surprising as this may sound, Kant’s conception of the symbol echoes Aristotle’s conception of metaphor—a conception which, as I will go on to show in Part Two, presupposes an analogical ontology that doesn’t do justice to the productive dimension of poetic and artistic production. Secondly, insofar as fine art consists of the presentation of ideas through the production of certain images, art itself is essentially analogical. Against the Kantian account, I will suggest that metaphor, and the specific mode of artistic presentation it involves, is neither schematic nor symbolic, neither mimetic nor analogical, but escapes and exceeds the strict metaphysical boundaries within which the question of presentation, and therefore art, has been thought ever since Plato broached the distinction between the sensible and the intelligible. The notion and practice of metaphor, which addresses the presence of the hypersensible in the sensible, requires that we break free from Platonic metaphysics, and think in its place what I call an onto-hetero-logy.²⁰ Were we, however, to retain the Kantian vocabulary, and displace it at the same time, we could say that metaphor is the (poetic and artistic) hypotiposis of difference, or the presentation of the hypersensible.

In what follows, I would like to show how the Kantian account of mimesis is taken up by, amongst others, Schopenhauer and Hegel, albeit at the cost of a series of transformations and adaptations.²¹

2   Schopenhauer

In §17 of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer establishes that science, and especially aetiology, teaches us how, “according to the law of cause and effect, this definite condition of matter produces that other condition” and how “for all cases what phenomenon must necessarily appear at this time and in this place.”22 It doesn’t explain, however, the essence of phenomena, or what they are in truth. And this, Schopenhauer claims after Kant (yet in a way that eventually leads to a different conclusion), is something we want and need to know. Do we know the world only scientifically, as a phenomenon? Is the world only our representation, “object for a subject?”²³ Or is there “something else, something in addition” that defines the inner nature of things, and that we can apprehend from within? What would such a thing be, and how can we know it?

Schopenhauer’s answer to this question is well known: it is the world not as representation, but as will, that constitutes the essence of living as well as brute matter, and it is through our bodily or incarnate experience of the will that we know the world as thing-in-itself. Scientific knowledge is, like everything else, an expression and an objectification of the will. Knowledge is entirely subordinated to “the service of the will,” to the demands and ends of life, from which it sprang, “as the head from the trunk.”²⁴ But although, with the animals, “this subjection of knowledge to the will can never be eliminated,” with human beings it appears occasionally and “only as an exception.”²⁵ Music, Schopenhauer goes on to claim in §52, is the artistic medium in which the will is expressed freely, independently of any representation or Ideas, and in a way that would seem to mark a decisive break with mimetic art. And yet, as I will go on to show, whereas envisaging music as a medium without representation, Schopenhauer reinscribes it, ever more forcefully, within the Platonic schema of the original and the copy. Schopenhauer’s discussion of the other arts, and especially the formative arts, takes place in the context of his analysis of representation, but considered independently of the principle of sufficient reason, which governs scientific and philosophical representation. Following Schopenhauer, then, we need to distinguish very clearly between two forms of representation, and two modalities of knowledge—one that is concerned only with the relation between things, and remains subordinated to the principle of sufficient reason, and one that is concerned with Ideas in the Platonic sense, and is expressed through art. The rational method, which alone is valid and useful in practical life and in science, is of no value when it becomes a question of intimating the world as it is in itself. The only adequate method for the pursuit of such knowledge is “the method of genius, which is valid and useful in art alone.²⁶ Through the contemplation of Ideas in art, the subject reaches a viewpoint that, although not exactly that of the will or thing-in-itself per se, opens onto it. In that respect, the experience of art sets us underway to the essence of the world as will.

Before I turn to Schopenhauer’s analysis of the visual and poetic arts, let me emphasise the following. Although not exactly identifying the Platonic Idea and the Kantian thing-in-itself, Schopenhauer sees the former as the most immediate manifestation of the latter, independent of the principle of sufficient reason. At the outset of Book Three, for example, Schopenhauer hopes that, “after what has been said, there will be no hesitation in recognizing again in the definite grades of the objectification of that will, which forms the in-itself of the world, what Plato called the eternal Ideas or unchangeable forms (εἴδη).”27 The Idea is nothing but the immediate objectivity or representation of the will at a definite grade. But the thing-in-itself is the will insofar as it is “not yet objectified” and has “not yet become representation.”²⁸ What is specific to Schopenhauer, then, is this synthesis of the Idea and the in-itself as defining the essence of the world, or the “truly being” (ὄντος ὄν). In bringing the Platonic schema of the archetype and the copy, or the supersensible and the sensible, back into the discussion of knowledge, Schopenhauer also transgresses the prohibition that Kant himself had imposed on metaphysics. Naturally, it could be argued that this move is one that Kant himself had made possible by speaking of aesthetic ideas in the third Critique. But let us not forget that Kant’s appreciation of art, and his discussion of aesthetic ideas, were rooted in what he saw as their essential connection with the supersensible in a moral sense. We could say, then, that by returning to Plato, Schopenhauer extends the knowledge of the non-phenomenal world beyond the strict limits that Kant had identified. At the same time, we could say that, through Kant, Schopenhauer rehabilitates art beyond Plato by showing how artistic representations manifest Ideas that underpin and exceed the forever fleeting and deceiving world of individuated phenomena.

For it is art, Schopenhauer insists, which provides the kind of knowledge that “tears itself free from the service of the will” and allows the subject no longer to be merely individual.²⁹ Art is the truly ideal knowledge, outside of the principle of individuation and the relations that characterise scientific knowledge. Art is the type of knowledge “that considers what continues to exist outside and independently of all relations, but which alone is really essential to the world, the true content of its phenomena, that which is subject to no change, and is therefore known with equal truth for all time.”³⁰ Contrary to what Plato claimed, then, yet in a way that remains entirely consistent with the Platonic opposition between being and non-being, art is the way in which the subject comes to know the world sub specie aeternitatis. Where science, and especially etiology, is the knowledge of events and relations, art is the contemplation of eternal forms. Where science follows endlessly the restless and unstable stream of the phenomenal world, “and can never find an ultimate goal or complete satisfaction,” art “plucks the object of its contemplation from the stream of the world’s course, and holds it isolated before it.”³¹ But how, exactly, is art able to do precisely what Plato thought it incapable of doing? What conception of art must Schopenhauer have in order to see it not as presenting fleeting and deceiving images, copies of an original, but as the original itself, permanent, stable, and self-identical? By moving from the particular to the universal, the part to the whole, and the momentary to the eternal, in what amounts to a symbolic operation in the Romantic sense:³²

This particular thing, which in that stream was an infinitesimal part, becomes for art a representative of the whole, an equivalent of the infinitely many in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing; it stops the wheel of time; for it the relations vanish; its object is only the essential, the Idea.33

Art is concerned neither with the particular thing as such, the object of common apprehension, nor with the concept of that thing, the object of rational thought and science, but with Ideas in Plato’s sense. Ideas in that sense are not grasped through reason, or even ordinary sensations, but through pure perception, which Schopenhauer identifies with contemplation.³⁴ Only through such contemplation, “which becomes absorbed entirely in the object, are the Ideas comprehended.”³⁵ To this pure type of perception, this “clear eye of the world,”³⁶ directed towards essences and fixed identities, I will oppose the mixed vision of art as presentation of the hypersensible.

Far from being incarnate or corporeal, Schopenhauer’s pure perception is an intellectual vision that frees the subject from the essentially negative grip of the will, from the pressures of desire, fear, and hope, which spring from lack, and thus from suffering:

It is the state where, simultaneously and inseparably, the perceived individual thing is raised to the idea of its species, and the knowing individual to the pure subject of will-less knowing, and now the two, as such, no longer stand in the stream of time and of all other relations.³⁷

Such is the reason why Schopenhauer values Dutch still lives and tranquil landscapes: they calm the will, and reveal the pleasure that we can gain by contemplating the most ordinary things, so long as we see them as the expression of an Idea. Aesthetic pleasure follows only from the forgetting of oneself as individual and will, as temporal and spatial, and the ability to immerse ourselves in the beauty of things qua Ideas. Beyond the philosophy of art, as I will show in the following chapter, Schopenhauer’s Platonic conception of art, revisited and rehabilitated beyond Plato’s own condemnation of mimetic art, corresponds indeed to a certain view and practice of modern and contemporary art, and especially abstract art. There is, I will suggest, a certain form of abstraction that is perfectly compatible with Schopenhauer’s view of art. Yet that conception, against which Nietzsche fought all his life, is precisely not the one that I want to retain, nor that with which Chillida confronts us. With its emphasis on that “one eye of the world [das eine Weltauge],”³⁸ on the supersensible and the metonymic behind the phenomenal, it leaves no room for the discovery in the sensible of what I shall call the hypersensible, or the conception of art as the double vision of metaphor. Thinking art at the limit of metaphysics, and developing an aesthetics freed from any residual Platonism, means acknowledging a different sense of the sensible, and sensation, as well as a different sense of vision. Chillida’s specific form of abstraction, and the relation to the sensible it makes possible, forces thought outside the metaphysical opposition between the phenomenal and the ideal, becoming and being, time and eternity, and into the hypersensible.

Schopenhauer’s discussion of the various fine arts, from architecture to poetry and tragedy, ends with music. Music, he argues, stands apart from all the other art forms, and is the highest amongst them all, in that it “refers to the innermost being of the world and of our own self” and affects “man’s innermost nature” absolutely and universally: it is “an entirely universal language,” and one, he goes to add immediately, in what amounts to a clear distinction between music and all the other arts, “whose distinctness surpasses even that of the world of perception itself.”39 In music, then, it is no longer a matter of perceiving or contemplating those Ideas that all other art forms, in one way or another, present. Rather, it is a matter of experiencing the world as will, directly and immediately. All the arts objectify the will indirectly, by means of the Ideas. But music doesn’t amount to an objectification. Or if it does, it is “as immediate an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself is . . . ”⁴⁰ In fact, Schopenhauer never reaches the point at which he is able to define the sort of operation that music is, or the exact modality of apprehension that it presupposes. And this inability, I believe, has to do with the Platonic metaphysics—and its Kantian transformation—with which he operates. For most remarkable, in his analysis, is his claim that, although it is no longer possible to recognise in music “the copy, the repetition, of any Idea of the inner nature of the world,”⁴¹ music remains entirely a matter of mimesis. To be sure, music is no longer a representation of the representations (the Ideas) of the inner nature of the world. Yet it is related to that world “as the depiction to the thing depicted, as the copy to the original.”⁴² It is the most likely, the most faithful copy, and thus the mode of expression that brings us closest to the true world: “its imitative reference to the world must be very profound, infinitely true . . . ”⁴³ And yet, it is also the most mysterious and obscure relation between copy and original. In fact, it is something of a paradox. It establishes music as a representation (Vorstellung) of “that which of its essence can never be representation,” and as “the copy of an original that can itself never be directly represented.”⁴⁴ Because music “transcends” [übergeht] the Ideas, it is independent of the phenomenal world, which it ignores entirely.⁴⁵ Unlike the other arts, music could even exist without the phenomenal world. And yet, as a “copy of the will itself, “⁴⁶ it is an image, a phenomenal representation of some kind. Such is the reason why, ultimately, the relation of imitation between music and the world is not one that can be demonstrated. It can only be intimated, experienced, by listening to music, and drawn by analogy with the other arts’ relation of imitation to the world as will.

Still, it is possible to show how music operates, how it imitates the world as will. Although Schopenhauer doesn’t use the word, we could say, following the classical conception, inherited from Aristotle’s Poetics, that music proceeds metaphorically.47 Where the visual and poetic arts operate metonymically, by showing the universal through the particular, and sometimes allegorically,⁴⁸ music seems to operate metaphorically. The most faithful imitation, the most likely copy, is that which, bypassing the world of Ideas, recreates the world analogously. Music is the artistic medium analogous to the will’s expression, the pre-representational medium in which the world is intimated in its essence. The “deepest tones of harmony” are analogous to “the lowest grades of the will’s objectification, inorganic nature, the mass of the planet.”⁴⁹ Similarly, the high notes, which seem to detach themselves from the deep bass-notes, and the harmony they create, are analogous to the way in which organic nature, bodies, organisms, came into existence “through gradual development out of the mass of the planet.”⁵⁰ Music, then, is not oriented towards specific archetypes, or objectifications, of the will, but towards the world in its unity and consistency, its self-generation and self-objectification, from its brute, inorganic state, to its highest expression in the human intellect:

Further, in the whole of the ripienos that produce the harmony, between the bass and the leading voice singing the melody, I recognize the whole gradation of the Ideas in which the will objectifies itself. Those nearer to the bass are the lower of those grades, namely the still inorganic bodies manifesting themselves, however, in many ways. Those that are higher represent to me the plant and animal worlds. The definite intervals of the scale are parallel to the definite grades of the will’s objectification, the definite species in nature . . . The higher ripienos, running parallel to the animal world, move more rapidly, yet without melodious connexion and significant progress . . . Finally, in the melody, in the high, singing, principal voice, leading the whole and progressing with unrestrained freedom, in the uninterrupted significant connexion of one thought from beginning to end, and expressing a whole, I recognize the highest grade of the will’s objectification, the intellectual life and endeavour of man.⁵¹

At this point, it becomes clear how Schopenhauer’s revaluation of art, and of music in particular, is at once a complete reversal of the Platonic condemnation of mimetic art, and a radical and powerful re-inscription of the mimetic framework, which he inherits from Plato. Although seeing in music the art form that allows one to break with representation, and enter the domain of truth proper, Schopenhauer continues to think of our relation to truth within the framework of mimesis: the arts “speak only of the shadow, but music of the essence.”⁵² Music expresses only the quintessence [das Wesentliche] of life and of its events, and never the actual events themselves—this or that emotion, passion, or affliction. This is the extent to which it is a direct copy of the will, and not a copy of a copy, or a simulacrum. Music is the noumenon that is closest to the phenomenon, or the metaphysical in the physical. Ultimately, music and the will are so close that “we could just as well call the world embodied music as embodied will.”53 With his remarkable appreciation of the specificity of music, and of the manner in which it escapes the Platonic suspicion regarding mimetic art, Schopenhauer tests the limits of metaphysical aesthetics. Specifically, he establishes a crucial connection between music and truth beyond or, better said perhaps, beneath the conception of truth as representation (whether scientific and rational or artistic and perceptual). As such, he makes possible a connection that, following Nietzsche and certain developments within phenomenology, I would like to radicalise. At the same time, given Schopenhauer’s overall commitment to Platonic and Kantian metaphysics, the radicalisation in question can only exceed the mimetic schema in which he continues to operate. I shall return to music and the nature of its relation with the other art forms when discussing Chillida, and the aesthetics of the hypersensible. It will become a question of showing how, when no longer subordinated to the distinction between the sensible and the supersensible, or the phenomenal world and the true world, art breaks with mimesis, and opens up, and onto, the true world of the hypersensible.

3   Hegel

Unlike Plato, and even Aristotle, for whom art is essentially and irreducibly imitative, Hegel, like Schopenhauer, sees the meaning and value of art in its ability to present an image of the beautiful itself, that is, of its idea. In order for art to reach its true domain, it must go beyond imitation and present an image of the truth, or the universal, in the particular. In other words, the philosophical value of art consists in its ability to present more than what is actually given in experience, to transcend the particular in the direction of its universal truth, or idea. That is the point at which the work of art is no longer simply an illusion, or a mere appearance, but a sensuous shining of truth itself. Against Plato, and with Schopenhauer, Hegel claims that artistic images aren’t phantoms or simulacra, far removed from the original, but genuine manifestations of truth itself, and in fact truer than the original. Aside from those images produced by way of imitation, an appearance (Schein) is never a mere appearance, but always a manifestation of essence, or spirit. In other words, appearance is essential to essence, and artistic appearance is always more than the merely empirical. The following passage, in which Hegel defends the truth of art, is worth quoting in full:

Truth would not be truth if it did not show itself and appear [schiene und erschiene], if it were not truth for someone and for itself, as well as for spirit in general too. Consequently, not pure appearance [das Scheinen im allgemeinen] in general, but only the special kind of appearance in which art gives reality to what is inherently true can be the subject of reproof. If in this connection the pure appearance in which art brings its conceptions into existence is to be described as deception [Täuschung], this reproof first acquires its meaning in comparison with the phenomena [Erscheinungen] of the external world and its immediate materiality, as well as in relation to our own world of feeling, i.e., the inner world of sense. To both these worlds, in our life of experience, our own phenomenal life, we are accustomed to ascribe the value and name of actuality, reality, and truth, in contrast to art which lacks such reality and truth. But it is precisely this whole sphere of the empirical inner and outer world which is not the world of genuine actuality; on the contrary, we must call it, in a stricter sense than we call art, a pure appearance and a harsher deception. Only beyond the immediacy of feeling and external objects is genuine actuality to be found. For the truly actual is only that which has being in and for itself, the substance of nature and spirit, which indeed gives itself presence and existence, but in this existence remains in and for itself and only so is truly actual. It is precisely the dominion of these universal powers which art emphasises and reveals [erscheinen läßt].54

And yet, one can wonder whether this reversal doesn’t leave the Platonic schema entirely in place, whether it constitutes a fundamental reorganisation of the relation between the particular and the universal, the image and the Idea, but one that leaves the distinction itself, and the place of art in relation to it, intact. Like Plato, Hegel situates art within the broader, philosophical question regarding the manifestation or shining of truth as the universal, or the Idea, underlying the particular. The philosophy of art, Hegel claims, is concerned first and foremost with what, in Greater Hippias, Plato calls beauty as such, or the being of the beautiful (τί ποτ᾽ ἐστὶν τὸ καλόν),⁵⁵ and not, in the way that Hippias himself believes, with particular instances or examples of beauty.⁵⁶ That being said, where Hegel differs from Plato is in recognising the logical necessity of the particularisation and differentiation of the idea, which gives birth to a variety of forms and figures of art, and which in turn needs to be grasped as necessary instances and moments of the idea. The truth doesn’t exist outside its incarnation, and art is one such incarnation. In fact, the incarnation of truth in art is what we call the beautiful.

Yet art, according to Hegel, and in a way that remains consistent with the Platonic account, isn’t the highest expression of truth. Having established the superiority of the beautiful in art over the beautiful in nature— because art is a product of spirit and spirit is superior to nature (“spirit is alone the true”⁵⁷)—and therefore severed the mimetic connection between art and nature, having reversed the order established in the Republic, Hegel immediately emphasises the limits of art in relation to truth. Art isn’t the highest expression of truth, precisely to the extent that it remains bound to the sensible. Ultimately, the sensible itself remains the merely sensible, insofar as its philosophical value consists in its ability to point beyond itself and towards the supersensible, towards spirit freed from all sensible limitation. Religion and philosophy are ultimately truer than art, because they alone penetrate the depths of the supersensible. The work of art can satisfy our need for the absolute, and quench our thirst for truth, only to an extent, and up to a point. The truth of art itself consists in its own self-overcoming in a higher, unlimited expression of the absolute. The truth of art lies in art’s ability to transform itself into non-sensuous truth.

4   Adorno

Reversing further the Platonic exclusion of art from truth, extending and radicalising the Hegelian connection between art and truth, Adorno’s aesthetics seems to unfold at the very limit of metaphysics, and broach a space for art outside the Platonic-Aristotelian schema. Specifically, by suspending the classical subordination of artistic images to philosophical truth, by rehabilitating the sensuous and the material in art against conceptual abstraction—the very abstraction that, according to the authors of The Dialectic of Enlightenment, led to the domination of “instrumental reason” in modernity—and by asserting art’s autonomy from bourgeois society, Adorno’s aesthetic theory seems to signal a radical departure from the idealist framework and the hierarchy in which, up until then, metaphysics had inscribed the work of art. Speaking of the tendency of “traditional philosophy” and “idealist aesthetics” to view the truth content of art as its objective idea, Adorno claims that it “remains external to the artwork and abstract” and reduces “artworks to examples of the idea as instances of what is ever-the-same.”58 Art, he claims, needs to be freed from the “idealist prejudice” of philosophy (AT: 382/258) and “the spell of absolute spirit” (AT: 20/9). Although dialectical, Adorno’s thought, and his aesthetic theory in particular, resists presenting art as the first and lowest expression of the Idea, or absolute spirit, and thus to inscribe its truth content in a logic of sublation involving religion and philosophy. If anything, art is seen as the site of a possible absolute, freed from conceptual abstraction and its tendency to reduce non-identity—and specifically sensuous, material non-identity—to the identity of the concept and objectify it for purposes of enhanced control and domination. At the same time, Adorno is equally critical of the sensualist approaches to art, which tend to view art in terms of subjective appreciation. If, in the end, Adorno retains the concept of mimesis to designate the operation that is specific to art, it is to turn it on its head, and against itself: mimesis is the impetus, most visible in works of art, to open itself to non-identity and be “like” an Other—the Other that philosophy is precisely incapable of grasping, or can only grasp (begreifen) by turning into a concept (Begriff) and suppressing its difference. And yet, as I will try and show, by attempting to overcome the limits of the Platonic-Aristotelian schema with the concepts, distinctions, and oppositions of metaphysics itself, and, most importantly, by anchoring his aesthetic theory in a concept of truth, the presuppositions of which he fails to question sufficiently radically, Adorno ultimately fails to carry out a genuine overturning of the schema in question, and to recognise the hypersensible as the specific dimension of art and distinguish it from “spirit” or “truth.” What takes place in Adorno’s aesthetic theory is the full or fully explicit crisis of mimesis, yet one that, as a result of its continued commitment to the very terms, concepts, and metaphysical framework that produced such as crisis in the first place, cannot extricate itself from it. With Adorno, we reach the moment of the permanent crisis of mimesis, one in which metaphysical underpinnings of mimesis are made explicit, and the need to think outside that framework is made fully manifest, and yet one from which, it seems, it is impossible to break free.

A   The Context: The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Adorno’s aesthetic theory and explicit rehabilitation of mimesis take place against the backdrop of his critique of modern, “instrumental” reason, initially developed with Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment, and largely indebted to Klage’s radical critique of civilisation and reason.59 In many ways, a post-Hegelian Adorno departs from speculative dialectic’s faith in the power of the concept and reason to bring about the state of reconciliation and happiness, which Hegel himself had sought to bring about ever since his Frankfurt period.⁶⁰ Specifically, Adorno sees the relation between subject, object, and concept as a relationship of repression and domination: concepts are tools developed for the adjustment and domination of external nature by a subject motivated essentially by his desire for self-preservation—a desire that also requires the repression of the subject’s own nature and desire for happiness. It is as if the domination of reality and the unity of the subject, realised through the construction of concepts, could take place only at the cost of separating the subject from life or living nature: through a series of conceptual objectifications and system-constructions, the human mind becomes a closed universe of “instrumental reason,” “forgetful of itself,” and able to understand itself only as dead nature. “From the very start,” Habermas writes, “the process of enlightenment is the result of a drive to self-preservation that mutilates reason, because it lays claim to it only in the form of a purposive-rational mastery of nature and instinct—precisely as instrumental reason.”⁶¹ “The original sin of philosophy,” which consists in trying “to grasp the non-conceptual through conceptual means,” leads it systematically and increasingly to reduce non-identity to identity and secure its hold on the world through its power of mediation and instrumentalisation—a sin, Adorno believes, which revealed itself in all its terrifying consequences in the genocide of the Jews, who were and continue to be the ultimate incarnation of Otherness at the heart of European modernity.

Like Hegel (and Marx), though, Adorno sees “reconciliation,” “happiness,” and “emancipation” as the horizon or end of history and the very task of philosophy. This means that the process of civilisation, and the history of reason, remains that of enlightenment in its classical sense. It also means the reconciliation of the self and nature can take place only from within the logic and history of reason itself, as a reversal of the movement of spirit bent on dominating nature. Yet, given thought’s tendency to reduce the non-identical to the identical, and the non-conceptual to the conceptual—a tendency most visible in the current historical, cultural, and socio-political state of affairs, defined by the domination of instrumental reason—the ideal of truth and reconciliation of reason itself cannot be realised in the present moment. For such a genuine identity to happen, Osborne argues, there would need to be “a new ontological configuration of subject and object, a transformed subjectivity, the precise character of which is by definition ‘unthinkable’ form the standpoint of the present.”62 In the meantime, Osborne goes on to argue, the possibilities for the apprehension of truth are restricted to those modes of experience that, first, register such a situation, and second and consequently, in some way anticipate a state of reconciliation. For Adorno, there are two such modes of experience: the reflective experience of non-identity thinking (negative dialectics), which aims to suspend the natural tendency of thought, and “authentic” aesthetic experience. Of the two, it is the latter, to which I shall turn shortly, which Adorno sees as the more metaphysically significant.⁶³

The following few words on negative dialectics should therefore suffice. Non-identity thinking requires that the concept turn against the reifying tendency of conceptual thought. Through this radical change of course, philosophy is to “transcend the concept by way of the concept”⁶⁴ and thus redeem philosophy of its original sin:

To change [the] direction of conceptualisation, to give it a turn toward nonidentity, is the hinge of negative dialectics. . . . Disenchantment of the concept is the antidote of philosophy. It keeps it from growing rampant and becoming an absolute onto itself. (ND: 24/12–13)

Conceptual thought must come to the realisation that the epistemological gap between subject and object is one that thought cannot be reduced, even though it can and must aspire to such an ideal. As negative dialectics, the task of philosophy is to enact this performative contradiction and even to dwell in it: negative dialectics resists the compulsion to identification inherent in all conceptual thought by continual self-reflection upon the inadequacy of such thought. This, Osborne remarks, “is the Kantian, tragic element in Adorno’s thought.”⁶⁵

Non-identity thinking and aesthetic experience, however, are not entirely unrelated. Remarkably, Negative Dialectics characterises the self-critique and change of direction of reason in terms of a “mimetic” moment internal to thought. In fact, it’s in the context of such a turning, in the context, that is, of the project of emancipation, reconciliation, and happiness for which rational thought stands, but which it cannot realise on its own, that works of art come to play a crucial role. This means that art is not something prerational or irrational, which would condemn it to untruth and separate if off from the truth of the social realm. Rather, art is “rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it” (AT: 88/55). It criticises rationality by suspending its logic of conceptual identification and domination. But it remains rationality by intimating or promising the reconciliation or unity for which reason stands: “Paradoxically, art must testify to the unreconciled and at the same time envision its reconciliation” (AT: 251/168). As an utopian and progressive force, and precisely by virtue of its ability to reflect critically the social reality, from which it remains estranged, art points to the way forward, to a time and place beyond the dominance of instrumental rationality and its repressive effects on social relations:

Inherently every artwork desires identity with itself, an identity that in empirical reality is violently forced on all objects as identity with the subject and thus travestied. Aesthetic identity seeks to aid the nonidentical, which in reality is repressed [unterdrückt] by reality’s compulsion to identity [Identitätszwang] (AT: 14/4).

This ability to include the nonidentical beyond the compulsion to identify and dominate is precisely what Adorno calls “mimetic comportment” (das mimetische Verhalten). Art, he argues, is a “refuge” for such a comportment (AT: 86/53). This means that the value of art consists in its ability to relate to its object and itself not by way of identification, not, that is, by way of imitation (Nachahmung), but—in a gesture reminiscent of Romantic aesthetics—by way of unification. Through the radical domination of its own nature, and thus through self-identity, art “corrects” the domination of nature as the domination of another, which characterizes conceptual knowledge. It is precisely this turn away from identity, and towards unity, or reconciliation, which Adorno calls mimesis, in what amounts to a remarkable inversion of its traditional sense: mimesis is no longer bound up with the identical reproduction of an original, but, as we shall see, with the shining of truth itself.

Following and radicalising Weber, who saw art as providing “salvation from the routine of everyday life, and especially from the pressures of theoretical and practical rationalism,”66 Adorno sees art as salvation from instrumental reason and thus as carrying over the emancipatory social function once attributed to revolutionary politics. It is indeed by virtue of its distance from social reality—defined by the repression and domination of nature, as well as the commodification and fetishisation of culture—that “authentic” art already embodies a critique of society. But this autonomy is not an escape from reality, a mere distraction of the kind generated by the culture industry. On the contrary: the self-identity of the work of art, its autonomy in relation to the “total exchange society [die totale Tauschgesellschaft] in which everything exists with a view to something else [in ihr ist alles nur für anderes]” (AT 335/226), is itself an essentially social relationship. Art, Adorno claims, “becomes social by its opposition to society, and it occupies this position only as autonomous art” (AT: 335/225). Driven by his social, emancipatory agenda, Adorno sees autonomous artworks as instances of social critique, precisely because of their ability to resist the process of identification and commodification that drives modern, capitalist rationality:

The principle of heteronomy [or being-for-another: des Füranderesseins], apparently the counterpart of fetishism, is the principle of exchange, and in it domination is masked. Only what does not submit to that principle acts as the plenipotentiary of what is free from domination; only what is useless can stand in for the stunted use value. Artworks are plenipotentiaries [die Statthalter] of things that are no longer distorted by exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity (AT: 337/227).

As an image of reconciliation, and also of freedom, in that it stands in the world as a self-determining object, free from the determining intentions of its producer and from the capitalist relations of production, the autonomous work of art appears as “irreconcilable to, and critical of, the lack of freedom in reality.”67 By virtue of its autonomy, it is able to act as a critique of the existing state of affairs, of reality itself as a “broken promise,”⁶⁸ and to function itself like a genuine promise of non-illusion and reconciliation with the non-identical: “When in reality everything has become fungible, art holds up to the world of everything-for-something-else [dem Alles für ein Anderes] images of what it itself would be if it were emancipated from the schemata of imposed identification” (AT: 128/83).

Such is the reason why, ultimately, one must “reverse the doctrine of imitation [die Nachahmungslehre]” and recognise that “in a sublimated sense reality ought to imitate artworks,” (AT: 199–200/132) not the other way around. It is art, not philosophy, which reveals the “nonconceptual affinity” (and not identity) with an “unposited other” in something that is subjectively produced (AT: 86–87/54). Mimesis is reversed and rehabilitated specifically as a means to rescue philosophy from its own excesses and tendency toward reification. In other words, mimesis is no longer simply opposed, and indeed subordinated, to the concept and its privileged relation to truth, but is now seen as necessary and internal to the concept’s turn to the non-identical, and thus to truth itself. It is a moment or aspect of truth itself, yet not one that is destined to be sublated in the concept as the ultimate form of truth. Mimesis is the very moment and movement by which the concept is able to open itself onto the world not as object or dead nature, but as living, embodied, sensuous nature; it is the “endeavour to recover the bliss of a world that is gone,” to reunite the subject with nature, but not through identification or imitation: “mimetic comportment [das mimetische Verhalten] does not imitate something [ahmt nicht etwas nah], but resembles only itself” (AT: 169/111). Art, as the effort to fulfil such a task, is not like anything other than itself; yet it is not the absolute self-positing of the Fichtean I. It is only like itself, but is itself only by relating non-identically with another being. By virtue of its ability to “remember” that the subject is itself part of nature, and that its own nature is to strive for unity and reconciliation with objective externality—a “unity” or “affinity” that is precisely not an “identity”—mimesis is, Adorno argues, “universally opposed to domination.”69 In fact, it is “the historical voice of repressed nature” (AT: 365/246) that speaks in the artwork. Drawing on Kant’s idea of nature as displaying a purposiveness without purpose, Adorno claims that art “sides with repressed nature, to which it owes the idea of a purposiveness that is other than that posited by humanity” (AT: 428/288), other, that is, than its practical purposes and the natural science to which they gave rise. The only end or purpose of art, in other words, is the suspension of purposefulness, yet—such is the dialectical paradox of art—one that happens “only by way of the subject, only through that rationality from which purposefulness derives” (AT: 428/288). Paradoxically, art frees itself of purposefulness and domination by dominating material nature; it “is the rescue of nature—or of immediacy—through its negation, that is, total mediation” (AT: 428/288). But this domination is only a simulation, a simulacrum:

The opposition of artworks to domination is mimesis of domination. They must assimilate themselves to the comportment of domination in order to produce something qualitatively distinct from the world of domination (AT: 430/289).

In reality, art is a freeing or rescuing of nature, aimed not at domination “but at the expiation of domination, in that the subject places the control of itself and its other in the service of the non-identical simulates the domination” (AT: 430/289). The aim of aesthetic rationality is “to make good on the damage done by nature-dominating rationality” (AT: 430/289). As such, it is a counterweight to the natural tendency of conceptual thought, which the concept itself tries, but fails (in what amount to its only possible or desirable outcome) to integrate.

Ultimately, Adorno attributes a unique redemptory function to art in the modern world, one that surpasses philosophy, and even religion: it is as aesthetics, and specifically mimesis, that philosophy comes into its own; it is by binding its own destiny to that of the arts that it can overcome its own reifying and instrumentalising tendencies. What we have, in this instance, is mimesis turned on its head: on the one hand, art is a simulation of mimesis, understood as a process of identification and domination; on the other hand, art is mimesis in the distinctly Adornian sense, that is, as the intimation of a unity without identity, a reconciliation without domination. Art’s relation to nature is not one of imitation, but of mediation—a spiritual mediation that does not lead to the rationalisation and instrumentalisation of nature, but to the self-showing of nature as otherness.

B   Art and Truth

We have already touched on the concept of truth on several occasions. This is no coincidence: Adorno is a classical thinker in that, for him, to think philosophically is (still) to think from the standpoint of truth, and truth is itself an epistemological matter. Such a standpoint applies to art in particular: “Art is directed toward truth . . . By its relation to truth, art is knowledge” (AT: 419/282). But art is nonconceptual knowledge, that is, knowledge that “completes knowledge with what is excluded from knowledge” (AT: 87/54).70 Time and again, Adorno emphasises the fact that truth is the genuine content [Gehalt] of artworks and the ultimate end of art. He refers to the “truth content” of art, thus making clear that truth is the genuine and only content of art, or at least the only content that philosophy can and should be concerned with. To be sure, the content of art appears and is made concrete through form and technique, as well as matter. But the latter do not exhaust the truth of art. This claim, which posits the truth content of art as a matter for philosophical thought—one that, as we shall see, philosophy can only betray in the moment in which it tries to articulate it—is precisely the claim that, ultimately, chains Adorno to Platonic metaphysics. Specifically, through his commitment to an essentially Hegelian and epistemological concept of truth, Adorno binds his aesthetic theory to the space of metaphysics as unfolding between the sensible and the intelligible, nature and spirit, or the particular and the universal.

Like Hegel, who on this question follows the Aristotelian, rather than the Kantian line, Adorno values art for its cognitive or epistemological power: it is insofar as “truth emerges through the work” (AT: 419/282), and not in connection with aesthetic pleasure, or any subjective criterion, that it is of value to the philosopher. Adorno praises Hegel for his uncompromising opposition to “aesthetic sentimentalism” and his insistence that the value of art reside in the intrinsic—I would say mimetic—conceptual objectivity of the work itself:

Hegel was the first to oppose aesthetic sentimentalism that seeks to discern the inherent content of the artwork not in the work itself but rather in its effect. This sentimentalism later became a concern with mood, a concept that has its own historical importance . . . He insists, as he does throughout his philosophy, on the sturdiness of the concept. This redounds to the objectivity of the artwork rather than to its effects or to its merely sensuous façade (AT: 407/273).

Where Adorno agrees with Hegel, then, is in his critique of “sensualism” and “sensual satisfaction” as the true domain of art. What defines the artwork as a thing is precisely this excess that shines through the work and is thus irreducible to the work in its particularity and thingly character—an excess and a content that, following Hegel, Adorno calls spirit: “What appears [erscheint] in artworks and is neither to be separated from their appearance [Erscheinung] nor to be held simply identical with it—the nonfactual in their facticity—is their spirit” (AT: 134/86). Spirit, then, is the force of mediation at work in the work, a force that transforms their sensual moments into something objective and true. Where Adorno departs from Hegel, however, is in refusing to discard this sensual element altogether, and see the realm of semblance or appearance (Schein, Erscheinung), in which the work is presented, as the merely sensuous representation of truth. Instead, reversing the Hegelian order, Adorno claims that it is precisely by virtue of its sensuous, natural form that the work is closer to truth. The superiority of art over discursive knowledge is precisely due to the fact that, in it, truth makes its appearance as an object of the senses. Its sensuousness is its distinctive advantage and its specific truth-character:

By defining art as something spiritual, the sensual element is not simply negated . . . It is only by grace of that element that art is intermittently able to become an image of bliss . . . The promise that the content is real—which makes its truth content—is bound up with the sensual (AT: 412/277)

This, in turn, means that the “authentic” work of art, by contrast with the products of the culture industry, which threatens to engulf the whole of art, is a genuine shining (Schein) or sensuous manifestation of truth, rather than its mere appearance or illusion. Now of course, Hegel himself recognises the connection between art and truth, on at least two levels. Firstly, at the purely logical level, he refuses to separate appearance or semblance (Schein) from essence (Wesen), insisting all along that beauty is precisely the manifestation of essence in the work of art. Secondly, at the historical level, he insists that art is the form in which truth manifests itself in the Greek world. He also makes very clear that beauty isn’t the only nor indeed the highest manifestation of truth, or the true form of truth. Following Hegel, yet up to a point only, Adorno affirms artistic shining as essential to truth: “no artwork has content other than through semblance [Schein], through the form of that semblance. Central to aesthetics therefore is the redemption of semblance” (AT: 164/107). Yet insofar as the artwork is not pure semblance, that is, purely sensuous, but is also an expression of a spiritual reality, the total “identity of essence and appearance [Identität von Wesen und Erscheinung] can no more be achieved by art that it can be by knowledge of the real” (AT: 167/109). It is not a matter, therefore, of claiming that art succeeds where knowledge (Erkenntnis) failed—or if it is, it is a question of understanding the failure of the project of knowledge as the only success of art: it is this impossible identity, the truth of that impossibility, that the artwork stands for. In a way, the truth of the work is its ability to reveal itself as illusion, or as the illusion of the total reconciliation or “harmony” (Harmonie) of essence and appearance: “The essence that makes the transition to appearance [in die Erscheinung übergeht] and defines it also explodes it [sprengt sie stets auch]; in being the appearance of what appears, what appears is also a husk [Hülle]” (AT: 167/109).

But what does truth mean in this context? Adorno seems to use the concept of truth in connection with art in two different yet intertwined senses, and implicit in what I have been saying thus far.

On the one hand, the truth of art is to be thought by contrast with the untruth, heteronomy and inauthenticity of the contemporary social realm: genuine artworks point to the possibility of a “manifest,” “authentic” or “autonomous” social consciousness and a general “social truth.” To begin with, the work of art is “true” precisely insofar as, unlike commodity fetishism, it doesn’t conceal its specific mode of production, but brings it forth in the work. By contrast, the capitalist mode of production is self-concealing and deceiving: the visibility of the commodity masks its own social reality, and is thus a simulacrum of truth. In that respect, Adorno reiterates the Platonic distinction between the authentic copy and the phantasm, even though he inverts its order: under the capitalist mode of production, based on exchange value, products conceal their very mode of production, and the labour that is required in order for the commodity to be produced—a labour that is not recognised for what it is, and is the source of the worker’s alienation from his or her own production. Production, then, or what Plato would have called poiesis, is entirely self-concealing and organised solely in order to benefit the capitalist, who extracts the surplus-value from a process the truth of which must remain hidden in order for the commodity to circulate and the economy to operate. In that respect, the shining of the commodity is a mere appearance, and the “domination” at work in the process is “masked” (AT: 337/227). Works of art, on the other hand—at least insofar as they are free from the culture industry and the fetishisation it presupposes—make visible the process of their own production, and thus reveal what commodity fetishism precisely tends and needs to conceal. Their visibility or shining is an image or manifestation of truth itself. They reveal their autonomous mode of production, their freedom from “useful labour.” Artworks, Adorno claims, intimate a society “beyond the endsmeans-rationality of utility” and freed from “exchange, profit, and the false needs of a degraded humanity” (AT: 338/227). In that second sense of social truth, “true” is used as synonymous with “genuine” or “authentic” as well as “autonomous” and “disinterested.” Finally, and in a way that will now seem unproblematic, “truth” is opposed to “ideology” or “false consciousness.” The social consciousness, possibly awakened by authentic aesthetic experience, becomes “true” when the reality of commodity fetishism becomes apparent, as this “for-itself” that “pretends to exist for-another,” but really “exists for those who hold power” (AT: 351/236). Specifically, it is when consciousness shifts the ground of its appreciation of art, from affective receptiveness (“this is beautiful!” “I like that”)—which today has descended into the aesthetic vulgarity of kitsch (this “parody of catharsis”), entertainment and advertisement (AT: 355–356/239–240)—to production, that “the reversal of ideology into truth” begins to take place (AT: 351/236). There is no doubt, in that respect, that Adorno’s aesthetic theory amounts to a complete inversion or reversal of Platonism: truth is now on the side of art, and poiesis on the side of deception and conceal-ment; artistic production is itself thought on the basis not of reproduction and the mere imitation of an ideal paradigm, but free invention of form, independent of useful labour and surplus-value. The question of art is as social and political for Adorno as it is for Plato, with the significant difference that, for Adorno, artists, far from being a threat to the ideal city, anticipate it. Social and political consciousness is not inhibited or corrupted but awakened by art and genuine aesthetic experience.

It is not in relation to its actual content, however, that “every authentic artwork is internally revolutionary” and “becomes the schema of social praxis,” but precisely by “abstaining from praxis” (AT: 339/228). In other words, it is not by representing specific themes or images, not, that is, by being politically committed that works of art are intrinsically social: “[T]he political positions deliberately adopted by artworks are epiphenomena and usually impinge on the elaboration of works . . . Political opinions count for little” (AT: 344/232). In fact, artworks that are explicitly political and want to “divest themselves of fetishism . . . regularly enmesh themselves in false consciousness” (AT: 338/228). Rather, what is socially decisive in art are the work’s formal structures. Taking the example of Kafka, whose work is socially far more relevant than that of Sartre or Zola, Adorno claims that it is its language that illustrates “the thesis that form is the locus of social content [Gehalt]” (AT: 342/230). Specifically, its revolutionary potential lies in the contrast, indeed the contradiction, between the objectivity and sobriety of its language and the extraordinary nature of the events it depicts, and its ability to make absurdity “as self-evident as it has actually become in society” (AT: 342/231). “The priority of form over independently identifiable content [Inhalt],” a commentator remarks, derives from the fact that art “represents a process through which society itself is reflected.”71 The process in question is one of mediation, but in a very specific sense, insofar as, far from amounting to a dialectic of identification, it allows the different elements of the work of art to become ‘other’ for one another. The fragmentary unity of the work of art cannot be fixed conceptually “precisely because it is essentially a unity of diverse and distinguished moments.”⁷² This is especially visible in modern art, where the principle of montage becomes predominant, and this in such a way “that the individual parts attain a certain independence and are therefore no longer mechanically subjugated to the whole.”⁷³ And that, Tichy goes on to argue, is also why the truth content of art finds expression in different and distinct works of art rather than in some single concept of art in general. It is also the reason why, whilst signifying a promesse de bonheur, modernist works of art do not and cannot give a time and place for the actual realisation of such a promise: deauraticized (or postauratic) art have “relinquished the immediacy of the Stendhalian promesse de bonheur, the beautiful illusion that happiness might be attainable in the here and now.”74 More significantly still, because “all happiness found in the status quo is an ersatz and false,” in that it is organised and planned by the culture industry, and thus dominated by utility, modern art needs to suspend happiness in its current form; its paradox is that it can only “break its promise in order to remain true to it” (AT: 461/311).

Beyond or, better said perhaps, beneath this social dimension of truth lies another, (quasi)metaphysical sense of truth, which interrupts and criticises the truth of rationalism. It is more primordial and ultimately more problematic than the first, social sense of truth. It points to the possibility—better said, the promise—of the unity or reconciliation between subject and object, which coincides with the classical concept of truth. We saw how such a unity cannot be equated with the conceptual identity of subject and object, which amounts to the domination, and indeed the dissolution of the objective in the subjective. In fact, the unity in question amounts to the reversal of that process of identification, and the dissolution of the subjective in the objective. It is that unity (or dissolution) which Adorno characterises as truth in the most fundamental sense, and which he sees as taking place in aesthetic experience, and specifically in modernist art. Yet it is paradoxical, in that the fulfilment of the promise is always its nonfulfilment: this promise of a solution, for which the aesthetic experience of modernity stands, withdraws in the moment in which it is held out.

When speaking of aesthetic experience, Adorno draws a sharp distinction between two senses of experience, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. Whereas the latter defines genuine, that is, objective aesthetic experience, the former designates the realm of personal emotions and the satisfaction of subjective desires or needs. Erlebnis privileges the standpoint of the I, that is, of self-preservation, vital instincts, impulses, and emotions, including that of domination and repression. As such, Erlebnis cannot be the site of aesthetic experience: “Whoever experiences [erlebt] artworks by referring them to himself, does not experience them” in the true sense of the term (AT: 365/246). Erfahrung, by contrast, presupposes the dissolution of the I and the suspension of its self-preserving instinct. To be sure, there is an irreducible affective, and even pleasurable, dimension to aesthetic experience. Works such as Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Adorno explains in terms reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics, exercise a “mesmerizing effect [üben Suggestion aus]” (AT: 364/245) and a range of emotions, which Adorno summarises with the term “shudder” (Erschütterung). But it is of the utmost importance to distinguish such a response from the thematic of desire (Lust), satisfaction (Befriedigung), and sublimation, which Freud associated with the economy of the ego and its instinct of self-preservation. In fact, the economy of Erfahrung is the reversal of that of Erlebnis: the shock that is felt “is the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work” and “lose their footing.” This dissolution of the I, however, is not to be mistaken for the weakening of the I that the culture industry produces. It is not through distraction, but tension, that the I exceeds its own lived subjectivity: shaken, the I “perceives its own limitedness and finitude” and is able to catch a glimpse “beyond the prison that it itself is.” Through this shock, and “for a few moments,” “the I becomes aware, in real terms, of the possibility of letting self-preservation fall away, though it does not actually succeed in realizing this possibility” (AT: 364/245). This is the point at which the possibility of truth itself, “embodied in the aesthetic image, becomes tangible [leibhaft]” (AT: 363/244). The awakening that takes place in aesthetic experience is the awakening of the whole of consciousness, and not simply of “isolated stimuli and responses” (AT: 364/244). It corresponds to the irruption of objectivity into subjective consciousness, as opposed to its systematic identification and reduction:

True, even an authentic relation to the artwork demands an act of identification: The object must be entered and participated in—as Benjamin says, it is necessary to “breathe its aura.”75 But the medium of this relationship is what Hegel called freedom toward the object: The spectator must not project what transpires in himself on to the artwork in order to find himself confirmed, uplifted and satisfied in it, but must, on the contrary, relinquish himself to the artwork, assimilate himself to it, and fulfil the work in its own terms (AT: 409/275)

Art signifies this turn away from the subjective pathos of identification, and towards “an objectivity that is nonobjectivated (AT: 428/288).”

We saw how philosophical thought seeks to represent the nature of things with abstract concepts, and thus introduces a distance between it and the reality it seeks to grasp. It can grasp or represent the world only by objectifying it; and that, Adorno argues, is precisely the reason why philosophy needs art: to return to the things themselves, to the phenomenal, pre-objective world. Art is the suspension or caesura of the conceptual. At the same time, however, art lacks what discursive knowledge has, that is, the clarity and precision of the concept. As one commentator puts it: “Precisely because truth appears by means of the senses in the work of art, truth remains inaccessible to aesthetic experience; since the work of art cannot express the truth which it makes manifest, aesthetic experience does not know what it experiences.”⁷⁶ In Adorno’s own words: artworks “have truth content and they do not have it” (AT: 194/128). They lack knowledge of the very truth they displays in images, sounds, and colours. They are thus deeply “enigmatic” (rätselfhaft) and resemble picture puzzles: “artworks are like picture puzzles in that what they hide—like Poe’s letter—is visible and, by being visible, hidden” (AT: 185/121). It is precisely this enigmatic quality of the work that requires that philosophy be brought back into the picture, back, that is, into the visible, but as the invisible in and of the visible. But the truth is that it had never really left it. In fact, it was commanding it from afar, and from the very start: although artworks can’t be reduced to rationalistic determinations and concepts, “each artwork through the neediness implicit in its enigmatic character nevertheless turns towards interpretive reason” (AT: 193/128). Having asserted the irreducible truth and redemptory nature of art, Adorno brings philosophy back as the necessary supplement of art, that is, as its faithful interpreter: “Artworks, especially those of the highest dignity, await their interpretation” (AT: 193/128). Philosophy turns the sensuousness of art into sense, extracts the conceptual from the image, and draws out the universal from the particular. This means that the truth of art is never complete in itself, that it becomes complete when it is elevated to the universal level of the concept, which it contained or expressed implicitly. By pointing beyond itself and demanding its solution, “the enigma points to its truth content. It can only be achieved by philosophical reflection” (193/128). If art is to be experienced in the strong and true sense of the term, that is, from the point of view of its truth content, then art needs philosophy. This, in turn, means that “genuine aesthetic experience must become philosophy, or risk being nothing at all” (AT: 197/131, translation modified). Is such a conclusion surprising, when Adorno subordinated the question and value of art to the philosophical question of truth from the outset? How could philosophy not be the truth and end—in every sense of the term—of art, when art is itself envisaged from the point of view of truth? The realisation of the truth content of art, which the work itself wants and promises, is the negation of the work qua work, and thus the end of art: “There is no artwork that does not promise that its truth content, to the extent that it appears in the artwork as something existing, realizes itself and leaves the artwork behind simply as a husk . . . ” (AT: 199/132). To the extent that the work of art is true, “then along with the semblance truth abolishes the artwork” (199/132). In the end, despite Adorno’s extraordinary complication of the relation between art and philosophy, the material form and the truth content, the sensuous and the non-sensuous, despite reconfiguring such a relation aporetically, he continues to see art as a stage—a necessary and irreducible one no doubt—towards the self-manifestation of truth. For it is only when the sensuous has been translated and transformed into its own sense, when the artwork has given way to its implicit concept, that art exists. But it is also the moment at which art ceases to exist. So long as the truth of art remains in the realm of the sensuous, it is not apprehended as truth. But as soon as it is expressed conceptually, it is betrayed and vanishes. Such is the aporia of art, or the negative dialectic of semblance: “The truth of discursive knowledge is unshrouded [unverhüllt], but for all that it does not possess it; the knowledge that is art has truth, but as something incommensurable with art” (AT: 191/126). In the “Fragment on Music and Language,” Adorno describes this double insufficiency as follows:

Discursive language wishes to express the absolute in a mediated way, and the absolute escapes it at every turn, leaving each attempt behind in its finitude. Music touches the absolute directly, but the very moment it does so, the absolute is obscured, just as a light that is too strong may blind the eye and prevent it from seeing what is perfectly visible.”77

Ultimately, art and philosophy combine to form a totality or wholeness that can only be intimated, an ideal that is forever promised, but never actually realised. What we have, in the end, are the elements or moments of the Hegelian dialectic, but without the moment of resolution. What we have is an unresolved, suspended, and diminished dialectic—a neutered Platonism. This is made particularly clear in the Draft Introduction published at the end of Aesthetic theory, in connection with the distinction between the universal and the particular—one that ends not in a dialectical solution, but an aporia, if not a dead-end. Whereas philosophy deals with universals, art deals with particulars. Of artworks, philosophy can only extract universals (concepts). In doing so, however, philosophy misses the artwork and the question it poses, which is that of knowing “how, under the domination of the universal, a particular is in any way possible” (AT: 521/351). Similarly, the universal “is the stumbling block of art: By becoming what it is, art cannot be what it wants to become,” which is precisely the universal (AT: 321/351). If every particular is the particular of a universal, and the universal is itself the identifying mediation of the particular, how can a particular ever escape the law of subsumption and signal a situation, a future, a unity that will not have been anticipated and defined in advance by the concept? Is every move beyond and away from the concept a move of the concept itself? At the same time, the artwork, qua particular, signals the limit of the universal, or what the universal literally cannot grasp (begreifen). In the end, we are left to wonder whether the suspension of the universal domination of the concept, which art promises, isn’t a false promise, an illusion, philosophically and socially as problematic as the illusion of fetishism itself.

Precisely insofar as it remains committed to the very sense of truth, and the very project of reconciliation, which animate Hegel’s thought as a whole, Adorno’s attempt to neutralise the excesses and negative tendencies of reason only manages a semblance of reversal. For having in a way advocated the superiority of art over philosophy, having reversed the terms of the Platonic hierarchy, Adorno immediately reveals the extent to which, by virtue of being a sensuous presentation of the truth, art is a diminished or partial intelligibility. Because the truth that is in question is the truth of metaphysics, that is, the intelligible truth, the sensuous and material dimension of the work of art, no matter how rehabilitated, continues to be viewed from the point of view of its contribution or access to a truth that is essentially a matter of cognition and thus, ultimately, of conceptual discourse. As in Hegel, and metaphysical aesthetics as a whole, art is not there to save us from the truth, but to give it a concrete, sensuous incarnation, the true content of which escapes it as art. To understand the limits and original sin of philosophy, and to understand the manner in which art provides a genuine relation to that which philosophy, as rationality, cannot achieve, philosophy remains indispensable. This, in turn, means that the self-critique of philosophy, and its ability to open the concept onto the non-conceptual, or identity onto non-identity, is never such as to call truth, and therefore philosophy, into question, precisely to the extent that truth is envisaged as the unity of the sensuous and the non-sensuous (sense)—albeit one that is never actually realised. Such is the reason why, ultimately, if there is a dialectic of semblance, it does not apply to art, but to the philosophical discourse that criticises itself and opens itself onto non-discursive practices only to reassert itself and reinscribe the very hierarchy it began by overturning.

C   Concluding Remarks

In the end, Adorno backs himself into a corner from which he tries to extricate himself by multiplying negative dialectical moves that never lead to a solution, but only to aporetic situations, which risk descending into melancholy pessimism. That, he would argue, is precisely the point: the only possible solution, redemption, or reconciliation is that which is promised or intimated; every attempt to move beyond such aporias will inevitably result in the further affirmation of instrumental reason and consummation of the enlightenment project. The cost of Adorno’s reversal of the classical metaphysical concepts and oppositions, and his effort to neutralise the systemic and dominating tendencies of conceptual rationality are therefore too costly, and ultimately vain. They are costly, firstly because the rehabilitation of art takes place against the backdrop of the crisis of philosophy, I would say the crisis of faith in philosophy’s ability to bring about the ultimate unity that is synonymous with truth and autonomy. In addition to this negative, critical role of philosophy, the only positive role that is now envisaged for philosophy is secondary and remarkably unambitious: it is that of a faithful interpreter of the arts, of a hermeneutical supplement to the truth of art. But they are costly also because they lead, at best, to a kind of utopianism, a messianic promise of reconciliation that generates an individual as well as collective mood that oscillates between hope and melancholy, and forces the ultimate goal of human action and nature, namely, happiness, into a forever postponed future. The hopes, expectation, and promises once ascribed to religion (and then political praxis) are now transposed to art: faced with the “original sin” of philosophy, art is announced as “redemption,” “salvation,” “expiation,” and “promise,” with the following significant difference that the redemption in question is impossible. They are vain, because, despite all its aporias and negativedialectical twists and turns, nothing has fundamentally changed: the space within which they take place remains that of Platonism, albeit reconfigured along Hegelian, Marxist and messianic lines. The truth that is at issue remains that of Hegel’s system, that is, that of the unity of subject and object, thought and being, spirit and nature, identity and non-identity, the universal and the particular. Promised or (im)possible, rather than actual, it is reconciliation itself, and truth as reconciliation, which remains the dominant paradigm after which the value of art is established. As a promise of happiness, in which the particular moments of happiness would be more than simple appearance, the work of art still points beyond itself, towards a place and time that is undefinable and forever postponed.

The question, for me, is one of knowing whether a genuine rehabilitation of the sensuous, and a radical rethinking of art, can actually take place, so long as philosophy is thought metaphysically, that is, in terms of the distinction and opposition between the sensible and the supersensible, and in relation to truth as the unity of subject and object. The question is one of knowing whether the excess that Adorno locates in the work is one that points towards the objective, spiritual content of the work—its truth as universal—or whether one can still locate the artwork as the site of an excess, yet one that would escape the distinctions and oppositions of metaphysics. Might the work be the site of an excess of the sensible itself, of the self-exceeding of the sensible, which would resist its spiritual translation or mediation? And might concepts themselves, and that of the hypersensible in particular, not be such as to escape the logic (or even the negative dialectic) of the universal and the particular? Similarly, could such an excess have a social dimension and value, one that would reveal a structure of alterity and dis-propriation ultimately more promising than that suggested by Adorno? The question, then, is one of knowing how art can provide not a way out of, or an antidote to, philosophy as crisis—crisis of the concept, of rationality, and of modernity as a whole—but a way into a positive philosophy of the (non-dialectical) concept? The question, in other words, concerns the possibility of another relation between the sensuous and the conceptual, art and philosophy—a non-hierarchical, anarchic, otherwise than identical or non-identical relation. The question concerns the possibility of the hypersensible.