Figurations of Nature in Kant and Adorno Público
Daniels, Jordan (Spring 2021)
Published
Abstract
At a time when the effects of human activity on the environment have never been a more urgent issue, I propose that looking anew at the concept of natural beauty in the works of Immanuel Kant and Theodor Adorno will help us better understand the relationship between human beings and nature today. By drawing out the ethical and political consequences of different conceptualizations of nature, the dissertation bridges the strict division between aesthetics and theoretical philosophy. While Kant is known for intensifying the separation between these spheres, I argue that Adorno takes up Kant’s elaborations of aesthetics and natural beauty in order to transform them, underlining their determination in and by history. Ultimately, by bringing the concerns of aesthetics to bear on the question of nature, I argue that we can better articulate the blockages that seemingly condemn the contemporary relationship between human beings and nature to be one of mutual destruction.
While contemporary debates in environmental aesthetics largely take an ahistorical approach to the aesthetic experience of nature, defining it as the aesthetic experience of “nature itself,” of nature “in its own terms,” Kant and Adorno’s accounts of nature challenge and deepen what counts as an aesthetic experience of nature by complicating the discipline’s foundational distinction of the natural against the artificial. Nature is grasped by human knowers and is therefore shaped by a distinct historical community, and yet, as Kant and Adorno both assert, human concepts do not exhaust nature. Drawing on the work of Walter Benjamin, Adorno conceptualizes a further tension: natural beauty might offer a false aesthetic comfort in an escape from history and human agency, or, if properly recognized as itself historical, natural beauty can serve to reorient us toward history and human agency. Ultimately, I propose that the experience of natural beauty is expressive of social historical content, offering a vision of a different relationship with nature and disclosing ethical claims on us to act in this world.
Table of Contents
Introduction: Nature, History, Aesthetics 1
Chapter 1: Adorno, Kant, and Environmental Aesthetics Today 12
Natural Beauty Revived
Cognitivist Approaches to “Appreciating Nature on Its Own Terms”
Dynamics of Disinterestedness
Chapter 2: Natural-History and Figurations of Nature 49
The Idea of Natural-History
From Natural-History to Speculative History
The Fear of Nature and the Nature of Fear
Odysseus and Nature’s Sacrifice
Chapter 3: Kant, Phenomenal Nature, and Metaphysical Mourning 92
Metaphysics (Taking) After the Natural Sciences
Nature, Blind and Mutilated
Nature and the Block
Chapter 4: Enlightenment and Aesthetic Experience 129
Morality and Mutilated Nature
Freedom in Thought
Aesthetic Rationality in Kant and Adorno
Chapter 5: Natural Beauty on This Sad Earth 165
Subordinated Natural Beauty
Transience and Trauerspiel
Messianic Nature, History, and Happiness
Natural Beauty and the Cultural Landscape
Conclusion 203
Bibliography 208
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