Traces of the Other: Adorno on Natural Beauty

Abstract

Abstract This article explores Theodor W. Adorno’s recovery of natural beauty in Aesthetic Theory against the background of current debates in environmental aesthetics and evinces the relationship of his reading of natural beauty to his critique of the domination of nature. From there, a critique of natural domination can be issued through the artwork. Whereas Adorno specifies that artworks do not relate to natural beauty in a positive, pseudomorphotic sense, they nevertheless inherit a quality of natural beauty as presenting to humans what is not reducible to the human. Within the specific historical context of an environmental crisis, then, a case is finally made for art as an area of ecological critique that recovers the artwork and nature from both the artwork’s reduction to a propagandistic tool and its idealistic enlisting for reinstating a bourgeois ideal of nature.