Adorno’s Aesthetics in the Age of Anthropocene

Adornos Aesthetics in the Age of Anthropocene (AesthAnth) is a research project that intersects philosophy, aesthetics, philosophy of history and history of modern and contemporary philosophy. It deals with the impact of climate change on the self-understanding of the humanities: the Anthropocene is namely the age of the Anthropos, but do we really know what is anthropic and what is natural in what we call Anthropocene? The Anthropocene is namely characterized by an inextricable intertwinement of historical-social elements and natural factors. This is why this project aims at showing the relevance of Theodor W. Adornos aesthetics and philosophy of history for developing a novel and sound conceptual framework to understand the novel philosophical issues posed by the Anthropocene to the humanities. It will propose an original understanding of Adornos aesthetic theory that interprets it on the basis of Adornos idea of natural history. The core idea of the project is that the concept of what is aesthetic relevant, namely what Adorno calls an aesthetic field, is produced by the intersection historical and natural dimensions. Thus interpreted, Adornos aesthetic philosophy represents a critical alternative to the positions labelled as new materialism currently predominant in the studies on the Anthropocene. Whereas new materialist positions try in various way to acquire a non-anthropocentric point of view, the point for Adorno is not to interpret nature as what lies beyond human purposes and categories (as new materialist positions try to do); for Adorno, who also criticises modern anthropocentrism, the issue is to grasp in a precise and determined way the concrete, dialectical, i.e. reciprocal intertwining of historical, human and social moments with natural ones: in other words, to assume the inescapable centrality of the human so as to be able to reflexively grasp its being nature. Adornos program for a natural history means thus to comprehend an object as natural where it appears most historical and as historical where it appears most natural. The idea of natural-history, then, is the dialectic that can be extracted from a literal analysis of the terms ambiguity: the history of nature is nature grasped as historical; natural history is the historical grasped as natural. Whitin this perspective, as the project will show in detail, it is the aesthetics the privileged instrument of this natural-historical inquiry: in fact, aesthetic experience is characterized precisely by this intertwinement between historical and natural elements, in which what belongs to our sensation and imagination, and what springs from the aesthetic object, cannot cannot (and should not) be rigidly distinguished.

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