ABSTRACT
Adorno’s philosophy, especially his aesthetic theory, is unforgiving in the demands it places on the reader. He assumes a detailed knowledge of Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, as well as an intimacy with the history of Western art, and especially with developments in 20th-century modernism. Adorno formed his aesthetic theory via a tireless, antagonistic conversation with Hegel. The importance of art for Adorno rests on two pivotal points that arise from Hegel’s position. A kind of ugly beauty and mimetic truth are regained by Adorno’s critical engagement with Kant and Hegel, but on the basis that art is fundamentally separated from rationalised history, and can be understood to be so in terms of its being ‘purposive without a purpose.’ Adorno knows that art is necessarily hostile to any moral position, and that the experience of art itself, even if it is not simply reducible to Kant’s alleged hedonism, is the very opposite of that of suffering.
