Truth comes into play: Adorno, Kant and Aesthetics

Abstract

This paper departs from the verification of the centrality that, in Adorno’s recognition of the aesthetic field, the rehabilitation of its bond to knowledge and truth has. Adorno’s criticism to the Kantian aesthetic theory is, this way, reconstructed starting from his dismissal of the separation, established by Kant, between the aesthetic and the epistemological fields. This criticism, which accuses the Kantian aesthetics of subjectivism, is finally taken back to Adorno’s dissatisfaction regarding the transcendental approach, for not being dialectic. At this point, the need of determining the specificity of his own understanding of the aesthetic and dialectics becomes apparent. Surprisingly it is then discovered an unexpected proximity between his position and the one represented by the Kantian aesthetics itself, a proximity that let recognize in the latter some features which go beyond the limits of the Critical System towards the Adornian approach. But this proximity proves also the immanence and legitimacy of the (ambiguous) Adornian criticism to Kant, and, as a result of this, the unsatisfactory quality of the Kantian determination of knowledge and truth.