Reason, aesthetics, and solidarity: Hegel and Adorno on the reparation of modernity

My dissertation seeks to trouble longstanding assumptions governing the role of aesthetic resources within practical argument---particularly in light of Enlightenment efforts to privilege reason as the sole basis of normative authority. Although many commentators present any admixture of these conceptual regimes as objectionable, I propose that Hegel and Adorno use aesthetic resources to disclose that certain forms of reason may block those normative goods (rights, freedom, fairness, social transparency) traditionally associated with a rational polity. To this end, I grapple with Hegel's challenge to Kant and his Romantic contemporaries through what he terms a 'beautiful' community; trace his turn to a normative rationalism that secures freedom by expelling the aesthetic from the space of reason (and thus from practical consideration); and, in the final section of the dissertation, I reconstruct the normative resources that Adorno distills from modernist art in order to challenge both Hegel and broader social disruptions. Ultimately, I argue that---once we disengage unhelpful hermeneutic commitments (i.e., that reason and aesthetic resources are mutually exclusive)---certain appeals to the aesthetic can contribute to the emancipatory aims of philosophical modernity, as they expose the harms generated by insufficiently nuanced desires for 'self-grounding' and offer resources to repair this damage without, thereby, discarding the promise of reason altogether.