Guardian Of The Constellations Of The Night Sky

In this dissertation, the author takes Marxism as the basic directive thought and uses the perspective of Theodor W. Adorno's critically to explore a history of the aesthetic questions. There is a clue runs through the whole history of western philosophy, namely, the western philosophy takes aesthetics as its moment and impetus to reconstruct and renew itself. If we consider this clue as the background of the investigation of western aesthetics, we would find that aesthetics for philosophers is the responding to the problems and dilemmas of philosophy itself. And since modern times, it could be said that the dilemma is rooted in reason. As a result, aesthetics acts a role to save and sublate reason. And this also constructs the background of the study of Adorno's aesthetic thought in this dissertation. Adorno's metaphor of constellation is something very attractive. In this sense, we could not regard him simply as an aesthetician or a philosopher but as an opener of questions whose keystone is aesthetics.In chapter 1, we outline that clue through a retrospective research. This research refers to the philosophy in ancient Greece ( Plato and Aristotle), classical German philosophy ( Kant, Schiller and Hegel), and contemporary philosophy ( Heidegger and Wittgenstein). Of course it is not a mere historical review but a probe to the logical development of questions themselves. It is well-known that Adorno is a writer who opposes any system. However, this does not provide us any excuse to dismember his thoughts. So we make a general examination on Adorno's works in chapter 2. Those works include Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, Dialectics of Enlightenment, Philosophie der neuen Musik, Against Epistemology - a Metacritique Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, Negative Dialectics, and Aesthetic Theory through which we attempt to understand the development of Adorno's thoughts and his interest of aesthetics. From chapter 3, we start to discuss specially those questions opened by Adorno. We begin with "Loss of certainty" and discuss the origin of art as well as art work in chapter 3. Here history and constellation are expounded emphatically. And in chapter 4, we turn our view to nature by means of the dialectics of enlightenment. We argue that nature has been misinterpreted after our inquiry to those categories such as myth, magic, enlightenment and so on. Thus we show a kind of hardened situation or petrification from these two aspects of art and nature. Then we think of the disintegration to that hardened situation in the name of mimesis and illusion (Schein) in chapter 5. In thischapter, we also deal with some relative themes such as name, music, nominalism, imagination and so on. Through mimesis and illusion, we feel a new relation between ourselves and the world. We suggest in chapter 6 that this relation is implied in the relation between ourselves and art work. And in this chapter, we explain some inter-relative concepts such as form and objectification, subject and object, spirit and sensibility, and so on. In chapter 7, we respond again to the "Loss of certainty" in art field. And the focus here is the proposition of "end of art" and the idea of anti-art. According to Adorno, from now on, no art will be conceivable without the moment of anti-art. So we examine the modern art as anti-art carefully. In addition, so-called postmodernism is mentioned in this chapter also. At last, we come into a conclusion. But the conclusion in this dissertation is not a summarization. What we want to do is to think the question of art, truth and happiness in the way of constellation. So we speak of truth as the enigma of art and happiness as the promise of art.Anyway, what we have done in this dissertation to a great extent is only an introductory investigation. We wish that it would be helpful to introduce a new perspective to the study of aesthetics and philosophy.