Art Works As The Truth Content

Adorno's aesthetic and cultural theory was founded on his historical philosophy. Dialectics of Enlightenment and Negative Dialectics are two fundamental texts for understanding his aesthetics. In Dialectics of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer put forward two subjects of conversation to common people that myth had already been enlightened and the enlightenment had already been degenerated into myth. They believed that myth contained rational factors which embodied the early cognition and domination of human to the natural world and was not be human's imagination. The birth of natural gods in myth was the appearance of soul that human conquered the supernatural power and the evolution of natural gods to human gods would rather say that human grasped the natural world's law than say that all gods returned to their positions. The alienation of human and the natural world was latent in the birth of the myth. The alienation of human meant the establishment of subjectivity as well as the swell of subject, while the alienation of the natural world meant the natural world henceforth lost its spirit and charms and became an object which was controlled and plundered by human. The alienation brought about the serious confrontation between human and the natural world. Human who chose and accepted the thought of enlightenment controlled the natural world on the premise that subject and object are split. Naming things meant that human controlled them. Human used concepts filtering the quality of all things by which they were distinguished so that we would rather say the natural world of all colors was forgotten in fact than say human controlled all things and they only controlled things they wanted to. Enlightenment was a course in which human subject was gradually spiritualized and the natural world was gradually objectified. The swell of human subject not only aroused human's desire of conquering nature but also led to the appearance of all kinds of totalitarianism. The interchanging deadlock between myth and enlightenment embodied dialectics of enlightenment and human fell into the paradox of them.If it was a profound philosophy that the course of human's rationality redeemed was disclosed accompanying with the course of human's rationality instrumentalized in Dialectics of Enlightenment, Negative Dialectics, a representative of Adorno's later philosophic works, was conceived to provide guide in methodology by which human's rationality (instrumental rationality) was redeemed once again. First, Adorno distinguished concept fetishism from concept. He believed that the concept was useful to human and the concept...