Frihet, nödvändighet, skönhet : Relationen mellan konst och natur hos Schelling och Adorno

Sammanfattning: Schelling and Adorno are two thinkers from different periods who are critical of the modern scientific approach towards nature, which they deem disruptive. Schelling’s orientation is mainly towards the epistemological, while Adorno’s is also political. Both seek to find a path of the subject’s reconciliation with nature through aesthetics. Via Schelling’s works First Outline of a System of the Philosophy of Nature and System of Transcendental Idealism as well as Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment and Aesthetic theory, this paper emphasizes similarities and differences in their respective ideas on the art-nature relationship. Schelling’s idealistic-practical philosophy centers around the synthetization of nature and freedom, which culminates in the artwork while Adorno rather focuses on subjectivity’s dominance of nature and self and how aesthetics could reform subjectivity into something less harmful, which too would be a step towards freedom. The essay argues that the two thinkers complement each other in certain aspects and that their affinities are more than what appears at a first glance.