The Dialectics of Art from ‘Spirit’ to Freedom

Abstract

In the Frankfurt School and its member Adorno, art along with philosophy, is seen as a field of activity that allows freedom in the current historical-social conditions. In this sense, art in Frankfurt School, is defined as an area of resistance to current capitalist system. What makes art a field of resistance is the ‘spirit’ moment that work of art has and is inherent in the work of art. Spirit in a work of art is the element that emerges in spiritualization process of art. Although the spiritualization of art is a process of rationalization as the exclusion of natural beauty from art, it is a process that creates also an opposite spiritualization. The spirit that emerges in the dialectical process of the spiritualization of art, which is the repetition of the dialectics of the Englightenment in art, is a momentary liberation and subject’s experience of freedom from conceptual oppression and therefore from the domination of the holistic society. Because, contrary to the rationalization, subjectivation and freedom process of human being which has resulted in reification, art finds its origin in a natural impulse, behavior, that is mimesis.