Abstract

Art has long been said to open up a different relationship to nature for the subject than ordinary theoretical or practical knowledge allows. Instead of making nature the distanced object of our contemplation or the mere material and means of our practical constructions, art discloses to us an intelligibility of nature that reaches further than our concepts and a naturalness of ourselves that connects us with what we usually relate to as our other. Against this backdrop, it does not seem surprising that the discussions about the problematic relationship to nature that have characterised the Anthropocene repeatedly turn to art and highlight its ability to overcome the problematic modern opposition of subject and object, spirit and nature, which has got us in this mess. In what follows, I want to argue, however, that art and aesthetic experience can only help here if it leads beyond the classical aesthetic paradigms of the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful dwells in a dream of a harmonic fit between subject and nature that is precisely in question in the Anthropocene, and the sublime presents the superior power of nature only to bring out a different kind of power in the intelligent subject that remains untouched by natural might. These classical figures of aesthetic experience thus obscure how profoundly we need to revise our relation to nature in order to respond to the Anthropocene. In order to see this, it is helpful to first take a look at how (I) modern aesthetics around 1800 fundamentally conceived of art as a second or other nature. Against this background, we can understand more precisely (II) in which sense the figures of natural beauty and the sublime conceive of the relationship to nature. In view of the Anthropocene, these figures threaten to become part of an aesthetic ideology. We therefore need (III) other aesthetic strategies which I will point to in the third part.