ART AND MYTH: ADORNO AND HEIDEGGER

David Roberts

ABSTRACT The article examines Adorno and Heideggers contrasting conceptions of art and myth in relation to their reading of western history since the Greeks and to German thinking on the relation between nature and history since Kant. In Part I Adornos lecture The Idea of Natural History (1932), which draws on Lukcss Theory of the Novel and Benjamins The Origin of German Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heideggers fundamental ontology in Being and Time, serves as focus for the interrelation between myth, origin and repetition in western history, construed as the forgetting of nature (Adorno) or the forgetting of Being (Heidegger). In Part II, the question of the remythologization or the demythologization of art in Benjamin, Heidegger and Adorno is examined in the context of aesthetic modernism. KEYWORDS ticism enlightenment history modernism myth nature roman-

I. THE IDEA OF NATURAL HISTORY The entwinement of myth and enlightenment is the theme of Horkheimer and Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment. Myth, viewed through the perspective of enlightenment, is transformed into allegory. Dialectic of Enlightenment accordingly presents the melancholy allegory of human history given in the interpretation of The Odyssey as the original history of subjectivity: the journey of the prototypical subject through the world of myth towards self-consciousness and identity. The Odyssey tells the mythical story of the exit from myth, and at its centre is Odysseus encounter with the Sirens, which Horkheimer and Adorno call the anticipatory (ahnungsvoll) allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Odysseus, the prototype of modern man has no unied, harmonious relationship to past, present and future. He is cut off from the past the song of the Sirens by the fear of regression. The sacrice of the past to the future sets in train, however, a
Thesis Eleven, Number 58, August 1999: 1934 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright 1999 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd [0725-5136(199908)58;1934;009145]

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progression which will reveal itself as blind progression without progress, driven by the separation from nature the forgetting of nature in the self whose trace is preserved solely in arts echo of the song of the Sirens. Art thus functions as the impotent promise, the anticipatory allegory of the fullled moment, the moment of present experience which will reconnect past, present and future. Odysseus present, however, is divided: he hears and at the same time does not hear the Sirens, since he has had himself bound to the mast. Mimesis is bound to self-preservation. Like nature, Odysseus, prototypical subjectivity, has already been divided into the object and repressed subject of history. From this division springs time as temporal succession, the empty, homogeneous time of progress. But what we think of as progress is only the wind blowing from paradise, driving us ever further from the origin. Benjamins Angel of History looks backwards. Origin is the goal. Heideggers Being and Time sets out to destroy destructure and unground the metaphysical, scientic and vulgar conception of time as a temporal succession of present instances, which divide life-time into past, present and future. This is the time of Historie (the history of historiography) to which he opposes, as its true ground and origin, the historicity of Dasein, lived and living time. The analysis of Dasein uncovers the transcendental horizon of temporality, made up of the three temporal ecstasies, which in setting us outside of chronological time reveal the fundamental unity of past, present and future. Heidegger reverses the vulgar perspective of progress. The essence of Daseins temporality is repetition. Human being is future-oriented because it is being unto death. The future, i.e. our future possibility, comes to meet us as the coming back, the taking upon itself of our past, i.e. our past possibilities. The unity of the three dimensions of temporality, which denes Dasein, we could say, as the future past, is disclosed by decision, the resoluteness in the face of death which accepts and assumes the fallenness, the thrownness of human being into nitude. Resoluteness unto death transforms inauthentic existence, divided between past, present and future, into authentic fate. The resoluteness of decision is conceived purely formally. Its disclosure of the original temporality and historicity of Dasein points the way, however, to a deeper conception of history. Individual fate (Schicksal) coexists with the general or collective fate (Geschick) of its generation, which is that of the community, of the people (Heidegger, 1977: [1996]: 74). This formal structure of decision in Being and Time is lled with historical content in 1933 by Heideggers decision for National Socialism and the German Revolution. We cannot understand Heideggers fateful leap, however, without reference to the formal structure elucidated in Being and Time. Two points need to be stressed. First, only future past Dasein can accede to presence, that is, to the presence of the here and now, the Da of the authentic moment (Augenblick), through which Dasein becomes present for its time (Heidegger, 1977: [1996] 74). This time strikes for Heidegger and for the German people in 1933. Second, this moment of fate is the moment of repetition, dened by Heidegger in his Rectoral Address as the challenge of the German repetition of the Greek origin of the history of the Occident. Let us say, somewhat facetiously, that Heidegger

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has heard the song of the Sirens. By this I mean that the decision which has found its historical hour, the decision through which past, present and future are reunited, signies Heideggers entry into the essential time of history. This time comprises on the one hand the eschatological time of decision, of the rst and the last things, end and beginning, and on the other hand, the mythical time of repetition. The eschatological Second Coming (of the third and nal kingdom) must take the form of the repetition of the rst beginning. Origin thus corresponds with origin. Origin is the goal. Adorno and Horkheimers origin of history is inaccessible, repressed. Human history is to be understood as the history of this original repression, which unconsciously perpetuates the mythical power of nature. We can escape the compulsion to repetition the eternal return of the repressed only by remembering the origin, that is to say, by liberating ourselves through reexion from the forgetting of nature in the subject, inscribed in the repressive blindness and violence of enlightenment. Heideggers origin inaugurates by contrast the space-time of history. The Greek beginning remains incomparable because it constitutes the original opening of Being, the birth to presence (Nancy) which manifests the mystery of creation, the mystery of the origin. History does not develop from inconspicuous beginnings. On the contrary, all greatness belongs to the beginning and all that follows is decline. Heidegger therefore insists that the authentic greatness of historical knowledge lies in the understanding of the mystery of the beginning, and that the knowledge of original history (Ur-Geschichte) is the province not of science but of mythology (Heidegger, 1983: 1645). This gives us two opposed versions of origin, repetition and fate. In the one, inaccessible origin operates behind our backs to turn enlightenment into ever-repeated mythical fate. In the other, origin is the future past which comes to meet us as fate, the destiny we assume in repetition. The more original repetition, which brings back the past as our future possibility, reopens mythical time, which is equally that of the origin of myth and the myth of origin. Above I suggested that allegory reects myth through the perspective of enlightenment and that the allegory of allegory is summed up in the mythical story of the exit from myth. This exit is the original sin, called by Horkheimer and Adorno the forgetting of nature in the subject and by Heidegger the forgetting of Being. Thus for all their differences they are repeating the same romantic story, which of course has many variants, but whose essence can be dened as the allegory of the relation between myth and enlightenment, nature and history. The original myth paradise, fall, redemption returns as the originary myth of romanticism through an exchange of terms: the fall from nature into history points to the redeeming reunion of nature and history. The founding text of German romanticism, the fragment called The Oldest System Programme of German Idealism (1797) written by Hegel but the coproduct of Hegel, Hlderlin and Schelling, envisages the coming synthesis of nature and history in the form of a mythology of reason, the new religion which will be the last and greatest deed of mankind. The negative counterpart to their mythology of reason is the dialectic of enlightenment, unfolded in Horkheimer

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and Adornos history of the west and in Heideggers history of Being two mythical histories, which recount the catastrophic consequences of the forgetting of the origin in terms that are well known: the domination of nature, the devastation of the earth, the will to power and nihilism. In both accounts nature/Being appears in divided and double form as the hidden subject (i.e. repressed nature/the withdrawal of Being) and the overt object of history (i.e. as object of the natural sciences and the raw material and standing reserve of technology). Accordingly, it is a matter of indifference whether we speak with Horkheimer and Adorno of the destruction of history by nature or with Heidegger of the destruction of nature by history. In each case the vanishing point of judgment is provided by what Adorno in his Lecture of 1932 calls The Idea of Natural History (Adorno, 1973a [1984]). Natural history certainly translates as Naturgeschichte, but it conveys none of the resonances and complexities of the original, which expresses in the most concentrated form the question of history the relation between nature and history central to German thought since Herder and Kant. In the symmetry of its coequivalence Naturgeschichte can be read in three ways: nature as history, history as nature and as the synthesis of both, just as each of its terms, in and by virtue of their division, is open to a triadic reading: original, fallen and resurrected nature, mirrored in original, fallen and redeemed history. The resurrection of nature and the redemption of history Naturgeschichte in its full meaning constitute the mythical other to the allegory of the dialectic of enlightenment. Or to put it another way, the dialectic of enlightenment is the one allegorical side of the German mythical history of the west, otherwise known as the philosophical discourse of modernity (Habermas), whose other side is the new mythology, which contains its own dialectic the dialectic of romanticism. The romantic critique of the enlightenment culminates in Horkheimer and Adorno but also of course in Heidegger. Here we observe close, if antagonistic, parallels. The germ of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the dening theme of Critical Theory are formulated in Adornos 1932 lecture. The idea of natural history developed there is expressly conceived as a response to Heideggers idea of historicity in Sein und Zeit. The parallels are even closer after 1945. Adornos and Heideggers histories of the west end in the quietism of negative theology. The light of the origin casts a fading glow over the ever-receding horizon of the end of fallen history, suspended endlessly between origin and goal. If Heidegger declares that only a god can save us, Adorno rests his case with Becketts endgame, Waiting for Godot. In The Idea of Natural History Adorno denes the task of philosophy as the overcoming of subjective idealisms division of the world into nature and history (spirit). He welcomes Heideggers ontological turn in Sein und Zeit: the bringing together of ontology and historicity in a fundamental ontology of Dasein which reveals the basic ontological structure of history. The price, however, which vitiates Heideggers solution to the reconciliation of nature and history and makes it merely an apparent solution, is the reduction of history to the structure of Heideggers ontology. Ontology alone is insufcient. What is required is a further step: the ontological reorientation of philosophy of history, which Adorno develops from Lukcs Theory of the Novel and

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Benjamins Origin of German Tragic Drama. Lukcs grasps history as nature: the reied world of social convention is a frozen second nature, which awaits resurrection. Benjamin conversely grasps nature as history: History is writ across the countenance of nature in the sign language of transience. The sign language of transience, in which nature and history converge, is the language of allegory. Natural history signies the interweaving of natural and historical being in the second nature of the social, whose deaths head is the emblem of allegory. Philosophys task can now be understood as allegorical: the awakening and resurrection of the petried world through allegorical interpretation, which lays bare the identity of rst and second nature, rooted in original history. Natural or original history overcomes the idealist division of the world, in which nature is understood as self-alienated spirit (Hegel), by means of a materialist concept of spirit as self-alienated nature (Noerr, 1990: 25). Philosophys task is thus dialectical. It must demonstrate that concrete history partakes of nature and that nature is historical by deconstructing the antithesis between nature and history. Adornos starting point is the denition of nature as mythical, the fateful predetermined being underlying history, and of history as the qualitatively new. In the archaic-mythical and the historically new we recognize the two key terms of Dialectic of Enlightenment: myth and enlightenment. Read dialectically, the archaic-mythical reveals its inherent dynamic, which Adorno elucidates through the strife of the old and the new gods in (Greek) tragedy: tragic myths contain at one and the same time subjectation to guilt and nature and the element of reconciliation that transcends the realm of nature (Adorno, 1973a: 363 [1984: 123]). Conversely, the historically new belongs inescapably to the mythical, since the second nature of the social as illusion or semblance (Schein) conveys the ideological illusion of a meaning beyond the allegorical. And since the nature of art is semblance, the work of art in its double form of historical semblance and mythical reconciliation can be thought of as both the allegory and the myth of natural history. Adornos ontological transformation of philosophy of history into the idea of dialectical nature substitutes for idealisms division of the world a materialism which appeals to concrete history against the tautologies of Heideggers ontology. The allegorical resurrection of the petried world declares that second nature, is in truth, rst nature (Adorno, 1973a: 365 [1984: 124]), but this rst nature is in fact already a double nature. First nature comprises both the historicity and facticity of transience and the promise of reconciliation, just as history is constructed in the light of this double image. Adornos dialectical nature suspends the dialectic of history in the constellations of the dialectical image (Benjamin), the constellations which revolve without resolution around the idea of history and the idea of nature. Adornos Idea of Natural History thus represents the vanishing point of philosophy of history, the last stage of the search for a dialectical synthesis of nature and history in response to the ratication of their division by Kant, a search which runs from Schiller and Schelling to Hegel and Marx, and whose characteristic tendency the historization of nature and the naturalization of history appears most clearly in Schelling, is echoed in the young Marxs programme of humanizing nature and naturalizing man, and is renewed in Ernst Blochs

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philosophy and eschatology of nature. The resurrection of nature, which will redeem history from the mythical cycle of the compulsion to repetition, replaces the Kantian division by a dialectical doubling of nature and history, underpinned by Marxs distinction between the realm of necessity and the realm of freedom, of prehistory and history. Marxs distinction brings out clearly the doubled dialectical concept of Naturgeschichte. On the one hand, we have the romantic utopian project of the young Marx; on the other, especially after 1848, the scientic-materialist insistence on the economic laws of motion of modern society. In the Preface to Capital Marx denes his standpoint as that which views the evolution of the economic formation of society as a process of natural history. From the beginning to the end of the tradition of a dialectical philosophy of history in German thought, from Schillers Naive and Sentimental Poetry and the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man through to Marcuses Essay on Liberation and Adornos Aesthetic Theory nature must function in this double guise. It is here that we can locate the origin of the performative contradiction (Habermas) of Dialectic of Enlightenment. When Horkheimer and Adorno state: nature is neither good, as the old, nor noble, as the new romanticism believes. As model and goal, it signies anti-spirit, lie and bestiality, only as recognized does it become the impulse of existence to peace (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1984: 292 [1973: 254]), history appears in the light of nature a nature that is divided, like reason, in such a fashion that nature is called upon to rescue us from nature. If the idea of natural history is central to the German idea of history, it is not least because of Kants dual legacy. On the one hand, his division between pure and practical reason, nature and freedom, sums up enlightenment thought and denes the problem and the challenge to post-Kantian philosophy. On the other hand, his third Critique, in seeking to bridge the gap between nature and freedom, becomes the bridge between the enlightenment and romanticism. The outcome of Kants dual legacy is a fourfold conception of nature: (1) nature as the object of possible experience, the object of science; (2) teleological nature, the organism which exceeds the capacity of the understanding, to which we must add nature in its two aesthetic manifestations; (3) beautiful nature, i.e. the natural beauty of living form; and (4) sublime, destructive nature. The philosophy of nature and the philosophy of art, developed in the Critique of Judgment, meet in the idea of beauty to give what Otto Marquard calls romantic nature. Marquard proposes an illuminating distinction between three conceptions of nature central to modernity: control nature is nature as understood by the new science; romantic nature is the aesthetic nature of romanticisms project of undoing the enlightenments denaturalization of man and disenchantment of nature; drive nature stands for the Hobbesian civil war of all against all, that is to say, the natural history uncovered by the death of god in the modern period, pregured in the English Revolution and fully manifested in the French Revolution (Marquard, 1987: 547). Now the key point of Marquards argument is that both control nature and romantic nature have the primary function of defending us from the threat of drive nature. Each

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denes, in opposite ways, the relation between nature and history in the paradoxical terms of nature against nature: control nature, i.e. tamed, objectied, civilized nature, against threatening nature; and romantic nature, i.e. creative nature, against destructive nature. What is Schillers answer to the terrifying nature of man revealed by the French Revolution? Beautiful nature. It is clear that control nature and romantic nature, precisely by virtue of their defensive function, contain a dialectic. In Horkheimer and Adornos naturalhistorical deduction: the control nature of self-preservation and instrumental reason is only the other face of drive nature, which leaves romantic nature the song of the Sirens preserved in art the impotent witness of the always already completed negative short-circuit of nature and history. Romantic nature is entrusted with the mythical image of the identity of origin and goal. The romantic nature of romantic Idealism is conceived as this identity of origin and goal, it represents the positive short-circuit of nature and history in the Absolute. Art advances with Schelling to the organon of philosophy because it is living form, sensuous manifestation of the innite in the nite and aesthetic pledge of the synthesis of nature and history, to be sealed by the new mythology, the mythology of reason which will be the last and greatest deed of mankind. The romantic synthesis embodies not only the synthesis of nature and history, but equally of philosophy and history. Philosophy nds its historical fullment, and history its philosophical fullment in the union of Greek nature and Christian history. The new mythology stands as the symbol not the allegory of the dialectical completion of history, in which a self-alienated modernity comes to fullment and redemption. The new mythology thus symbolizes the completion of the allegorical odyssey through which philosophy returns to the ocean of poetry, in which poetry, philosophy and myth are once again one (Schelling). Origin is the goal, but it is attained in the dialectical version through the unfolding of human history. The new mythology of Friedrich Schlegel or of Schelling is carried by the idea of the reconciliation of modernity. Heideggers more original repetition of the origin also envisages the completion of history but now as the decline of the west, the inescapable theme of the 1920s, which clears the way for the new beginning, for Germanys GreekGerman mission. Heideggers repetition reverses the telos of dialectical history. Modernity can be neither completed nor rescued, it must be overcome and this demands the liberating of the greatness and power of the origin the Greek conception of physis from its denaturalization in the second nature of its Roman, Christian and modern scientic translations. The task of Heideggers history of philosophy is to undo dialectics philosophy of history. Heideggers own philosophy of history is thus accomplished by the ungrounding of metaphysics in order to lay bare its abyssal ground in original history. Looking back in the light of the sun setting over the Abendland, the land of evening, the evening which conceals the coming dawn, Heidegger constructs his allegory of the west as the story of the forgetting of Being. The driving force of this history springs from the imperative to repeat the beginning, to bring back an original revelation of Being, in which philosophy and poetry will be reunited

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in a new mythology, whose prophets are Heidegger, the poetic thinker, and Hlderlin, the philosophical poet. The most concise presentation of the history of Being, the hidden essential history of the Occident, is to be found in Heideggers lectures on Parmenides, given in the winter semester 19423. Occidental history can be summed up under the three titles: Being and Word; Being and Ratio; Being and Time. In the Greek beginning Being reveals itself through the mythopoietic word, which is transformed by Plato and Aristotle into logos, thereby inaugurating the history of metaphysics, in which logos becomes ratio. The break with this history is announced in Being and Time: time points to the more original origin, that is to say, the origin of the Greek origin. As the primordial ground of the world, time announces the more original beginning, destined for the Occident, the event and advent (Ereignis) which can occur only in an occidental-historical people of poets and thinkers. The German people thus incorporate the site of the destiny of the Occident, which holds concealed a world fate. Heidegger is speaking in the shadow of Stalingrad. Even if victory is denied us, he declares, the people of the poets and thinkers has already conquered because it is invincible (Heidegger, 1982: 11314). Being and time, nature and history meet in the Ereignis. Heideggers conception of history, his version of Naturgeschichte, is that of the eschatology of Being. The god of this eschatology is the god of time: Kronos, Heraclitus World Time and Hlderlins Lord of Time (Herr der Zeit, Empedokles). Time reveals Being as the temporality, the transience which transmutes, as in Adornos Idea of Natural History, history into nature and nature into history. And just as Adornos allegory of fallen nature and fallen history is framed by mythical remembrance, so Heideggers allegory of Seinsvergessenheit is framed by the myth of origin. The genealogy of Germanys more original repetition, of its new/old mythology, is traced by Heidegger in his Hlderlin lectures of 19345. It runs from Heraclitus via Meister Eckhart to Hlderlin, Hegel and Nietzsche. In the beginning is Heraclitus World Time (Fragment 52): World Time it is a child, a playing child, moving the pieces here and there, [such] a child is master [over Being]. Heidegger comments: original history is the great game that the gods play with peoples and with a people. The great times of World Time are the great times of world-historical turning, the advent in which the earth becomes home and opens itself to the power of the gods. Both are the same and include in themselves the third: that the earth stands in the storm of the divine and is torn open in its foundations and abysses [Grnde und Abgrnde]. The great times of turning of peoples come from the abyss, and to the degree that a people reaches down into it, that is, its earth and possesses home (Heidegger, 1980: 1056). In the beginning the divine lightning strikes and opens the earth to history. The originary leap (Ursprung) of the work of art holds fast this strife of the earth and the world, of nature and history, of the old and the new gods, and it is the thinking of this original strife which Hlderlin has bequeathed to the Germans as the essential opposition within and between Greek and German Dasein. The most familiar expression of this essential opposition is that symbolized by Apollo and Dionysus. Reframed in Nietzschean terms, Hlderlins

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thinking of the essential opposition within and between Greece and Germany can be formulated in the following way: Greece achieved its identity through the Apollonian mastering of the Dionysian; Germany, the west, will attain its identity when its occidental Apollonian endowment of order and organization is infused with Dionysian power, when as Heidegger puts it, it is seized by Being (Heidegger, 1980: 29092). To put this opposition in the sharpest form: if the Greek mission was to transform nature into history, the German mission is to transform history the exhausted history of the rst beginning back into nature in order to inaugurate the new beginning. And this mythical refoundation of history in nature, in the abyss of the native earth, will be one with Germanys nativity. Germany will give birth to the coming god, Dionysus, and the coming god, the seizure by Being, will give birth to Germany. Heidegger thus situates himself in the hour of Germanys destiny, the great time of the world-historical turning of the Occident, in the tradition of the new mythology, which reaches from the French Revolution to the German Revolution, and in which Germanys birth, identity and mission are conceptualized in terms of a twofold struggle with antiquity and modernity. Out of this twofold struggle between Greek nature and art and modern history springs the quest for the aesthetic state (Chytry, 1989): the coming god of the new mythology is also the god of the aesthetic state, the total work of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) which will redeem modernity through the union of nature and history. Thus at each stage of Franco-German history between 1789 and 1933 the coming birth of Germany is announced. This is the response of Schiller, Hlderlin, Schelling and Friedrich Schlegel to the French Revolution, of Heine to the July 1830 revolution in Paris, of Wagner to 18489 (Art and Revolution), of Nietzsche to the Franco-Prussian war of 18701 (Birth of Tragedy), of Jnger to the First World War. As the title of Jngers most famous book, Storms of Steel, indicates, the Great War is experienced as the sublime Dionysian return of history to nature from which the new man, the mythical gure of the Worker, is born. Jngers The Worker projects the coming military state as a total work of art, imbued with the spirit of Nietzsches great style, and dedicated to the cult of power and death a vision which nds its appropriate cultic representation in Riefenstahls Triumph of the Will. After 1934 Heidegger draws back from his fascination with Nietzsche and Jnger and his own proclamation of the triumph of the will in his Rectoral Address. He returns to Hlderlin and Germanys GreekGerman mission and presents his version of the aesthetic state in The Origin of the Work of Art. Heideggers return to Hlderlin resumes the whole tradition of the new mythology, conrming its genetic continuity: Hlderlin remains Germanys most future poet because Germany has still not been born. At the same time, Heideggers repetition of Germanys future past, predicated on his conception of an original history and an original temporality, underwrites the fateful dialectic of this tradition, which Ernst Bloch at this same historical moment dened as Germanys non-contemporaneity (Bloch, 1962). We can read Blochs famous formula of non-synchronicity as the formula of the non-identity of a Germany, which because it lacks a national culture is neither classical nor modern but romantic. Romantic Germany in search of

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its identity must dene itself against the enlightenment and against the French Revolution, and up to 1848 we can say to simplify that it does this dialectically. The idea of a new mythology, of a mythology of reason, answers the crisis of the French Revolution with the vision of the aesthetic reconciliation of modernity. The fateful break occurs after the failure of the 1848 revolution to emancipate and to unify Germany. The dialectical response, directed to making Germany the contemporary of the west, collapses and brings to the fore the dialectic of romanticism contained in latent form in the new mythology. The idea of the dialectical completion of modernity gives way to the will to overcome modernity. Its anti-dialectical formula, the negation of the dialectic of enlightenment, is summed up in Nietzsches radical opposition in The Birth of Tragedy of myth and enlightenment. The mythology of reason of The Oldest System Programme reverses into the will to myth. Heideggers repetition of Hlderlin is also the repetition of Nietzsche. Heideggers whole conception of the temporal structure of repetition, disclosed by decision, and thus his conception of history, is expressly linked in Being and Time to the second of Nietzsches untimely meditations on the uses and abuses of history. From Nietzsche on, the new mythology becomes the untimely refusal of the vulgar time of modernitys progress, to which Heidegger opposes the eschatological time of decision, the great time of history. Nietzsche can thus be seen as the prophetic turning point, in which the very possibility of the sublation of the dialectic of enlightenment, and with it modernity, is negated. II. THE ORIGIN OF THE WORK OF ART Heideggers Origin of the Work of Art is a last emphatic assertion of the idea of a new mythology, mediated through Nietzsche. Heideggers origin responds to Nietzsches birth of tragedy. Each announces the return of myth, the completion of the wests trajectory from myth to logos to myth, that is to say, the transformation of the romantic mythology of reason into the founding onto-poetic powers of myth against a nihilistic enlightenment. Equally, however, we can grasp Adornos Idea of Natural History as a negative completion of the romantic vision of a synthesis of nature and history, myth and reason. Dialectical synthesis ends in the intractable entwinement of a nature which is historical and a human history entrapped in nature. This entwinement of myth and enlightenment forbids the temptation of any simple postmythical opposition of myth and enlightenment. Rather, as we have seen, nature, history, myth and enlightenment are divided dialectically: they bear witness in their fallen state to the lost origin and goal. In this sense we can speak in relation to Heidegger and Adorno of a second romanticism, which responds like the rst to the perceived crisis of modernity but is separated from it by Nietzsche and his diagnosis of nihilism and the death of god. Integral to this second romanticism, which embraces Lukcs, Benjamin, Adorno and Heidegger, is the whole complex of natural history, historicity, transience and the thrownness of Dasein: the comprehension of the present as the world of

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fallen nature provided the fertile ground for the reactivation of romanticisms new mythology. The death of god points to the coming god, whether it be communism with Lukcs, National Socialism with Heidegger, or Benjamins marriage of messianism and historical materialism in the 1930s. Adorno alone resisted the political leap of faith and remained faithful to what Lukcs was later to call the ideology of modernism (Lukcs, 1963). Lukcs account of the ideology of modernism, for all its own ideology of realism, is interesting in two respects. First, because his own early writing stands silently accused. The Theory of the Novel already articulates the mood of religious atheism which he identies as central to modernism. Second, Lukcs key witnesses for the ideology of modernism are Heidegger and Benjamin. If religious atheism shows that the desire for salvation lives on with undiminished force in a world without God, the only transcendence left is that cast on history reduced to nature: The only purpose of transcendence the intangible nichtendes Nichts is to reveal the facies hippocritica of the world (Lukcs, 1963: 445). The world delineated by the sign language of transience is that of allegory, which destroys history and aesthetics (Lukcs, 1963: 36). It is only appropriate that Lukcs denes modernism in terms of the negative congruence between art and history, since it reveals his own position of realism, with its assumption of an objective teleology of history, as the positive reversal of the negative congruence of the novel form and the age of complete sinfulness depicted in The Theory of the Novel. The death of god divides the romantic critique of modernity into negative and positive epiphanies: the god of religious atheism, the atheos absconditus of allegory, stands opposed to the real presence manifested in symbolic realism. This theological structure, preserved in Lukcs critique, makes The Theory of the Novel an essential link between German romanticism and the second romanticism of Weimar modernism. The new mythology of the romantics already presupposed the disenchantment of the world: the alienation and atomism of competitive society, the naturalism of atheistic materialism, the clockwork universe of mechanics. Precisely as a new mythology, it is of necessity a religion of the death of God and the coming god, and it is this same divided theology and eschatology of history which informs The Theory of the Novel. Lukcs early masterpiece shares with Fichte and Wagner the view of modernity as the age of absolute sinfulness and egoism. And, as with Friedrich Schlegel, irony is elevated to the negative mysticism of a godforsaken age, since it expresses the profound certainty, expressible only in artistic creation, of having really attained, perceived and grasped, in this renunciation and impotence of knowledge, the ultimately real, the true substance, the God present and inexistent (Lukcs, 1971a: 71). But just as irony and allegory bear negative witness to the mystical dialectic of past and coming gods, so the novel in the truth of its form remains faithful in its normative incompletion to the epic longing for totality. Thus when Lukcs anticipates the birth of a new epic he repeats Schellings expectation at the end of his Philosophy of Art of a new Homer as the completion of the modern age and foreshadows Heideggers invocation of a more original beginning. Just as Hlderlin pregures for

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Heidegger the return of the gods, so Dostoevsky for Lukcs announces the lux ex oriente, the harbinger of authentic community beyond alienation. Between origin and goal, The Theory of the Novel anticipates in its eschatological structure the ideology of Weimar modernism, whose essence for Lukcs is captured in Benjamins The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1926) and Heideggers Being and Time (1927), reformulated, as we have seen, in Adornos Idea of Natural History. The genealogy of modernism reaches from Pascals deus absconditus and baroque allegory via romantic irony and Kierkegaard to Heideggers fundamental ontology, in which Dasein is dened and traversed by death in the same fashion as Benjamins allegorical landscape of natural history. The redemptive other of the fallen world is present in its absence, the absence, which points not only beyond modernism to the return of the epic but also to the completion of the via negativa of modernism. When Lukcs writes that the immanence of meaning demanded by form is to be achieved precisely by going to the end ruthlessly, in the laying bare of its absence (Lukcs, 1971: 62), he is formulating the programme of Benjamins baroque allegory, of Adornos philosophy of new music and Goldmanns analysis of Racinian tragedy. But of our modernists, it is Adorno alone who remains faithful to the ideology of modernism, that is to say, to the demands of arts formal immanence and of philosophys task as the presentation of ideas, as it is expounded in Benjamins Erkenntniskritische Vorrede to The Origin of German Tragic Drama, where truth appears as the content of beauty, the content released by the self-conagration of the work through which its form attains the full intensity of illumination. If this via negativa signies for Adorno that modernism in the quest for illumination must renounce the aesthetic ideal, the semblance, the Schein of the organic work, indeed in this sense go beyond aesthetics, at the same time it also meant that Adorno set himself against the overcoming of aesthetic modernism, articulated in very different ways by Lukcs, Benjamin and Heidegger and yet all springing from the same eschatological ferment of European crisis. Lukcs return to Weimar classicism in the 1930s as the answer to the second romanticism of Weimar modernism held of course no attractions for Adorno. It denied the very genealogy of modernism in its illusory proclamation of the restitution of the organic work of art. But neither could Adorno accept the destruction of the work of art and its aura, welcomed by Benjamin in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, not its very antithesis in Heideggers The Origin of the Work of Art. Neither Benjamins faith in the power of enlightenment beyond aesthetics nor Heideggers faith in the power of myth prior to aesthetics confronted their own dialectic. The politicization of aesthetics, espoused by Benjamin, remained blind to the dialectic of enlightenment. Mechanical reproduction heralded neither the emancipation of art from mythical servitude nor its necessary sacrice to emancipatory ends but rather the means to its nal instrumentalization the reproduction of the eternally same in the culture industry. Equally, however, Heideggers aestheticization of politics is blind to the dialectic of romanticism, the fatal embrace of the circulus vitiosus deus, the modern antimodern dream of community and myth joined in creation. While Heidegger

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proposes the remythologization of art, Benjamin sees the destruction of aura as the key to the demythologization of art. Both, however, responding to political pressure of the 1930s, comprehend art in relation to the people: the national community united by language in Heideggers case, the proletarian masses, to be brought to the consciousness of their class unity, in Benjamins case. Between the mass art of mass society and the mythical art of the community, between historical goal and historical origin, Adornos modernism appears as that of an art created for a non-existent community, as art in exile, the exile of religious atheism, condemned in Lukcs words to laying bare through its form the absence of meaning. This laying bare of the absence of meaning the path of disenchantment and demythologization represents for Adorno the via negativa which alone keeps faith with the mythical promise of art, with the remembrance of the lost origin and the goal of reconciled nature. To keep faith with the absent origin, which is at the same time the origin of the modern work of art without community, means keeping faith with the Benjamin of The Origin of German Tragic Drama and not the Benjamin of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. It means the demythologization demanded by the process of enlightenment but also the counter-movement of mythic remembrance, that is to say, a dialectic beyond the dialectic of enlightenment, which testies to the entwinement of myth and enlightenment in natural history while yet exceeding it. The Origin of German Tragic Drama and The Origin of the Work of Art present in the sharpest form the two opposed sides of arts relation to myth, language and history: the world of fallen nature as against the opening of the space-time of original history, the sign language of allegory as the gure of fall and redemption as against the founding mythical word which makes language the house of Being and the dwelling place of the gods. But whether exile from paradise in the disenchanted world of natural history or poetic dwelling in the reborn Greek cosmos, in each case origin is the goal. Origin for Heidegger and Benjamin is a historical not a logical category. As such it unites uniqueness and repetition (Benjamin, 1991: 226 [1977: 46]), the contradiction embodied in Heideggers call for a more original repetition of the Greek origin of western history. Origin presents itself as the restoration of that which remains unaccomplished, since repetition is the bringing back (Wieder-holung) of an unrealized future past. Heideggers original temporality, which joins through repetition past and future, nds its parallel in Benjamins understanding of the historicity of original phenomena, which contain within themselves their pre-history and post-history, revealed in the light of the idea of origin as the natural history which has come to completion and rest (Benjamin, 1991: 227 [1977: 478]). Benjamins origin springs from and at the same time transmutes the stream of becoming and passing away of natural history, just as for Heidegger origin springs from Hlderlins Werden im Vergehen to give form and shape to the ux of natural history. Thus, origin the encounter between the ideas and phenomena (Benjamin), between Being and history (Heidegger) signies the totality given form: the Gestalt of the work of art which inaugurates a world with Heidegger, the Gestalt of the original

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phenomenon through which the idea attains historical expression with Benjamin. Nevertheless, these correspondences, which derive from a common horizon of eschatological thinking, in no way diminish the opposed conceptions of origin. If for both the work of art represents the archetype of truth, with Heidegger it is because the work of art constitutes the origin of history, of the historical Dasein of a people, with Benjamin it is because the work of art contains the history of origin. Each historical individuation of the ideas gives a monadic image of the world, a fragment of revelation, which carries with it its own temporal (eschatological) structure of immemorial past and utopian anticipation (Moses, 1988). This double concept of origin eschatological and historical is taken over by Adorno and plays a central role in his Aesthetic Theory. The monadic work of art partakes of origin in two respects: historically, it captures the movement of the epoch in a crystallized image the dialectic at a standstill (Benjamin); eschatologically, it evokes the immemorial remembrance of that which is not but which comes to appearance as utopian promise, what Adorno calls the natural beauty (das Naturschne) which can appear only in art. Like Benjamins original phenomenon, the authentic work of art for Adorno is open to two readings: on the one hand it is the fragment, the ruin of a lost meaning and of catastrophic history, on the other, it is the sole bearer of the promise of reconciliation. And what unites these two perspectives is paradoxically the dialectic of enlightenment: in other words, the path of demythologization, driven by the taboo on regression, which forbids the surrender to the song of the Sirens or Heideggers embrace of mythical origin. Adorno accuses Heidegger in Negative Dialektik of succumbing to regression (Adorno, 1966: 11112) and insists in his counterinterpretation of Hlderlin that Hlderlins sacred words are not founding and grounding symbols but ciphers of the other (Adorno, 1974). Adornos demythologization of art, as against Heideggers remythologization, follows the path indicated, as we have seen, by Lukcs in The Theory of the Novel. But it is also Lukcs who points to the conclusion of this path when he speaks, with reference to Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus and Adornos Philosophy of the New Music, of the tragedy of modern art (Lukcs, 1964). In his Epilogue to The Origin of the Work of Art Heidegger poses the question of the possibility of great art against the closure of Hegels Aesthetics. Origin, the more original repetition of the Greek beginning, both conrms and answers Hegels verdict on the fate of art in modernity. By contrast, Adorno, the modernist par excellence, remains within the horizon of Hegels verdict. The new music poses in fact the question of the end of art, but in the double meaning of the word end. Lukcs rightly speaks of the tragedy of modern art, since the new music of Schnberg and his school enacts and exemplies the terminal logic of the dialectic of enlightenment. Here it is important to remember that Philosophy of the New Music is identied as an excursus to Dialectic of Enlightenment. This very terminal process, which seals the fate of the whole tradition of western music, also points beyond the dialectic to what lies on the other side of the western tradition and the sphere of aesthetics. As the quotation from The Origin of German Tragic Drama at the beginning of the Introduction to Philosophy of the New Music indicates, Adornos enquiry

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stands under the sign of Benjamins science of origin (Wissenschaft des Ursprungs) through which the epochal conguration of the idea is to be revealed in its totality through the opposed extremes of Schnberg and Stravinsky. Historical origin communicates at the same time with eschatology, with the rst and last things. In the closing pages of Schnberg or Progress Adorno writes that the origin and end of music reach beyond the realm of intentions, meaning and subjectivity. The end of music thus reveals the two faces of natural history. The progress of music, which reaches its conclusion in Schnbergs 12-tone system, is to be understood as the progress of the domination of nature, that is, the progressive rationalization and subjectication of the musical material, whose goal is the subjection of nature to human purposes and the emancipation of music as spirit from all organic residues. The rational organization and integration of the material can promise freedom, however, only as long as it is confronted with the resistance of the musical material. But once this resistance is mastered and this is the case with the 12-tone system then total enlightenment reverses into the iron cage of total construction, that is, into a second blind nature. The fate of enlightened music is one with the fate of modernity enslaved by the compulsion to domination: musical history reverts to the stasis of the mythical bondage to nature. But by the same notion, the end of history signies the end of progress, that is to say, the end of what Adorno calls the compulsions of the dialectic, the imprisonment of history in the realm of intentions, meaning and subjectivity, whose other would be the nature we no longer seek to master, that is to say, music which no longer strives to imitate fate, a music which nds the way to a demythologization beyond the dialectic of enlightenment, a demythologization whose mythical name beyond myth is reconciliation. It is this breaking free from the logic of aesthetic necessity and progress which Adorno sees as the innermost tendency of the late Schnberg, who has abandoned the prison of aesthetic autonomy by transforming the fragmentary work from appearance (Schein) into knowledge. By renouncing aesthetic necessity, Schnberg opens music to the negative dialectic beyond the dialectic of enlightenment. In assuming the darkness and guilt of the world, nature returns untransgured as suffering and music as lament keeps faith with utopia. Both Heideggers origin of the work of art and Adornos end of music, which communicates with the origin, are attempts to escape the vulgar time of progress, of a modernity dened by the will to power and by the forgetting of nature/Being. Their discontent with civilization drives them to a critique of civilization which in its totalizing impulse is itself suspiciously totalitarian. Desperate responses to desperate times, their denunciations of modernity as nihilism register the end of history. Or, as Marquard observes, instead of comprehending history, Heidegger unmasks metaphysics failure, and Adorno philosophy of historys failure to comprehend history (Marquard, 1987: 357). In this sense they mark terminal points in the German metadiscourse of modernity. The reconciliation of nature and history of which the romantics dreamed ends in the total ambivalence of natural history or the history of Being. Of the romantic dream there remains only its echo in the

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convergence of philosophy and art sought by Heidegger and Adorno in their thinking of origin and end. Hlderlin, the philosophical poet, who opened the way, and Heidegger, the poetic thinker, nd their counterpart in the dialectic composer Schnberg, who transformed music into knowledge, and the dialectical thinker Adorno, for whom theory became aesthetic.
David Roberts is an editor of Thesis Eleven. He is currently working on concepts of nature, origin and myth in romanticism. Address: Department of German Studies, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria 3168, Australia. [email: david.roberts@bigpond.com]

References
Adorno, Theodor (1966) Negative Dialektik. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor (1973a) Die Idee der Naturgeschichte, in Philosophische Frhschriften. Gesammelte Schriften I. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1973b) Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Allen Lane. Adorno, Theodor (1974) Parataxis. Zur spten Lyrik Hlderlins, in Noten zur Literatur. Gesammelte Schriften 11. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Adorno, Theodor and Horkheimer, Max (1984) Dialektik der Aufklrung. Gesammelte Schriften 3. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Benjamin, Walter (1977) The Origin of German Tragic Drama. London: NLB. Benjamin, Walter (1991) Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels. Gesammelte Schriften I/1. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bloch, Ernst (1962) Erbschaft dieser Zeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Chytry, Joseph (1989) The Aesthetic State. A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press. Heidegger, Martin (1977) Sein und Zeit. Gesamtausgabe 2. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1980) Hlderlins Hymnen Germanien und Der Rhein. Gesamtausgabe 39. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1982) Parmenides. Gesamtausgabe 54. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1983) Einfhrung in die Metaphysik. Gesamtausgabe 40. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1996) Being and Time. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Lukcs, Georg (1963) The Ideology of Modernism, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism. London: Merlin. Lukcs, Georg (1964) Die Tragdie der modernen Kunst, in Deutsche Literatur in zwei Jahrhunderten. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Lukcs, Georg (1971a) Die Theorie des Romans. Neuwied: Luchterhand. Lukcs, Georg (1971b) Theory of the Novel. London: Merlin. Marquard, Odo (1987) Transzendentaler Idealismus. Romantische Naturphilosophie. Psychoanalyse. Cologne: Dinter. Moses, Stphane (1988) Le paradigme esthtique de lhistoire chez Walter Benjamin, in Grard Raulet and Josef Frnks (eds) Weimar. Le tournant esthtique. Paris: Anthropos. Noerr, Gunzelin Schmid (1990) Das Eingedenken der Natur im Subjekt. Zur Dialektik von Vernunft und Natur in der kritischen Theorie Horkheimers, Adornos und Marcuses. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft.