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The main purpose of this paper is to clarify the category of the aesthetic in context of Adorno’s critique of the philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard. Adorno’s principal thesis is that Kierkegaard’s famous doctrine of existence and his individualism contain an implicit ontology, despite the fact that he intends to overcome objective ontology of absolute idealism. However, this reversal is hidden from Kierkegaard, and can only be deciphered in the posthumous history of his work. Adorno’s method is critique of ideology synthetised with Benjamin’s rather esoteric theory of allegory. His intent is twofold: not only to expose the abstract character of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of “objectless” inwardness, but to decipher an implicit historical truth of his philosophy, the social relations of bourgeois society. In the course of his argument, Adorno shows that Kierkegaard’s philosophy comes closest to its truth not in the realm of religious experience and faith, as Kierkegaard himself believed, but in the sphere of melancholy and aesthetic semblance. The category of the aesthetic plays an important role in Adorno’s later philosophy of art, as well as his critique of knowledge in general.

Summary The aim of this paper is to provide an examination of the concept of aesthetic rationality in the philosophy of art of Theodor W. Adorno, related to his celebrated critique of the enlightenment in The Dialectic of the Enlightenment written with Max Horkheimer. Our main purpose is to show how Adorno’s conception of art responds to a problem posed in the former study, namely that of a dialectical self-enchantment and alienation of subjective reason. In the first two sections is shown how self-preservation of subjective reason leads to its fall into the realm of myth. This turn was dialectically exposed in Adorno’s interpretation of Odysseus’ voyage as prahistory of subjectivity. The next four chapters expose a necessity and mode of critical approach and possibility of a transcendence of this mythical reality of reification in the structure of works of art, especially their form, with its ultimate goal to free individuals from social injustice and unconscious enslavement. Adorno’s account of the dialectics of aesthetic semblance, artistic truth content and immanent law of its form which embodies the consciousness of non-identity provides an ex­planation how modern art mimetically manages to transcend conditions of empirical reality and at the same time offers a plausible model of a “transitive“ rationality, which serves to discover its better possibilities.