What can Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience offer for the health and medical humanities?

Abstract

The concept of aesthetic experience is essential to understand the ways people interact with, immerse in, and interpret aesthetic objects, such as artworks, literature, or natural beauty. Aesthetic experience is also important within the health and medical humanities in explaining the effects and benefits of engaging with art, but philosophical perspectives on the concept within the field are surprisingly scarce. This article addresses this research gap by delving into one such perspective in the Western philosophical tradition that draws on the aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno. I argue that Adorno’s understanding of aesthetic experience offers valuable support for the critical turn in the health and medical humanities, which seeks to move beyond the clinical encounter toward the broader societal context of health and illness. Adorno’s relevance lies in his vehement argumentation against an instrumentalising understanding of aesthetic experience. According to Adorno, the experiencing subject ought not to be understood simply as someone who judges between good and bad art, beautiful and ugly, or aesthetic and nonaesthetic, because such judgements can ultimately be reduced to arguments about art as having or not having exchange value. Instead, aesthetic experience is something more profound: a mode of knowledge rarely accessible through other means, in which the experiencing subject enters into the artwork and activates its own subjectivity. This argument offers the health and medical humanities insight into how art might be approached in relation to its potentially transformative role in society.