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ART AND MYTH:

ADORNO AND HEIDEGGER

David Roberts

ABSTRACT The article examines Adorno and Heidegger’s contrasting con-

ceptions 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 Adorno’s lecture ‘The Idea of Natural History’ (1932), which
draws on Lukács’s Theory of the Novel and Benjamin’s The Origin of German
Tragic Drama and is conceived as a response to Heidegger’s 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 enlightenment • history • modernism • myth • nature • roman-
ticism

I. THE IDEA OF NATURAL HISTORY

The entwinement of myth and enlightenment is the theme of
Horkheimer and Adorno’s 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 unified, 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 sacrifice of the past to the future sets in train, however, a

Thesis Eleven, Number 58, August 1999: 19–34

SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Copyright © 1999 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Pty Ltd
[0725-5136(199908)58;19–34;009145]
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20 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

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 art’s echo of the song of the Sirens. Art
thus functions as the impotent promise, the anticipatory allegory of the ful-
filled 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, pro-
totypical 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.
Benjamin’s Angel of History looks backwards. Origin is the goal.
Heidegger’s Being and Time sets out to destroy – destructure and
unground – the metaphysical, scientific and vulgar conception of time as a tem-
poral 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 tem-
porality, 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 Dasein’s
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 defines 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 finitude. 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 filled with historical content in 1933 by
Heidegger’s decision for National Socialism and the German Revolution. We
cannot understand Heidegger’s 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, defined by Heidegger in his ‘Rec-
toral 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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Roberts: Art and Myth 21

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, signifies Heidegger’s entry into the essential time of history. This
time comprises on the one hand the eschatological time of decision, of the
first and the last things, end and beginning, and on the other hand, the myth-
ical time of repetition. The eschatological Second Coming (of the third and
final kingdom) must take the form of the repetition of the first beginning.
Origin thus corresponds with origin. Origin is the goal.
Adorno and Horkheimer’s 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
reflexion from the forgetting of nature in the subject, inscribed in the repres-
sive blindness and violence of enlightenment. Heidegger’s origin inaugurates
by contrast the space-time of history. The Greek beginning remains incom-
parable because it constitutes the original opening of Being, the ‘birth to pres-
ence’ (Nancy) which manifests the mystery of creation, the mystery of the
origin. History does not develop from inconspicuous beginnings. On the con-
trary, all greatness belongs to the beginning and all that follows is decline.
Heidegger therefore insists that the authentic greatness of historical know-
ledge 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: 164–5). This gives us two opposed ver-
sions 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 reflects 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 for-
getting 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
defined 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, Hölderlin 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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22 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

and Adorno’s history of the west and in Heidegger’s history of Being – two
mythical histories, which recount the catastrophic consequences of the for-
getting 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 trans-
lates as ‘Naturgeschichte’, but it conveys none of the resonances and com-
plexities 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 – consti-
tute 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 philo-
sophical 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 antag-
onistic, parallels. The germ of Dialectic of Enlightenment and the defining
theme of Critical Theory are formulated in Adorno’s 1932 lecture. The idea
of natural history developed there is expressly conceived as a response to
Heidegger’s idea of historicity in Sein und Zeit. The parallels are even closer
after 1945. Adorno’s and Heidegger’s histories of the west end in the quiet-
ism 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 Beckett’s endgame, Waiting for Godot.
In ‘The Idea of Natural History’ Adorno defines the task of philosophy
as the overcoming of subjective idealism’s division of the world into nature
and history (spirit). He welcomes Heidegger’s ontological turn in Sein und
Zeit: the bringing together of ontology and historicity in a fundamental ontol-
ogy of Dasein which reveals the basic ontological structure of history. The
price, however, which vitiates Heidegger’s solution to the reconciliation of
nature and history and makes it merely an apparent solution, is the reduction
of history to the structure of Heidegger’s ontology. Ontology alone is insuffici-
ent. What is required is a further step: the ontological reorientation of philos-
ophy of history, which Adorno develops from Lukács’ Theory of the Novel and
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Roberts: Art and Myth 23

Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama. Lukács grasps history as nature:

the reified 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 signifies the interweaving of natural and historical
being in the second nature of the social, whose ‘death’s head’ is the emblem
of allegory. Philosophy’s task can now be understood as allegorical: the
awakening and resurrection of the petrified world through allegorical interpre-
tation, which lays bare the identity of first and second nature, rooted in orig-
inal 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).
Philosophy’s 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. Adorno’s starting point is the definition
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 sub-
jectation to guilt and nature and the element of reconciliation that transcends
the realm of nature’ (Adorno, 1973a: 363 [1984: 123]). Conversely, the histori-
cally 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 reconcili-
ation can be thought of as both the allegory and the myth of natural history.
Adorno’s ontological transformation of philosophy of history into the
idea of dialectical nature substitutes for idealism’s division of the world a
materialism which appeals to concrete history against the tautologies of
Heidegger’s ontology. The allegorical resurrection of the petrified world
declares that ‘second nature, is in truth, first nature’ (Adorno, 1973a: 365
[1984: 124]), but this first 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.
Adorno’s dialectical nature suspends the dialectic of history in the constella-
tions of the ‘dialectical image’ (Benjamin), the constellations which revolve
without resolution around the idea of history and the idea of nature. Adorno’s
‘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 ratification 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 Marx’s programme
of humanizing nature and naturalizing man, and is renewed in Ernst Bloch’s
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24 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

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 Marx’s distinction between the realm of necessity and the
realm of freedom, of prehistory and history. Marx’s 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, especi-
ally after 1848, the scientific-materialist insistence on the economic laws of
motion of modern society. In the Preface to Capital Marx defines his stand-
point 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 Schiller’s Naive
and Sentimental Poetry and the Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man
through to Marcuse’s Essay on Liberation and Adorno’s 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 signifies 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 Kant’s dual legacy. On the one hand, his division
between pure and practical reason, nature and freedom, sums up enlighten-
ment thought and defines 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 Kant’s dual legacy is a four-
fold 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 aes-
thetic 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 concep-
tions of nature central to modernity: control nature is nature as understood
by the new science; romantic nature is the aesthetic nature of romanticism’s
project of undoing the enlightenment’s denaturalization of man and disen-
chantment 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, prefigured in the English Revolution and fully mani-
fested in the French Revolution (Marquard, 1987: 54–7). Now the key point
of Marquard’s 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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Roberts: Art and Myth 25

defines, in opposite ways, the relation between nature and history in the
paradoxical terms of nature against nature: control nature, i.e. tamed, objec-
tified, civilized nature, against threatening nature; and romantic nature, i.e.
creative nature, against destructive nature. What is Schiller’s 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 Adorno’s natural-
historical 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 infinite in the finite
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 great-
est deed of mankind. The romantic synthesis embodies not only the synthe-
sis of nature and history, but equally of philosophy and history. Philosophy
finds its historical fulfilment, and history its philosophical fulfilment 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 fulfilment 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. Heidegger’s
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 Germany’s ‘Greek–German
mission’. Heidegger’s repetition reverses the telos of dialectical history. Mod-
ernity 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 scientific translations. The task of Heidegger’s
history of philosophy is to undo dialectics’ philosophy of history. Heidegger’s
own philosophy of history is thus accomplished by the ungrounding of meta-
physics 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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26 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

in a new mythology, whose prophets are Heidegger, the poetic thinker, and
Hölderlin, the philosophical poet.
The most concise presentation of the history of Being, ‘the hidden
essential history of the Occident’, is to be found in Heidegger’s lectures on
Parmenides, given in the winter semester 1942–3. 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 mythopoi-
etic 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 pri-
mordial 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: 113–14).
Being and time, nature and history meet in the Ereignis. Heidegger’s con-
ception 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 Hölderlin’s Lord of Time (Herr der Zeit, Empedokles). Time reveals
Being as the temporality, the transience which transmutes, as in Adorno’s ‘Idea
of Natural History’, history into nature and nature into history. And just as
Adorno’s allegory of fallen nature and fallen history is framed by mythical
remembrance, so Heidegger’s allegory of Seinsvergessenheit is framed by the
myth of origin. The genealogy of Germany’s more original repetition, of its
new/old mythology, is traced by Heidegger in his Hölderlin lectures of 1934–5.
It runs from Heraclitus via Meister Eckhart to Hölderlin, 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 [Gründe und
Abgründe].’ ‘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 pos-
sesses home’ (Heidegger, 1980: 105–6). 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 Hölderlin 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 symbol-
ized by Apollo and Dionysus. Reframed in Nietzschean terms, Hölderlin’s
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Roberts: Art and Myth 27

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: 290–92). 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 first beginning – back
into nature in order to inaugurate the new beginning. And this mythical refoun-
dation of history in nature, in the abyss of the native earth, will be one with
Germany’s 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 Germany’s destiny, the great time of the
world-historical turning of the Occident, in the tradition of the new mythol-
ogy, which reaches from the French Revolution to the German Revolution,
and in which Germany’s 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, Hölderlin, Schelling
and Friedrich Schlegel to the French Revolution, of Heine to the July 1830
revolution in Paris, of Wagner to 1848–9 (Art and Revolution), of Nietzsche to
the Franco-Prussian war of 1870–1 (Birth of Tragedy), of Jünger to the First
World War. As the title of Jünger’s 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 figure of the Worker, is born.
Jünger’s The Worker projects the coming military state as a total work of art,
imbued with the spirit of Nietzsche’s ‘great style’, and dedicated to the cult of
power and death – a vision which finds its appropriate cultic representation
in Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. After 1934 Heidegger draws back from his
fascination with Nietzsche and Jünger and his own proclamation of the
triumph of the will in his Rectoral Address. He returns to Hölderlin and
Germany’s Greek–German mission and presents his version of the aesthetic
state in The Origin of the Work of Art.
Heidegger’s return to Hölderlin resumes the whole tradition of the new
mythology, confirming its genetic continuity: Hölderlin remains Germany’s
most future poet because Germany has still not been born. At the same
time, Heidegger’s repetition of Germany’s ‘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 defined as Germany’s non-contemporaneity (Bloch, 1962). We
can read Bloch’s 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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28 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

its identity must define itself against the enlightenment and against the French
Revolution, and up to 1848 we can say – to simplify – that it does this dialec-
tically. 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 mythol-
ogy. 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 Nietzsche’s 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.
Heidegger’s repetition of Hölderlin is also the repetition of Nietzsche.
Heidegger’s whole conception of the temporal structure of repetition, dis-
closed by decision, and thus his conception of history, is expressly linked in
Being and Time to the second of Nietzsche’s ‘untimely meditations’ on the
uses and abuses of history. From Nietzsche on, the new mythology becomes
the ‘untimely’ refusal of the vulgar time of modernity’s 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

Heidegger’s Origin of the Work of Art is a last emphatic assertion of the
idea of a new mythology, mediated through Nietzsche. Heidegger’s origin
responds to Nietzsche’s birth of tragedy. Each announces the return of myth,
the completion of the west’s trajectory from myth to logos to myth, that is to
say, the transformation of the romantic mythology of reason into the found-
ing onto-poetic powers of myth against a nihilistic enlightenment. Equally,
however, we can grasp Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural History’ as a negative com-
pletion 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 entwine-
ment of myth and enlightenment forbids the temptation of any simple post-
mythical 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 first 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 Lukács, 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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Roberts: Art and Myth 29

fallen nature provided the fertile ground for the reactivation of romanticism’s
new mythology. The death of god points to the coming god, whether it be
communism with Lukács, National Socialism with Heidegger, or Benjamin’s
marriage of messianism and historical materialism in the 1930s. Adorno alone
resisted the political leap of faith and remained faithful to what Lukács was
later to call the ideology of modernism (Lukács, 1963).
Lukács’ 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 identifies as central to modernism. Second, Lukács’
key witnesses for the ideology of modernism are Heidegger and Benjamin. If
‘religious atheism shows that the desire for salvation lives on with undimin-
ished 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’ (Lukács,
1963: 44–5). The world delineated by the sign language of transience is that of
allegory, which destroys history and aesthetics (Lukács, 1963: 36). It is only
appropriate that Lukács defines modernism in terms of the negative congru-
ence 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 cri-
tique of modernity into negative and positive epiphanies: the god of religious
atheism, the atheos absconditus of allegory, stands opposed to the real pres-
ence manifested in symbolic realism. This theological structure, preserved in
Lukács’ 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 disen-
chantment 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. Lukács’ 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, per-
ceived and grasped, in this renunciation and impotence of knowledge, the
ultimately real, the true substance, the God present and inexistent’ (Lukács,
1971a: 71). But just as irony and allegory bear negative witness to the mys-
tical 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 total-
ity. Thus when Lukács anticipates the birth of a new epic he repeats
Schelling’s expectation at the end of his Philosophy of Art of a new Homer
as the completion of the modern age and foreshadows Heidegger’s invo-
cation of a more original beginning. Just as Hölderlin prefigures for
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30 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

Heidegger the return of the gods, so Dostoevsky for Lukács 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 Lukács is captured in Benjamin’s The Origin of German Tragic Drama
(1926) and Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), reformulated, as we have seen,
in Adorno’s ‘Idea of Natural History’. The genealogy of modernism reaches
from Pascal’s deus absconditus and baroque allegory via romantic irony and
Kierkegaard to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology, in which Dasein is defined
and traversed by death in the same fashion as Benjamin’s 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
Lukács 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’ (Lukács, 1971: 62), he is formulating the programme of Benjamin’s
baroque allegory, of Adorno’s philosophy of new music and Goldmann’s
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 art’s formal immanence and of philosophy’s task as the presentation of
ideas, as it is expounded in Benjamin’s ‘Erkenntniskritische Vorrede’ to The
Origin of German Tragic Drama, where truth appears as the content of beauty,
the content released by the self-conflagration of the work through which its
form attains the full intensity of illumination. If this via negativa signifies for
Adorno that modernism in the quest for illumination must renounce the aes-
thetic 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 Lukács, Benjamin and Heidegger and yet all springing from
the same eschatological ferment of European crisis.
Lukács’ 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 procla-
mation 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 Heidegger’s The Origin of the Work of Art. Neither Benjamin’s
faith in the power of enlightenment beyond aesthetics nor Heidegger’s 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 sacrifice to
emancipatory ends but rather the means to its final instrumentalization – the
reproduction of the eternally same – in the culture industry. Equally,
however, Heidegger’s ‘aestheticization of politics’ is blind to the dialectic of
romanticism, the fatal embrace of the circulus vitiosus deus, the modern anti-
modern dream of community and myth joined in creation. While Heidegger
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Roberts: Art and Myth 31

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 Heidegger’s case, the proletarian
masses, to be brought to the consciousness of their class unity, in Benjamin’s
case. Between the mass art of mass society and the mythical art of the com-
munity, between historical goal and historical origin, Adorno’s modernism
appears as that of an art created for a non-existent community, as art in exile,
the exile of religious atheism, condemned in Lukács’ words to laying bare
through its form the absence of meaning.
This laying bare of the absence of meaning – the path of disenchant-
ment 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 Mechan-
ical 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 testi-
fies 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 art’s 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 figure of
fall and redemption as against the founding mythical word which makes lan-
guage 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 Heidegger’s 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. Heidegger’s ‘original temporal-
ity’, which joins through repetition past and future, finds its parallel in Ben-
jamin’s 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: 47–8]). Benjamin’s 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 Hölderlin’s ‘Werden im Verge-
hen’ to give form and shape to the flux of natural history. Thus, origin – the
encounter between the ideas and phenomena (Benjamin), between Being and
history (Heidegger) – signifies 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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32 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

phenomenon through which the idea attains historical expression with Ben-
jamin. Nevertheless, these correspondences, which derive from a common
horizon of eschatological thinking, in no way diminish the opposed concep-
tions 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: histori-
cally, it captures the movement of the epoch in a crystallized image – the
‘dialectic at a standstill’ (Benjamin); eschatologically, it evokes the immemor-
ial remembrance of that which is not but which comes to appearance as
utopian promise, what Adorno calls the natural beauty (das Naturschöne)
which can appear only in art. Like Benjamin’s 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 Heidegger’s embrace
of mythical origin. Adorno accuses Heidegger in Negative Dialektik of suc-
cumbing to regression (Adorno, 1966: 111–12) and insists in his counter-
interpretation of Hölderlin that Hölderlin’s sacred words are not founding and
grounding symbols but ciphers of the other (Adorno, 1974). Adorno’s
demythologization of art, as against Heidegger’s remythologization, follows the
path indicated, as we have seen, by Lukács in The Theory of the Novel. But it
is also Lukács who points to the conclusion of this path when he speaks, with
reference to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and Adorno’s Philosophy of the
New Music, of the tragedy of modern art (Lukács, 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 Hegel’s Aesthetics.
Origin, the more original repetition of the Greek beginning, both confirms and
answers Hegel’s verdict on the fate of art in modernity. By contrast, Adorno,
the modernist par excellence, remains within the horizon of Hegel’s verdict.
The new music poses in fact the question of the end of art, but in the double
meaning of the word ‘end’. Lukács rightly speaks of the tragedy of modern
art, since the new music of Schönberg and his school enacts and exemplifies
the terminal logic of the dialectic of enlightenment. Here it is important to
remember that Philosophy of the New Music is identified 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, Adorno’s enquiry
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Roberts: Art and Myth 33

stands under the sign of Benjamin’s ‘science of origin’ (Wissenschaft des

Ursprungs) through which the epochal configuration of the idea is to be
revealed in its totality through the opposed extremes of Schönberg and Stravin-
sky. Historical origin communicates at the same time with eschatology, with
the first and last things. In the closing pages of ‘Schönberg 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 Schönberg’s 12-tone
system, is to be understood as the progress of the domination of nature, that
is, the progressive rationalization and subjectification of the musical material,
whose goal is the subjection of nature to human purposes and the emanci-
pation 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 signifies 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 finds the way to a demythol-
ogization 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 inner-
most tendency of the late Schönberg, who has abandoned the prison of aes-
thetic autonomy by transforming the fragmentary work from appearance
(Schein) into knowledge. By renouncing aesthetic necessity, Schönberg
opens music to the negative dialectic beyond the dialectic of enlightenment.
In assuming the ‘darkness and guilt of the world’, nature returns untransfig-
ured as suffering and music as lament keeps faith with utopia.
Both Heidegger’s origin of the work of art and Adorno’s end of music,
which communicates with the origin, are attempts to escape the vulgar time
of progress, of a modernity defined by the will to power and by the forget-
ting of nature/Being. Their ‘discontent with civilization’ drives them to a cri-
tique 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 history’s failure to comprehend history (Marquard,
1987: 35–7). In this sense they mark terminal points in the German meta-
discourse 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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34 Thesis Eleven (Number 58 1999)

convergence of philosophy and art sought by Heidegger and Adorno in their

thinking of origin and end. Hölderlin, the philosophical poet, who ‘opened
the way’, and Heidegger, the poetic thinker, find their counterpart in the
dialectic composer Schönberg, 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]

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