Art as Critical Experience in Theodor W. Adorno and John Dewey.

The article focuses on the comparative analysis of aesthetic experience in the philosophies of Theodor W. Adorno and John Dewey, situating their thought within the legacy of German aesthetics after Kant, Schiller, and Hegel. It explores how both thinkers critique the subsumption of art by philosophy and emphasize aesthetic experience as a distinct, sensuous, and critical form of engagement with the world, though they diverge in their views on art’s relation to everyday experience and conceptual mediation. Adorno’s aesthetics is marked by a dialectical tension between art’s autonomy and its critical negativity, often highlighting modernist art’s rupture with social reality, while Dewey’s pragmatism stresses art’s continuity with experience and its democratic, integrative potential. The article also addresses historical misunderstandings of Dewey’s pragmatism by Frankfurt School thinkers, particularly Max Horkheimer, and argues for a nuanced dialogue between Adorno’s critical theory and Deweyan pragmatism, especially regarding the role of experimentation, risk, and the open-endedness of philosophical inquiry and aesthetic experience.