In his book "Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy", Andrew Bowie explores the significance of art for contemporary philosophy. Along the way he also provides, as he has in previous books like his Introduction to German Philosophy, many pithy and lucid asides. At one stage he is extolling Adorno's Lectures on Aesthetics (compared with the Aesthetic Theory), and reminds us:
"The reason that aesthetics is so significant in questioning the ends of modern philosophy is that an area of philosophy concerned with subjective responses to the natural and cultural worlds necessarily involves a kind of objectivity which differs from that present in warranted scientific knowledge.
If culture were supposedly about what gives subjective pleasure to individual human organisms, and what gave pleasure to each organism was radically particular to that organism, there would be no such thing as culture anyway." (p.140)
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