Paying attention to responses to culture and nature

"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 if objectivity which differs from that present in warranted scientific knowledge."

Andrew Bowie, "Adorno and the Ends of Philosophy", 2013, Cambridge, Polity

"Explanation has the moment of reducing what is unknown to what is familiar, of translating unfamiliar elements into thoughts, experiences, states of affairs, which are already present to one.
But art gravitates towards what is not known, what does not yet exist. What has not yet been subsumed, what was previously not there emerges precisely in works of art as their content."

Theodor Adorno, "Lectures on Aesthetics", 1973 (quoted in the above book, p.145)