Theodor W. Adorno thinks the social mediacy of art as an interruption of its solipsistic self-deceit, which consists in its existing entirely for itself. Society transcends the immanentism of the work, prevents it. Immanentism would here be synonymous with autonomy, society one name of the heteronomous that has a priori inscribed itself upon the artistic illusion of autonomy in order to identify it as illusory. At the same time, the work of art can be described as heteronomous, as incommensurable with the homogeneous commensurabilities that constitute the universe of social fact. Adorno’s aesthetic theory thinks the work of art as the scene of a contentious mediation between society and art or immanence and transcendence. Art can go beyond itself only by going within, where it encounters “its latent social content.” To “go within in order to go beyond itself”: that is, or ought to be, what art accomplishes. This may mean, first, to come upon a transcendence in immanence that is implicit to it; it may mean, second, to sense, in the pure and ostensibly untouched within—which marks an intrinsic transcendence, an unworldly interiority—the originary impact of the social without. The difference between immanence and transcendence may also be reflected in the distinction between nature and culture and the tension between natural and artistic beauty. Once we begin to resolve this tension in favor of one of its two poles we betray both, for they are what they are only out of, and in, this tension. Enlightened thinking begins with the refusal to evade the irreducible conflict between nature and culture, between the first and the second. Taken by themselves, first nature and second nature are illusions. Substituting for the phantasm of unmediated nature the ideology of consistent culture can only be an expression of thinking denied. In an essay written in 1968, Adorno addressed this denial under the name of a second naïveté: “There exists today a sort of second naïveté among artists, not just the first one, the sort of instinct rooted in nature many praise (they are wrong), but also a second one that suggests to the artist that the reified, commodified business under whose yoke he labors, God-given, is an absolute. That is the naïveté of him who, without much reflection, obeys the imperatives of the art business.” Transcendence can be synonymous with resistance. Instead of bowing to the structure of immanence that is established reality, the universe of fact, the business of facts, art implies resistance against what is given in order to appeal to an unthought. At least two ideologies need to be rebutted: on the one hand, the naturalist ideology, the phantasm of authenticity and purity, which cleaves to the cult of immediacy and the belief in the unmediated; on the other hand, the masochistic submission to fact. The masochist to fact is a subject that resembles Nietzsche’s last man; his disappointment becomes absolute; it is, to him, religion after religion, a substitute for belief in which he invests his libido. The gesture of Adorno’s thinking is always this double gesture, rejecting simple realism and simple idealism in favor of expanded concepts of both realism and idealism, in the name of what he gives us to think as an implicit incommensurability, in favor of a being that “amounts to more than what is, to more than the empirical.” For “what is essential to art is that which in it is not the case, that which is incommensurable with the empirical measure of all things,” as it marks the introjection of the new into the familiar, as an invention amid what already is, creative: “art is actually the world once over, as like it as it is unlike it.” Adorno uses the Wittgensteinian trope of what is the case to determine the already determined, which he associates with the immanence of culture, i.e., what already exists. The back to nature (or to the original rule of phusis) obfuscates nature’s mediacy. It befits the pathos of any ontology (Adorno, of course, is thinking first and foremost of Heidegger) that aims at the “subject area of the pure,” at the immediate that functions at the center of any ideological construction as its stabilizer. Against it we must insist on the mediacy of the natural: “In the universally mediated world everything experienced in primary terms is culturally preformed. Whoever wants the other has to start with the immanence of culture, in order to break out through it.” Such breaking out is what art and philosophy have in common. Both art and philosophy are about being taken in neither by naturalist purism nor by the no less ideological culturalism as they do not cease to drill holes into the immanence of what already exists.