Adorno: The Recovery of Experience (review)

In his Adorno: The Recovery of Experience, Roger Foster confronts two questions at stake in Adorno’s philosophy. First, how does Adorno navigate between what he sees as the twin errors of irrationalism and positivism? Second, how important to Adorno’s philosophy is the famously difficult style in which he presents it? Foster’s answer to each depends on what he calls “spiritual experience,” in which “the multilayered relations of a thing and the other things outside it, and eventually the entirety of its context, are allowed to inform the cognitive signature of that thing” (2). What makes this experience count as cognitive is that it depends on a specific use of concepts that Foster calls “the immanent universal” (3). In contrast to “the classifying function of concepts” (3), the immanently universal concept does not subsume the sensuous particulars under it but, rather, shows through or is expressed in the arrangement of the particulars themselves. The theory of spiritual experience is Foster’s account of Adorno’s alternative to positivism and irrationalism: it is genuinely cognitive, and so governed by rational norms, yet depends on a radically different use of concepts than the classifying function that characterizes scientific rationalism and which dominates cognition generally under conditions of disenchanted modernity. In turn, the immanent universal requires a specific use of language through which the scope of conceptuality is demarcated from within.

In the first chapter, Foster focuses on Adorno’s response to the social conditions of “disenchantment” (10). Adorno brings disenchanted cognition up against its own limits; spiritual experience is felt “negatively,” in our self-consciousness of its absence from modern capitalism. Foster then reconstructs Adorno’s intellectual development through his relations to Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Husserl, Bergson, and Proust. Foster first compares Adorno with the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus period (chapter 2) and Walter Benjamin (chapter 3) as sharing his concern with the limits of language. Foster reads the early Wittgenstein as concerned with a language in which ethics, aesthetics, and religiosity cannot be “said” or communicated. But instead of silence, Adorno wants to make language “stammer” (55, 82); by allowing it to express more than what it can say, disenchanted language reveals its own deficiencies. Adorno finds a model for this in Benjamin’s work on German tragic drama. In the arrangements of “phenomena,” what Benjamin calls “the idea” is not stated but is nevertheless expressed; this proves to be important for how Adorno uses language to express the loss of spiritual experience. (Interestingly, Foster does not mention any relation between this style of writing and the Bildverbot, or prohibition on depictions of God, which was crucial to both Benjamin and Adorno.)

The core of the book is Foster’s careful reading of Adorno’s interpretations and criticisms of Husserl (in chapter 4) and Bergson (in chapter 5). Husserl and Bergson both reject the “scientistic” thesis that cognitive experience must be restricted to “causal-mechanistic thinking” (92). This rejection motivates an “outbreak attempt” (92ff.): a form of cognitive experience distinct from the disenchanted cognition that dominates the natural and social sciences. Husserl’s outbreak attempt lies in his “intuition of essences” (100); the corresponding attempt in Bergson is his theory of durée and “intellectual intuition” (127). Yet neither Husserl nor Bergson reflects on the classifying use of concepts in order to express the loss of spiritual experience under conditions of disenchantment; hence both “outbreak attempts” fail.

Adorno requires a new kind of writing, which Foster locates in Proust (chapter 6). In Search of Lost Time describes the process of discovering and recovering the memory of sensuous particularity in a form that disrupts unreflective habits: “Proust is able to unseal the nonconceptual with concepts, without equating concepts to the nonconceptual” (152; emphasis in the original). Proust’s writing expresses the loss of spiritual experience without pretending to demarcate the space of concepts from the outside. Only writing within the space...