The Medium, the Mystic, and the Physicist: Toward a General Theory of the Paranormal by Lawrence LeShan (review)

Leonardo, Vol. 9, pp. 154-171. Pergamon Press 1976. Printed in Great Britain BOOKS Readers are invited to recommend books to be reviewed. Zit general, only books in English and in French can be reviewed at this stage. Those who would like to be added to Leonardo’s panel of reviewers should write to the Founder-Editor, indicating their particular interests. Negative Dialectics. Theodor W. Adorno. Trans. E. B. Ashton. Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1973. 416 pp. 24.95. Reviewed by John A. Walker* If, like me, you are intrigued by intellectual fashions, then the ever-growing accumulation of articles and books on the work of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and the recurring references to ‘critical theory’ in all sorts of journals will have aroused your curiosity. But, if you have not yet tackled the formidable texts of Horkheimer, Marcuse, Fromm and Adorno, then my attempt to come to grips with Adorno’s book may be of interest. In his introductorynote the translator informs the reader that to appreciate all the allusions of Adorno’s writing one needs ‘to know Kant near-perfectly, Hegel perfectly and Marx-Engels viscerally’ and also to have a working knowledge of Bergson, Husserl, Scheler and Benjamin. At once I admit that I am singularly ill-equipped to understand Adorno (let alone review him), however, since most of the readers of Leonardo are not professional philosophers, a layman’s response may be of value. The writings of the Frankfurt School are of particular interest to the art community because, besides philosophical and political issues, they address themselves to questions of aesthetics and the analysis of popular culture. Adorno does not deal directly with aesthetics. Indeed, he states in his preface that all aesthetic topics are shunned, nevertheless it contains many insights relevant to theoretical problems of art. Apart from the density of his references to other philosophers , it is hard to pinpoint the reason for the undoubted difficulty of Adorno’s writing, because the grammar seems straightforward and the vocabulary is not unduly esoteric. Consider his book‘s title. The meanings of the words ‘negative’ and ‘dialectics’ are simple enough, but what does ‘negative dialectics’ mean? It is precisely the paradoxical combination of ideas that constitutes the difficulty of Adorno. Again, consider the form of presentation of the content: 405 pages divided into ‘an introduction’; part one-‘relation to ontology’; part two-‘negative dialectics: concept and categories’; part three-‘models’. Nothing unusual here, but within these broad divisions are 405 short subsections with enigmatic captions such as ‘peephole metaphysics’ and ‘idealism as rage’. In other words, there is not a coherent argument running in a temporal sequence from beginning to end, but a series of probes aimed towards a central core from different standpoints. In spite of their shortness, these passages are still difficult to assimilate because of the complexity and obliqueness of Adorno’s thought, however, as a compensation , his text is studded with aphoristic remarks: ‘No theory today escapes the marketplace’. ‘“Angst” that supposed “existential” is the claustrophobia of a systematized society.’ ‘Heidegger’s philosopy is like a highly developed credit system: one concept borrows from the other.’ Adorno’s central theme appears to be the problematical enterprise of philosophy itself, judging from his skeptical *87 Hillfield Ave., London N8 7DG, England. comments about it: ‘Essentially philosophy is not expoundable . If it were it would be superflous.’ ‘Philosophy is the most serious of things but then again it is not that serious.’ ‘Philosophy, which once seemed obsolete, lives on because the moment to realise it was missed.’ ‘The philosophical ideal would be to obviate accounting for the deed by doing it.’ The dilemma of philosophers is that they are compelled to operate with concepts, but concepts do not exhaust the thing conceived; the problem is to transcend the concept by means of the concept, to use reason to get beyond rationality. Philosophical systems, however elaborate, are, in Adorno’s view, useless because they are inevitably incomplete and, therefore, ‘condenmed to annihilation at the hands of the next [system]’. Consequently, Adorno makes no attempt to erect an alternative system, but negates existing ones (in particular Hegels’ dialectics, phenomenology and existentialism), in other words, his philosophy is...