Abstract
Pre-theoretical experience and the life-world are traditionally seen as a key reference for phenomenology. In the present chapter I point out their relevance for critical theory as well. To this extent, I start off with a brief overview of phenomenological approaches to pre-theoretical experience and their relationship to empirical research. In sketching out some of the overlaps between phenomenology and early critical theory in this regard, I then specifically focus on Adorno’s reflections concerning the role of an extended concept of experience in both his sociological and his philosophical work. Outlining Adorno’s methodological appropriation of “unregimented experience” in guise of what he terms “physiognomic interpretation” – a procedure intended as a corrective to both rigorous empirical research and philosophical a priori reasoning – I try to show wherein Adorno’s own approach to the pre-theoretical diverges from phenomenology. Finally, I conclude with some reflections concerning the different functions experience acquires in traditional phenomenology and critical theory.
An early version of this chapter was published in German as “Zur Funktion des Vortheoretischen bei Adorno. Der Erfahrungsbegriff der Kritischen Theorie und die Phänomenologie”. In: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 67/6 (2019), pp. 930–951.
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Notes
- 1.
See GA 58.
- 2.
Hua VI, p. 18 f.; En., p. 21 f.
- 3.
Hua VI, p. 229 f.; En., p. 226 f.
- 4.
See for instance the notes on ethnology in Being and Time, SuZ, p. 51 f.; En., p. 490, n. XI.
- 5.
Hua VI, p. 130 f.; En., p. 127 f.
- 6.
See SuZ, p. 43; En., p. 69.
- 7.
See SuZ, p. 66 f.; En., p. 95 f.
- 8.
Schütz 1962.
- 9.
Hua VI, p. 126 f.; En., p. 123 f.
- 10.
GA 58, p. 2 f. See also Kovacs 1990.
- 11.
Schütz 1962, p. 38 f.
- 12.
Hua VI, p. 128 f.; En., p. 125 f.
- 13.
GA 58, p. 23.
- 14.
See Barber 2020.
- 15.
See for instance ten Have 2002.
- 16.
Hua VI, p. 176 f.; En., p. 173 f.
- 17.
This certainly involves a certain tension insofar as phenomenology, on the one hand, claims to simply “accompany” pre-theoretical experience in drawing from it immediately as a resource for knowledge, while on the other hand it finally only arrives at a universal theory of pre-theoretical experience in general. See to this regard also Biemel 1979.
- 18.
See for instance his remarks to the “ontologization of the ontic” by means of concepts like “facticity” or “historicity” in the Negative Dialectics, GS 6, p. 119 f.
- 19.
Horkheimer 2009a, p. 171.
- 20.
Horkheimer 2009b, p. 122, n. 15. Husserl’s Crisis-work is important for critical theory insofar as Kracauer 1969/2009 first and then especially Habermas 1981 pick up the concept of the “life-world” developed by Husserl in this work assimilating it to their own theoretical endeavors. Although in their correspondence, Horkheimer explicitly points Adorno to his aforementioned note on Husserl, Adorno himself, who declares his agreement with Horkheimer’s appreciation of the Crisis, barely mentions the work in his own criticism of Husserl. One can nevertheless wonder whether Husserl’s simultaneous criticism of physicalism and psychologism in the Crisis does not show a deep compatibility with Adorno’s own dialectical reflection, which point to the complementarity between subjectivization and reification. (GS 6, p. 98).
- 21.
- 22.
Habermas 1993, p. 158.
- 23.
Adorno 2017, p. 91 f.
- 24.
Habermas 1993, p. 160, n. 5.
- 25.
See GS 8, p. 314.
- 26.
For the following, see GS 8, p. 314 f. or GS 9/2, pp. 317–359.
- 27.
Adorno 2008, p. 73 f.
- 28.
- 29.
GS 8, p. 315.
- 30.
Adorno’s confrontation with phenomenology finds its most detailed expression in the yet unpublished manuscript of his Oxford dissertation. The subsequently published Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie (Against Epistemology) only offers a partial impression thereof. Of course, the sinuous theoretical intentions behind that dissertation cannot be fully accounted for here in detail. In what concerns the question of physiognomics, however, the following chapter will show, taking Adorno’s criticism of Husserl’s concept of eidetic intuition as its starting point, that his own theory of the physiognomic gaze explicitly re-appropriates a core residue of that phenomenological procedure. See chapter “Eidetic Intuition and Physiognomic Interpretation”.
- 31.
To this extent, one would have to point at the important function that this concept acquires after Lavater in the German philosophy of culture during the twentieth century, in the works of authors like Simmel, Spengler or Klages, with numerous crosslinks to phenomenology, in order to finally show how that precise use of the term, with its implicit contrast between the methods of the human sciences and those of the natural sciences, is also critically reflected in Adorno’s writings. See for this also GS 10/1, pp. 47–71. With regard to the more recent evolution of the term, see also Christians 2000.
- 32.
For a thorough analysis of Adorno’s physiognomics, see also Romero 2007.
- 33.
See for this Lohmar 2005.
- 34.
GS 8, p. 315.
- 35.
See Adorno 2017, p. 129.
- 36.
GA 63, p. 80.
- 37.
Adorno 2008, p. 132.
- 38.
Th.W. Adorno, Probleme der zeitgenössischen Erkenntnistheorie (1951), Theodor W. Adorno Archiv, Frankfurt a. Main, Sign. Vo 125ff.
- 39.
SuZ, p. 393 (En.: p. 445).
- 40.
SuZ, p. 106. (En.: p. 140 f).
- 41.
Husserl 1940.
- 42.
Schmitz 2011, p. 7 f.
- 43.
GS 8, p. 203. This approach anticipates Tran Duc Thao’s immanent critique of phenomenology in his Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, see Tran 1971, pp. 3–121. I thank the anonymous reviewer for pointing me to this connection.
- 44.
Adorno 2017, p. 244.
- 45.
Habermas 1993, p. 158.
- 46.
GS 8, p. 320.
- 47.
GS 8, p. 320.
- 48.
Adorno 2017, p. 245.
- 49.
GS 8, p. 319.
- 50.
This point will be expanded at length in the third chapter of the present book.
- 51.
- 52.
Adorno 2011, p. 273. For a more detailed discussion of this aspect, see especially chapter “Adorno’s Genetic Phenomenology”.
- 53.
See also GS 5, p. 219 (EN.: p. 216) : “Husserl just had to go through the open gate in order to find that the ‘inner historicity’ which he conceded was not just inner.”
- 54.
GS 8, p. 320.
- 55.
GS 8, p. 194.
- 56.
GS 8, p. 190.
- 57.
Lazarsfeld 1941, p. 11.
- 58.
Albert 1993, p. 204 f.
- 59.
See for this also GS 4, p. 90 f.
- 60.
Schütz and Gurwitsch 1995, p. 393.
- 61.
Thus, Husserl explicitly states already in his Ideas I that, in phenomenology, “no experience, as experience, that is, as a consciousness that seizes upon or posits actuality, factual existence, can assume the function of grounding.“ Hua III/1, p. 22 (En.: p. 16).
- 62.
Husserl tellingly stipulates in his Crisis-work: “Merely fact-minded sciences make merely fact-minded people”, Hua VI, p. 4 (En.: p. 6 ). See for this also Ferencz-Flatz 2018.
- 63.
- 64.
Thus, the “physiognomic gaze” is deployed early on in Adorno’s philosophical writings, for instance in his discussion of Kierkegaard’s metaphors (GS 2, p. 61 f.), in his analyses of Heidegger’s linguistic idiosyncrasies (GS 6, p. 434 f.), or Husserl’s stylistic eccentricities (GS 5, p. 44 f.). On all of these occasions, a certain physiognomic approach is used, as Gurwitsch justly suspects, to reduce philosophical discourse to its concrete conditions in the social life-world. On the contrary, in Adorno’s sociological works, the procedure is employed in several of his micrological case-studies, for instance in his early analyses of popular music (Adorno 2008, pp. 477–496), or in his interpretations of the Los Angeles Times horoscope (GS 9/2, pp. 7–120), whereas Adorno seems to ascribe physiognomics in this context primarily a philosophical function. Thus, in Adorno’s view, “the function of philosophy for empirical social research” resides precisely in recognizing “within the facts themselves” the tendency that “points beyond them” (GS 8, p. 216). See for this also Adorno’s more general plea for using such case-studies as a complement to pure quantitative research in Adorno 2017, p. 149.
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Ferencz-Flatz, C. (2023). The Function of Pre-theoretical Experience in Critical Theory and Phenomenology. In: Critical Theory and Phenomenology . Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 125. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27615-6_1
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