Adorno's empiricism?: On intellectual and metaphysical experience

Abstract

Adorno's work contains pregnant references to the concepts of both “intellectual” and “metaphysical” experience. While the concept of metaphysical experience figures relatively prominently in the Adorno literature, intellectual experience has been largely neglected—indeed to the point that certain scholars have asserted that the two concepts are in fact the same. In this article, I demonstrate that they are not, while also showing how the concept of intellectual experience is somehow key for Adorno's critical theory. The having of “metaphysical experiences,” meanwhile, is shown to be a condition on the possibility of having intellectual experiences. Ultimately, I argue that we might read Adorno as a distinctive, rather heterodox sort of empiricist.