Søren Kierkegaard, circa 1840
Adorno had written about Kierkegaard for his doctoral dissertation, Kierkegaard. Konstruction des Ästhetischen, originally published as a book in early 1993. That work is also included in the Gesammelte Schriften Bd. 2, along with at 1963 essay, "Kierkegaard noch einmal" ("Kierkegaard Once Again"). A 1966 publisher's note in the Gesammelte Schriften edition notes of the 1933 book that it was "overshadowed from the beginning by political troubles." The 1963 essay looks at Kierkegaard's influence on philosophy and theology, calls his arguments against Hegel's dialectic a form of the "unhappy consciousness" Hegel discusses in his Phenomenology of Spirit, and comments on on Kierkegaard’s application of the "power of powerlessness" in his attacks on the established Protestant Church in Denmark in his day.
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813–55) was an eccentric Danish theologian who is mainly remembered for having provided some of the conceptual background for existentialist philosophy. His religious perspective is often called "existential theology" and is known for his concept of the Leap of Faith. Kierkegaard is credited for the concept "existentialism." He had a great influence on Christian theology and the existential philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers.
Adorno in his 1940 paper seems to have been reaching hard to find progressive elements in Kierkegaard's very conservative general attitude. This is a tricky business. Because although Kierkegaard had a sharp critical eye for problems in the developing mass society of 19th century European capitalism, his criticisms often stemmed from a retrograde perspective based in the mystical/pietistic version of the Christian faith in which he was raised. For example, his opposed marriage and the existing system of family, a view very much connected with his mysticism. But his critical perspectives on the family didn't stem from a perspective like Robert Owen's or Charles Fourier's. Kierkegaard was very much opposed to women's rights. And that was one overtly political issue in which he took an interest.
The most intriguing part of Adorno’s essay on love is his discussion of Kierkegaard's thoughts on love for those who have died, which he elaborated in a sermon called, "Wie wir in Liebe Verstorbener gedenken" ("How We Think of Love for The Dead") Adorno quotes him as saying (all quotes here from this essay come from the 1940 English version):
Truly, if you thoroughly wish to ascertain, how much love is in you or in another person: watch only the behavior to a dead one… For the dead man is cunning. He has really drawn himself totally out of any entanglements. He has not the slightest influence which could aid or hinder his opposite neighbor, the loving one ... That we think lovingly of those who passed away is a deed of truly unselfish love.Adorno points out the obvious limitation of this, because one’s love for the dead is not living, reciprocal relationship. It could be seen as a love that is essentially abstract. Or, to use Adorno terminology, reified and fetishized. On the other hand, love for the departed is a very real thing, a real part of life and of individual experience and personality. Adorno writes of love for the dead:
... it is love absolutely void of any barter, of any "requital," and, therefore, the only unmutilated love permitted by our society. The paradox that the only true love is love for the dead is the perfect expression of our situation.Adorno explains, "The relation to the dead is characterized as one free of aims," and therefore one that is beyond the dictates of the economic marketplace.
But this is a very unsatisfying way of pulling a social-critical conclusion out of an interesting insight of Kierkegaard's. Yes, love for the dead is love for one who cannot reciprocate, and is insofar unselfish. Someone somewhere has probably done a critical interpretation of William Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" in light of Kierkegaard's theory of love for the dead. Although I’m guessing Kierkegaards wasn't exactly thinking of the topic in that way.
Yet it's also obvious that there are ego interests involved with the love of the departed, as well, from prestige considerations to material inheritance to complying with the standards of one's community for mourning. The sentimentalizing of deaths in war can certainly have a selfish side, i.e., he died instead of me.
Love for the dead may hold up a revealing mirror to the limits society puts on love among the living. And such critical perspectives are still urgently needed. But our understanding of death is heavily conditioned by the societies in which we live. And while love for the departed is a special case that sheds light on other relationships of love, it's not at all clear that such love is particularly free of egoistic elements or chosen more freely than other types of love.
He connects Kierkegaard's concept of love for the dead with this observation from Max Horkheimer, who is identified in the German version by name but in the English version (in a journal edited by Horkheimer), he is called only "a secular philosopher of our own time":
On the death bed, when death is certain, the rich and the poor are alike in many regards. For with death a man loses his ‘relationships’: he becomes nothing. The proudest kings of France had to have this experience. The enlightened and humane physician who tries to help the lonely dying man in the hour of his last ordeal, not for the sake of economic or technical interest but out of pity – this physician represents the citizens of a future society. His situation is the present image of a true humanity.But for Kierkegaard, the dying person does not become "nothing." The Christian in good standing has a share in eternal life with God. To Kierkegaard, in a quote Adorno goes on to give, death involves a kind of joke, "the roguishness to resurrection."
In most of this essay, Adorno is actually highly critical of Kierkegaard's ideas on love as expressed in his book Works of Love (1847), of which the sermon on love of the dead is part. The core of his criticism is that Kierkegaard takes the Christian concept of love for one’s neighbor and puts it on such a very abstract basis that it makes love into something unsubstantial, love without a real object. Adorno sees Kierkegaard’s concept of a Christian duty to love others as making love valid only as a "'breaking down' of nature." Adorno connects this with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the "pure inwardness" of the individual's ego and his mystical outlook with its ascetic tendency. By making love into a duty, "The creo quia absurdum [I believe because it is absurd] is translated into the amo quia absurdum [I love because it is absurd]."
He gives credit to Kierkegaard for perceiving that the society of his time the concept of "neighbor" had become much more transitory than it had been for most people for most of history. "The neighbor no longer exists," as Adorno puts it, in contrast to the situation in the Gospels: "The neighbor of the Gospels implies fishermen and peasants, herdsmen and publicans, people whom one knows and who have their established locus in a life of simple production which can be realized adequately by immediate experience."
But he argues that Kierkegaard's solution to the problem presented by this radical change in the nature of "neighbor" is to make it so abstract as to deprive it of all real-world meaning. He writes of Kierkegaard's discourse on mercifulness:
He modifies, as it were, biblical parables, in order to make them fit present reality. He tells the story of the Samaritan with the alteration that the Samaritan is incapable of saving the unfortunate man. Or he assumes that the sacrifice of the poor widow, which is supposed to be worth more than that of the rich, has been stolen without her being aware of it. Of course he maintains that her behavior is still that of true love. I should like to emphasize the configuration of the motives at hand. Pure inwardness is made the only criterion of actions at the very moment at which the world no longer permits an immediate realization of love. Kierkegaard is unaware of the demonic consequence that his insistence on inwardness actually leaves the world to the devil.Kierkegaard makes love of the neighbor into a mystical abstraction, not related it real social conditions. The Biblical teaching of the equality of the believers and of humanity can and has been used to encourage activism and change. Kierkegaard uses it as a substitute. Freedom and equality, like neighborly love, become inner qualities whose violation and denial in the real world ceases to be a special problem for the Christian believer.
But Adorno finds that Kierkegaard's view of historical development as de-humanization, one he shared with the Left Hegelians, gave him the ability to describe some of the effects of that process with real insight:
The thesis underlying the present study, the thesis which I should like to put forward for discussion, may be expressed as follows: Kierkegaard’s misanthropy, the paradoxical callousness of his doctrine of love enables him, like few other writers, to perceive decisive character features of the typical individual of modern society. Even if one goes so far as to admit that Kierkegaard’s love is actually demonic hatred, one may well imagine certain situations where hatred contains more of love than the latter's immediate manifestations. All Kierkegaard’s gloomy motives have good critical sense as soon as they are interpreted in terms of social critique. Many of his positive assertions gain the concrete significance they otherwise lack as soon as one translates them into concepts of a right society.The German version includes Alexis de Tocqueville along with Poe and Baudelaire in that group.
... Kierkegaard regards the criticism of progress and civilization: as the criticism of the reification of man. He belongs to the very few thinkers of his epoch (apart from him I know only Edgar Allan Poe and Baudelaire) who were aware of the truly chthonian changes undergone by men, as it were, anthropologically, at the beginning of the modern industrial age: by human behavior and the total setting of human experience. It is this awareness which invests Kierkegaard’s critical motives with their genuine earnestness and dignity. [my emphasis]
Adorno thought that Kierkegaard recognized the downside of democratic mass culture, "the mutilation of men by the very mechanisms of domination which actually change men into a mass." But he notes that what Kierkegaard expresses is "a hatred of the mass" which "styles itself" conservatively. Still, he finds a humane element within what is often a conservative hull: "Kierkegaard's doctrine of hope protests against the seriousness of a mere reproduction of life which mutilates man. It protests against a world which is determined by barter and gives nothing without an equivalent."
All in all, Adorno in this essay appears to be looking for a way to link the insights and concerns of a more strictly materialistic outlook with considerations that are at the center of religious thinking. He concludes with the thought that Kierkegaard's notion of the love for the dead and his understanding of death are ultimately in the service of "the hope of the reality of redemption." In the German version it reads, "Die Hoffnung ... auf die leibhafte Wirlichkeit der Erlösung," which I would translate as "the hope for the bodily reality of salvation" and which better expresses the attempt to find a connecting point between materialism and religion.
Tags: adorno, critical theory, frankfurt school, frankfurter schule, kierkegaard
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