[FRA:] Adorno's constellation

[James Rovira]

Simon: I believe the German translations of Kierkegaard that Adorno
used were defective, but Danes contemporary to Kierkegaard leveled the
same critiques against Kierkegaard that Ralph and Adorno seem to have
-- and they weren't communists either (communism wasn't much in
Denmark in the mid 19th cent).  So I can imagine how a Marxist or
communist would perceive K.  Critique is a forgone conclusion.

Ralph and Simon: Perhaps the best way to understand K's presentation
of the individual, especially in essays such as "On my work and the
'Single Individual'" (in Hong's _The Point of View_)  where they find
their clearest exposition, is to understand it akin to Tommy Lee Jones
talking to Will Smith in MIB 1.  Do you remember that?   TLJ's
character said, basically, that a "person" is smart, but "people" are
dumb -- there is an almost exact verbal parallel in K's _TPOV_ that I
can't find offhand.

It is very important to note that K distinguished between the "single
individual" and the "crowd," but not between any kind of elite and the
crowd.  He explicitly said that elite classes are simply different
kinds of crowds.  The distinction, then, is between a single
individual who considers an issue on his own (qualified by the fact
that "on our own" is always part of a social context) and an
individual whose psychology has been supplanted by group-think.  The
single individual, Kierkegaard would argue, is a person truly
universally human, while the crowd is always a subgroup that reduces
its members to units of political instrumentality -- serving one
particular platform rather than the universal.

I don't know what Marx or Adorno could do with this other than what
Adorno did.  Bourgeois liberalism?  Perhaps it sounds too much like it
to avoid that charge.  K did allow the "crowd" political legitimacy
and was deliberately trying to be apolitical at this point.  To K,
while the crowd can dictate political decisions, it cannot dictate
truth: that only the single individual can determine.

Jim R.