[FRA:] Adorno's constellation

[Ralph Dumain]

Re your last paragraph: whether truth or authenticity resides in the 
individual as opposed to the crowd really has nothing to do with Marx's 
views on way or another.  There's no reason why Marxism could not recognize 
conformity as a problem.  There are other issues, though: (1) the 
irrational submission to belief and authority endemic to Kierkegaard's 
religious views; (2) a mystified view of what is wrong with society; (3) an 
indifference or hostility to scientific thought; (4) indifference or 
hostility to social amelioration.  I recently came across a book 
announcement claiming a political consciousness on the part of Kierkegaard 
I never knew he had.

In another post I suggested the possibility that K is essentially 
anti-bourgeois from the right.  Someone asked me to explain.  Such an 
explanation could go in a couple of directions, but what matters here is 
that there are many disillusioned with bourgeois society, see through its 
pretenses, venality, corruption, etc., but have no perspective, hope, or 
even interest in a better future.  Their only recourse is cynicism and 
escapism, a psychological withdrawal from the world as it is but at the 
same time an affirmation of its characteristics as essential and 
eternal.  Disillusioned conservatives are legion.  While I'm no expert on 
K, nut I wonder if he fits the profile.

At 10:23 PM 4/9/2006 -0400, James Rovira wrote:
>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.