[FRA:] Adorno's constellation

[James Rovira]

Much appreciation for a good, specific response, Ralph.  Yes, the fact
that Kierkegaard is a religious writer will be a barrier for any
serious Marxist.  RE: your four points:

1. Submission to authority in Kierkegaard is completely internalized. 
In other words, there is no submission to an "external" authority. 
The individual's confrontation with God is the ultimate defining act
and serves not only as the source of individual identity but as the
basis of critique of all external authority -- thus, this is where
"truth" is located and in this way the individual is capable of being
an individual rather than a manipulable member of a "crowd."

This is all very difficult to assimilate from an atheist perspective:
the question being, if there is no God, what is it exactly that the
individual is really defining himself in relation to?  The assumption
is usually some kind of external authority in the form of church or
creed, but this answer doesn't work as this kind of unthinking
submission is precisely what Kierkegaard criticizes, harshly and
repeatedly.  On the most basic of levels the individual is always
confronting his or her own assimilation of church and creed in the
light of his or her subjectivity.  The important thing is that the
individual maintains a conscious, critical relationship to these
externals.

2. I think Kierkegaard's description of the crowd mentality requires
no mystification at all -- so long as this is what is understood as
what Kierkegaard thinks is fundamentally wrong.  As a Christian he
calls this crowd mentality "sin," but the content of his word "sin" is
"crowd mentality."

3. Yes, he is indifferent to scientific thought (he is not hostile to
it), but he is not attempting to provide guidelines for the
construction of an ideal society.  He does address scientific thought,
its uses, and its misuses in various places, but largely to keep it
from being misused.  _Concept of Anxiety_ probably does the most work
in this regard, as he wants to carefully distinguish between the
fields of psychology, logic, and dogma, and describes in some detail
the errors that occur when we confuse one field with another.  Both
traditional Christian dogma and Hegel are the objects of Kierkegaard's
attack.

4. I'm not sure K is indifferent or hostile to social amelioration. 
His problem here is that his default position is the apolitical; when
he does make concessions to the political, however, he is clearly on
the side of the most inclusive forms of democracy.  Denmark had been
an absolutist monarchy -- Parliament didn't even wield any power --
until the monarch  that ruled during most of K's life took the throne
in the late 18th century.  This monarch began with political reforms
that strengthened the peasant class, allowing the peasant class to
start transforming into a middle class -- which it did, rapidly,
culminating in the reduction of an absolutist monarch to a weak
constitutional monarch by the late 1840s.

The Copenhagen elite resisted these changes but were powerless to stop
them.  Kierkegaard's father was a member of Denmark's peasant class
who elevated himself to an upper middle class merchant position that
would allow Kierkegaard to travel within the circles of Copenhagen's
cultural elite well before the time his youngest son, Soren, began his
college education. So Kierkegaard lived with a foot in both worlds,
criticizing both the state church that catered to Denmark's cultural
elite, and the pietist movements that had the most sway among the
peasant class.  When he presented an image of an ideal Christian,
however, it was usually a peasant farmer.

In his work _Point Of View_, Kierkegaard claims that Christianity is a
vast illusion in Denmark.  Modernity is a force that he believes will
undo this illusion, and the next step -- he hopes --  will be the
"single individual."  What we have instead is a crowd mentality whose
content is consumerism.

Jim R.