Kierkegaard and Adorno on the Communication of Possibility Clifford Gentry Lee
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CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Duquesne University: Digital Commons Duquesne University Duquesne Scholarship Collection Electronic Theses and Dissertations 2008 Aesthetic Pedagogy: Kierkegaard and Adorno on the Communication of Possibility Clifford Gentry Lee Follow this and additional works at: https://dsc.duq.edu/etd Recommended Citation Lee, C. (2008). Aesthetic Pedagogy: Kierkegaard and Adorno on the Communication of Possibility (Doctoral dissertation, Duquesne University). Retrieved from https://dsc.duq.edu/etd/810 This Immediate Access is brought to you for free and open access by Duquesne Scholarship Collection. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Duquesne Scholarship Collection. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AESTHETIC PEDAGOGY: KIERKEGAARD AND ADORNO ON THE COMMUNICATION OF POSSIBILITY A Dissertation Submitted to the McAnulty Graduate School Of Liberal Arts Duquesne University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Clifford Gentry Lee, IV April 2008 Copyright by Clifford Gentry Lee, IV 2008 AESTHETIC PEDAGOGY: KIERKEGAARD AND ADORNO ON THE COMMUNICATION OF POSSIBILITY By Clifford Gentry Lee, IV Approved April 2, 2008 Dr. Ron Polansky, Ph.D. Dr. James Swindal, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy Professor of Philosophy, Chair (Dissertation Director) (Committee Member) Dr. Tom Rockmore, Ph.D. Professor of Philosophy (Committee Member) Albert C. Labriola, Ph.D. Dean, McAnulty Graduate School Of Liberal Arts iii ABSTRACT AESTHETIC PEDEGOGY: KIERKEGAARD AND ADORNO ON THE COMMUNICATION OF POSSIBILITY By Clifford Gentry Lee, IV April 2008 Dissertation Supervised by Dr. Ron Polansky, Ph.D. Number of Pages in Text: 349 This dissertation focuses on Adorno’s appropriative reading of Kierkegaard. Adorno interprets Kierkegaard’s notion of the aesthetic as an active philosophical principal. He finds this principle to be at work throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship as the means of the justification of the particular and concrete in defiance of their would be enslavement to the general and abstract. The aesthetic principle is that which requires Kierkegaard’s readers to become active participants in the formation of the experienced meaning of his texts. Adorno’s approach facilitates a reading of Kierkegaard that focuses on his pedagogical use of the communicative power of imagery. At the same time, the attention being drawn to the Kierkegaardian element of Adorno’s philosophy provides a means for comprehending the experiential dimension of Adorno’s writings. Both thinkers write with the goal of communicating awareness of the possibility of human freedom. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract iv Introduction i. Overview of the Project 1 ii. Overview of the Scholarship 20 iii. Chapter Outline 29 I: The Seduction of the Aesthetic in Either/Or Introductory Remarks on the Young Girl 32 i: The Aesthete’s Intoxicant 34 ii: The Speculative Ear 46 iii: Aesthetic Pedagogy 61 iv: Images of Presentiment 100 II: Adorno’s Aesthetic Construction of Kierkegaard i: Pseudonymous Subjectivity 101 Excursus A: The Constellational Roots of Adorno’s Philosophy 109 a: Modern Aesthetics in Miniature 109 b: Schönberg 123 c: Benjamin 128 ii: Adorno’s Thought Image of Kierkegaard 145 III: The Work of Freedom as Communication in the Concept of Anxiety Introductory Remarks 176 i: Innocence and the Word 182 ii: The Demonic 197 iii: Indirect Communication as the Work of Freedom 206 Excursus B: Adorno’s Kant in Negative Dialectics 209 iv: The Aesthetic Dignity of Words 234 IV: Reason’s Sacrificial Productivity in Fear and Trembling and Training in Christianity i: Faith as Transgression 251 ii: Productive Failure of the Image 267 Excursus C: The Artist’s Model: Aesthetic Ideas in Kant’s Critique of Judgment 291 iii: Aesthetic Salvation of the Demonic 315 Conclusion: Aesthetic Pedagogy and the Validation of the Individual Prefatory Remarks 323 i: The Single Individual 325 ii: Negative Dialectics 330 iii: Parting Remarks on the Communication of Possibility 336 Bibliography 339 v Introduction i. Overview of the Project When the word “aesthetic” is used within the context of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings, more times than not, it connotes one of two possibilities: either a way of living or a specific style of writing. The latter refers to the inimitable confluence of the poetic and the philosophical that characterizes much of Kierkegaard’s work. The former, however, refers to a specific theme developed within this authorship – namely, a way of life, contrasted with the ethical and the religious alternatives, characterized by an ironic effort to determine meaning by means of the indeterminate. Understood as three subjective determinative states of meaning from which the individual must choose or by which the individual is chosen, these three stages have become the hallmark of Kierkegaard’s foundational significance for the existential thought of the 20th century. Yet, the developmental movement implied by the hierarchical nature of this idea – from the lowest sphere of the aesthetic through the ethical and on to the heights of the religious – commonly results in a reduction of the meaning of the aesthetic to the religious truths of which it could only be a debasement or to which it unknowingly aspires.1 The 1 This is not to say that the developmental approach to understanding the spheres is, in and of itself, a mistake, but only that the exclusive use of such an approach prevents recognition of the full significance of the aesthetic. Kierkegaard’s prioritization of the religious over the philosophical/aesthetic is a direct following study will not make such an assumption. It will aim to excavate a layer of theoretical richness buried deep within Kierkegaard’s treatment of the aesthetic, one that is only uncovered when liberated from its subservient role and, as a consequence, allowed to show itself at work as a fundamental and irreducible element of Kierkegaard’s thought. Though invariably present, the aesthetic is rarely the recipient of direct definition. A notable occurrence of such directness is found within the second half of Kierkegaard’s first pseudonymous work, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life. Through the voice of Judge William, we hear the following: the esthetic in a person is that by which he spontaneously and immediately is what he is; the ethical is that by which he becomes what he becomes. The person who lives in and by and from and for the esthetic that is in him, that person lives esthetically.2 Focusing attention on what is being said about the aesthetic, we notice that not only is it equated with a state within which one may live, but it is also likened to an ideal one could live by, for, and from; it is more a principle of evaluation, in this case, than a state of being. In his discussion of this passage’s implications for understanding Kierkegaard’s authorship, Louis Mackey claims that here the primary constituent of this ideal is provided as that immediacy which the aesthete, in some way, attempts to be. Which is to say, as a notion essentially linked with the idea of the immediate, the aesthetic has a central role to play in the conceptual drama that is Kierkegaard’s authorship considered inversion of the Hegelian prioritization of philosophy over religion, the truths of which, conversely, are equated with the aesthetic as symbolic/pictorial expressions of the potential unity of consciousness with its object that find their complete expression in the conceptual knowing of philosophy. Cf. sections VII and VIII of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). 2 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, Part 2, trans. Howard Hong and Edna Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 172. 2 as a whole. Expressing its centrality, Mackey writes: “immediacy – never possessed but always forfeit, vainly sought and paradoxically bestowed – is the cantus firmus about which the polyphonic Kierkegaardian literature shapes its varied and often dissonant counterpoint.”3 Expanding on this fitting metaphor, the persisting melody of immediacy can be said to be itself composed of notes played through the various conceptual issues immediacy poses to thought. Questions concerning whether or not immediate and concrete experience can be known or experienced as such, how and to what extent reflection is capable of accuracy in its representations, and to what degree is the role language serves in the effective communication of experience itself capable of being communicated, are examples of the individual notes constructive of the melody of immediacy as it plays itself out throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Therefore, if we wish to comprehend the significance of the aesthetic in his work, thorough attention must be given to the way its constitutive notes, these and other questions of a seeming theoretical nature, all speak to the same issue – the knowing and communicating of immediacy. A consideration of the possibility of the conceptualization and/or communication of immediacy is crucial to Kierkegaard’s strategic attempt to think Hegelian philosophy differently. For Hegel, immediacy is never immediate. All experience assumes a pre- existing I, as the subject of experience, and a pre-existing thing, as the object experienced, both of which he contends are dependent upon conceptual processes preceding the experience itself. Thus, all experience, even that of experience’s immediacy, is the product of mediation.4 Kierkegaard’s philosophical project seeks to 3 Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 3-4. 4 “Among the countless differences cropping up here we find in every case that the crucial one is that, in sense-certainty, pure being at once splits up into what we have called the two ‘Thises’, one ‘This’ as ‘I’, 3 disrupt the hegemonic force expressed by this claim; that is, it aims to restore validity to the immediacy that accompanies concrete experience, to conceive then, contra Hegel, what would appear to be inconceivable.