Idealism without Absolutes: Philosophy and Romantic Culture

Sacrificial and Erotic Materialism in Kierkegaard and Adorno

181 Sacrificial and Erotic Materialism in Kierkegaard and Adorno
John Smyth The relation to the opposite sex has also been made into the meaning and earnest of life—into true Christianity. —Søren Kierkegaard, Journals Creation is a mistake that repeats itself. —Kevilina Burbank, “Divorce” A false alarm on the night bell once answered—it cannot be made good, not ever. —Franz Kafka, “A Country Doctor” I Idealism and materialism are tricky terms. Adamant materialists tend to idealize matter, while idealists can sometimes produce thoroughly material rabbits (or ducks) from ideal hats. The relationship between Søren Kierkegaard and Theodor Adorno—both relating to romantic culture via, as well as contra, G. W. F. Hegel—gains a good deal of its complexity from this kind of problem. 182 John Smyth The sheer variety of uses to which Kierkegaard has been prostituted might raise the question of whether his seductiveness is not in inverse proportion to rigor. Consideration of his influences generalizes the problem to intellectual genealogy at large. If we begin with “existentialism” for instance, of which he is often called the founder, we find that his religious focus is frequently disposed of in both “left” and “right” existentialists (e.g., JeanPaul Sartre and Martin Heidegger) by being either hygienically detached from his ethical and aesthetic “spheres,” and/or recuperated in a way that remains ambivalent at best.1 Today we find him in the guises of both theologian and proto-post-modernist, and sometimes both at the same time; and there have been attempts to rehabilitate his religious language in the light of both Wittgensteinian and Derridean so-called god-talk (conceived respectively as a language-game and a structure of subjectivity).2 Despite his apparent distance from political theory, meanwhile, we can now sometimes even find him politically rehabilitated, to the extent of discovering him in one of the latest commentaries as a kind of mediator between Habermas and Vaclav Havel.3 Situating Kierkegaard in his own period is no less confusing, beginning with notorious oscillations by commentators between Hegelian and antiHegelian as well as between romantic and antiromantic classifications. As putative founder of existentialism, supposed antidote to idealism, he is seen in the company of the likes of Marx and Nietzsche as a kind of turning point between romantic idealism and modernity. However, without here buying any particular view of intellectual history, and in deference to the title of this collection, we may begin with the narrower thesis that in formulating the absolute as (religious) paradoxy (i.e., in failing to affirm the absolute in a philosophical sense) Kierkegaard undoes the conventional equation between idealism and absolutism, producing—not so much an anti-idealist existentialism (a misapprehension astutely criticized, as we shall see, by Adorno)—but precisely an idealism without absolutes, which is also a materialism whose “logic” is sacrificial, a negation of the ideal. My appropriation of Kierkegaard for the title of this volume may appear suspect, not least because many commentators, both religious and philosophical (like Sartre and Derrida), have insisted on applying the term absolute to Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity.4 Moreover, insofar as idealism and materialism signify by definition the absolute primacy of one concept over the other, “idealism without absolutes” is of course contradictory. The problem is complicated rather than resolved in dialectical thinking, since while dialectics relativize apparently contradictory principles in order to produce dialectical motion, they must also maintain a sufficiently absolute opposition to avoid collapse. Thus Marx and Hegel tend respectively, according to conventional wisdom, toward materialist and idealist syntheses, and Kierkegaard himself confirms that “basically, an unshakable insistence upon the absolute 183 Sacrificial and Erotic Materialism and absolute distinctions is precisely what makes a good dialectician.”5 This pronouncement, which seems to render null and void the thesis of “idealism without absolutes,” is made in the context of a reproach against Hegelians for getting into the facile dialectical habit of “canceling the principle of contradiction ,” heedless to Aristotle’s caveat that this can only be done by the same principle, “since otherwise the opposite thesis, that it is not canceled is equally true” (PF109). The context is further complicated by the fact that Kierkegaard’s (religious) insistence on absolute contradiction is not in the service of dialectical absolutism, whether material or ideal, but of the hypothesis of absolute paradox inaccessible to dialectics from which the possibility...