1

Adorno and Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, first published in 1933,1 is a

modified version of Adorno’s Habilitationsschrift, which had been writ-
ten a few years earlier. The book, which is critical of Kierkegaard, was
at odds with the sentiment of the time, for Kierkegaard’s thought was
experiencing a renaissance in Germany due to the writings of Tillich,
Barth, Jaspers, and Heidegger. Yet, as Susan Buck-Morss states,
although he was nominally attacking Kierkegaard, Adorno actually had
his sights on the entire existential tradition, and, at least with respect
to Heidegger, who was his secondary target, Kierkegaard compared
rather favorably:2 “Heidegger ‘falls behind’ Kierkegaard, by Adorno’s
criteria, since the latter’s critical perception of social reality led him at
least to pose the ontological question negatively.”3 Going one step fur-
ther, I would argue that a good deal of Adorno’s hostility toward exis-
tentialism arises from his distaste for its particular German manifesta-
tion, and that his “negative dialectics, [which] kept alive an insistence
on undefined experience,” has strong affinities with many elements of
Kierkegaard’s “negative” existential philosophy.4
After first examining Kierkegaard, which anticipates a good deal of
Adorno’s later work, I shall try to show that Buck-Morss actually tends
to understate the allure that Kierkegaard holds for Adorno. Although
Adorno uses Hegel’s dialectic to expose the ways in which Kierkegaard’s
thought collapses into the kind of idealism that it purports to leave
behind by rejecting Hegel, he is also extremely sympathetic to

17

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18 SARTRE AND ADORNO

Kierkegaard’s attack on Hegel’s “identity thinking.” Of course, for

Adorno, Kierkegaard’s ultimately undialectical approach backfires,
which leaves him open to attack on the precise grounds that he attacks
Hegel: Kierkegaard, despite his intentions, makes individual existence
abstract. Still, confronted with what he refers to as the “totally admin-
istered society,” whose levelling drive progressively extirpates individual
subjectivity, Adorno embraces certain aspects of Kierkegaard’s philoso-
phy, as well as a number of Kierkegaard’s techniques for reviving indi-
vidual subjectivity in mass society—albeit, of course, in a dialectical
framework that is more mediative and materialistic.

ADORNO’S CRITIQUE OF KIERKEGAARD

After beginning Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic with a crucial
discussion of the need to avoid interpreting philosophy as poetry,
which “tear[s] philosophy away from the standard of the real,” and thus
“deprives it of the possibility of adequate criticism” (K, p. 3),5 Adorno
points out that Kierkegaard equivocates with respect to his own status.
Although usually adopting the poet’s stance of “speaking without
authority,” and often stating, in various ways, that he is “a kind of poet,”
Kierkegaard also sees himself as a philosopher, maintaining in Fear and
Trembling, for example, that “I am no poet and I go at things only
dialectically.”6 Still, certain distinctive attributes of poetry do resonate
within Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and nowhere is this phenomenon in
greater evidence than in his exposition of “the aesthetic,” which, in
addition to art and art theory, can refer to immediacy, or subjective
communication. In all three of these cases, however, Kierkegaard “was
not involved with giving form to the contents of experience,” which,
for Adorno, is the hallmark of aesthetics, “but [merely] with the reflec-
tion of the aesthetic process and of the artistic individual himself ” (K,
p. 8). This leads to what will be the essence of Adorno’s attack: “He
who as a philosopher steadfastly challenged the identity of thought and
being, casually lets existence be governed by thought in the aesthetic
object” (K, p. 6). Thus, in response to Kierkegaard’s brand of dialectics,
in which both the concrete subject and the concrete object are lost,
Adorno contends that to understand Kierkegaard philosophically
rather than poetically (as Kierkegaard himself demands), we must
pierce his poetic pseudonyms, those “altogether abstract representa-

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 19

tional figures” through whom he presents his philosophy, which is only

in keeping with his own requirements: “Kierkegaard the person cannot
simply be banished from his work in the style of an objective philoso-
phy, which Kierkegaard unrelentingly, and not without good cause,
fought” (K, p. 13).
The intangibility of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors is symp-
tomatic of his deeper perspective on the nature of subjectivity itself,
which, Adorno states, can be correctly interpreted only by considering
the relation between the flesh-and-blood Kierkegaard and the socio-
historical conditions in which he lived, and from which he was largely
estranged. As an early nineteenth-century rentier involved in neither
economic production nor capital accumulation, Kierkegaard lived off a
fixed sum of invested money, and was thus highly subject to the mar-
ket fluctuations of his age (such as the economic downturn caused by
the worker revolts of 1848). He was a member of a declining economic
class, and, as such, was externally powerless. Under these circum-
stances, his philosophy “adapts”:

In Kierkegaard the “I” is thrown back on itself by the superior

power of otherness. He is not a philosopher of identity; nor
does he recognize any positive being that transcends con-
sciousness. The world of things is for him neither part of the
subject nor independent of it. Rather, this world is omitted. It
supplies the subject with the mere “occasion” for the deed, with
mere resistance to the act of faith. In itself, this world remains
random and totally indeterminate. (K, p. 29)7

As evidenced by the “immanent dialectic” that he proffers within

the framework of his explication of the three “spheres of existence,”
Kierkegaard purports to operate in a dialectical way. Yet, this estrange-
ment from the world leads him to take undialectical stances on the
internal relations between subject and object, internal and external his-
tory, and history and nature. As to the subject-object relation, Adorno
tells us:

What Kierkegaard describes as “being quit with everything fun-

damental to human existence” was called, in the philosophical
language of his age, the alienation of subject and object. Any
critical interpretation of Kierkegaard must take this alienation as

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20 SARTRE AND ADORNO

its starting point. Not that such interpretation would want to

conceive the structure of existence as one of “subject” and
“object” within the framework of an ontological “project.” The
categories of subject and object originate historically. . . . If sub-
ject and object are historical concepts, they constitute at the
same time the concrete conditions of Kierkegaard’s description
of human existence. This description conceals an antinomy in
his thought that becomes evident in the subject-object relation,
to which “being quit” may be traced. This is an antinomy in the
conception of the relation to ontological “meaning.”
Kierkegaard conceives of such meaning, contradictorily, as rad-
ically devolved upon the “I,” as purely immanent to the subject
and, at the same time, as renounced and unreachable transcen-
dence.—Free, active subjectivity is for Kierkegaard the bearer of
all reality. (K, p. 27)

By breaking off the subject-object dialectic, Kierkegaard hopes to open

up spaces within which, come what may, one’s personal “meaning” can
be preserved. (Indeed, one’s personal meaning does not even have to be
“positive,” as is the case with Kierkegaard’s negative theology.) But this
tactic—namely, the attempt to protectively isolate subjectivity by cast-
ing out everything that is not subjectivity—is fundamentally mis-
guided: “The harder subjectivity rebounds back into itself from the
heteronomous, indeterminate, or simply mean world, the more clearly
the external world expresses itself, mediatedly, in subjectivity” (K, p.
38). When internalized, therefore, the melancholy that is engendered
by an alienated existence becomes an “existential condition.”
Kierkegaard’s melancholy “does not mourn vanished happiness. It
knows that it is unreachable” (K, p. 126).
Just as Kierkegaard aims to exclude the external world from sub-
jectivity, he aims to exclude external history from one’s “personal” his-
tory, which is marked totally by interiority. Nevertheless, external his-
tory again comes crashing through the perimeter. Language, ostensibly
the form of the communication of pure subjectivity, is itself sedimented
by the historical dialectic that Kierkegaard refuses to recognize, and,
therefore, drags external history’s meanings into the core of inwardness
(K, pp. 34–35), thus leading Kierkegaard all the more to fall prey to the
objective historical situation that he would just as soon escape. For
Adorno, Kierkegaard’s objectless “I” and its immanent history is spa-

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 21

tiotemporally symbolized by the historical image of the intérieur of

Kierkegaard’s childhood apartment. Drawing on Kierkegaard’s own
works, Adorno recounts how father and son would stroll within the
parlor, all the while pretending that they were passing exciting places.
In this way, the external world is subordinated to the intérieur, but the
very nature of existence in the intérieur is simultaneously delimited by
the unseen world. (The only semblance of the external world that
manages to work its way into the intérieur does so through the hall
mirror, and what is reflected—the endless row of apartment buildings
off which the rentier makes his living—is the very historical situation
that imprisons its inhabitants.) The intérieur is thus analogous to the
role of subjectivity in Kierkegaard’s philosophy.
Finally, in characterizing the Kierkegaardian intérieur, which con-
tains images of the sea, flowers, and other things from nature, Adorno
maintains that Kierkegaard fails to differentiate history and nature. In
attempting to hold onto a world that has already effectively receded
into the past, the intérieur, which is designed to preserve that past,
would make of it something that transcends the merely historical. It
would make this bygone period into something eternal and natural—
in other words, into a thing of unchanging nature. In the apartment,
then, eternity and history merge together: “In semblance . . . the his-
torical world presents itself as nature” (K, p. 44). Of course, this con-
solidation of history and nature in the intérieur is a counterfeit one, and
the artificial representations of nature are symbolic of Kierkegaard’s
desire to dominate nature, which, according to Adorno, all but pre-
cludes an existentially meaningful reconciliation.
Adorno goes on to explicate this relation between history and
nature in the penultimate section of the book (“Reason and Sacrifice”)
in a manner that clearly anticipates the themes of Dialectic of Enlight-
enment.8 Accordingly, he states that objectless, self-identical conscious-
ness, which is Kierkegaard’s “exclusive category” for breaking out of
systematic idealism, is actually “the archimedian point of systematic
idealism itself: the prerogative of thought, as its own law, to found real-
ity” (K, p. 107). But, paradoxically, while conciousness is posited as an
empirically pure foundation on which self-liberation hinges, its sacri-
fice is ultimately the price of ontological reconciliation, for a meaning-
ful personal existence demands a spiritually inspired leap of faith that
requires consciousness to disavow itself in the process of submitting to
God. Adorno thus asserts:

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22 SARTRE AND ADORNO

The category that dialectically unfolds here is that of paradox-

ical sacrifice. Nowhere is the prerogative of consciousness
pushed further, nowhere more completely denied, than in the
sacrifice of consciousness as the fulfillment of ontological rec-
onciliation. With a truly Pascalian expanse, Kierkegaard’s
dialectic swings between the negation of consciousness and its
unchallenged authority. . . . The category of sacrifice, by means
of which the system transcends itself, at the same time and fully
contrary to expectation, holds Kierkegaard’s philosophy sys-
tematically together as its encompassing unity through the sac-
rificial abstraction of all encountered phenomena. (K, p. 107)

Kierkegaard’s trumpeting of consciousness sacrificing itself in order to

achieve reconciliation is mythical in character, as is the broader project
of idealism itself, because the commitment to reconciliation cannot be
immanently fulfilled. By placing nature out of bounds in favor of a
spiritual comportment, Kierkegaard’s brand of idealism more firmly
entangles itself in the very nature that it attempts to escape: “By anni-
hilating nature, hope enters the vicious circle of nature; originating in
nature itself, hope is only able to truly overcome it by maintaining the
trace of nature” (K, pp. 109–110).
According to Adorno, then, much like his nemesis Hegel,
Kierkegaard relies on reason to bring about a mythic reconciliation.
But in contrast to Hegel’s use of reason, which “produces actuality out
of itself ” to bring about “universal sovereignty,” Kierkegaard’s use of
reason, which results in “the negation of all finite knowledge,” suggests
“universal annihilation” (K, p. 119). Adorno contends that the mythic
quality of these philosophers arises from a depreciation of aesthetic
considerations, and, furthermore, that it is only by returning to “the
aesthetic” as a methodological principle that the concrete social reality
that is the driving force behind these conflicting philosophies can be
revealed. These would seem to be the two impulses that hang behind
Adorno’s phrase “construction of the aesthetic,” which is the book’s
subtitle, as well as the name of its final chapter.9
At the outset of Adorno’s book, we saw that while Kierkegaard
equivocates with respect to “the aesthetic,” every one of its articulations
failed to make contact with the concrete contents of experience. To the
extent that the aesthetic deals with the nonspiritual—that is to say, the
object, sensuous matter, or nature—Kierkegaard depreciates it. (While

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 23

referring to the later Kierkegaard’s aversion to art, Adorno states: “His

antipathy for art expresses the longing for an imageless presence . . . an
imageless self-presentation of truth” [K, p. 136]). The Kierkegaardian
aesthetic is thus wholly rarefied—devoid of a trace of nature. But by
virtue of this denial of nature, as we saw, Kierkegaard’s thought becomes
blindly entangled within it. Adorno asserts, to the contrary, that the aes-
thetic “sphere of existence,” which is the first step in Kierkegaard’s “exis-
tential dialectic” (and before both religion and philosophy in Hegel’s
dialectic), is where the greatest truth lies: “Where his philosophy, in the
self-consciousness of its mythical semblance, encounters aesthetic char-
acteristics, it comes closest to reality” (K, p. 66). According to Adorno,
there can be no impetus for reconciling with reality without first com-
ing to grips with both history and nature, which dialectically “inter-
weave” but can be neither reduced nor sublated.10 Kierkegaard, however,
simply avoids the dialectical problem altogether by fleeing both.
Adorno’s “construction of the aesthetic” also reveals his Benjamin-
inspired methodology. According to Adorno, for whom, roughly
speaking, “the aesthetic” pertains to the “object” side of the subject-
object dialectic, “the category of the aesthetic is, in contrast to the posi-
tion of [Kierkegaard’s] aesthete, one of knowledge” (K, p. 14). And in
Kierkegaard, which employs the same method that he delineated in
“The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno indicates how such knowledge
is to be acquired. In “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Adorno had main-
tained that “philosophy is interpretation,”11 and that philosophical
interpretation involves a process akin to “riddle-solving”:

Authentic philosophic interpretation does not meet up with a

fixed meaning which already lies behind the question, but
lights it up suddenly and momentarily, and consumes it at the
same time. Just as riddle-solving is constituted, in that the sin-
gular and dispersed elements of the question are brought into
various groupings long enough for them to close together in a
figure out of which the solution springs forth, while the ques-
tion disappears—so philosophy has to bring its elements . . .
into changing trial combinations [constellations], until they
fall into a figure which can be read as an answer.12

In Kierkegaard, Adorno arranges the miscellaneous elements of

Kierkegaard’s ouevre into a constellation of images that metaphorically

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illuminates the historical truth that was the impulse for his philosophy.
As previously discussed, from the petrified reproductions of nature to
the threatening social reality reflected in the hallway mirror, it was the
image of Kierkegaard’s childhood apartment, the bourgeois intérieur,
that symbolized Kierkegaard’s philosophy of inwardness. And while
Kierkegaard could no more escape the reality from which he sought
refuge in “inwardness” than in his childhood apartment, the attempt
itself, Adorno states, reflects the social truth of his time (i.e., the
increasingly perilous fate of “the individual” in industrial society). For
Adorno, the appropriate response to this levelling reality is to move
toward “the aesthetic,” not away from it, as Kierkegaard does. This
means adopting a dialectically informed materialist aesthetics that
might induce the recognition that, historically, both external and inter-
nal nature had been sacrificed in the name of self-preservation, but that
the perpetuation of this sacrifice had outlasted any of the objective
demands that might have precipitated it.
Yet, in moving away from Hegel’s dialectically informed idealis-
tic aesthetics toward what he mistakenly takes to be a “materialist”
aesthetics based on “sense perception” (in which “the aesthetic in a
man is that by which he immediately is what he is”13), Kierkegaard
falls into the very idealism that he sought to escape. According to
Adorno, this is invariably the result when the dualism of form and
content is rigidly maintained, as is the case with Kierkegaard, who
attempts to master the breach with the primacy of a subjectively
engendered form that “cancels the specific substance of the contents”
while simultaneously purporting to give the contents their due:
“Through selection, subjectivity becomes the dominant factor by its
prerogative over the material, and those contents are omitted that
would challenge the rule” (K, p. 18). By managing “the material” in
such a way as to exclude the treatment of social experience, Adorno
contends, Kierkegaard falls behind Hegel, who mediates the relation
between form and content (as well as subject and object, external his-
tory and personal history, and history and nature), but veers into ide-
alism by producing the entire process—which from the contrived
standpoint of the Absolute is “meaningful” and “rational” through-
out—out of his own thought determinations. Thus, although Hegel
precipitously brings this concrete dialectical process to completion,
Kierkegaard, by stripping “meaning” from existence, never even
embarks on it—that is, he fails to attain historical concretion in the

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 25

first place, a failure that sets a precedent the German existentialists of

the twentieth century would emulate.
Accordingly, as was indicated at the start of this chapter, Adorno’s
attack on Kierkegaard also implicitly functions as an attack on Hei-
degger. In concluding this review of Kierkegaard: Construction of the
Aesthetic, therefore, I shall briefly examine Adorno’s analysis of the
relation between Kierkegaard and Heidegger, which is cursorily set
forth in section four (“The Concept of Existence”) of the book.
Because it is my view that the grounds for seeking a rapprochement
between Adorno and Kierkegaard are more ample, not to mention
more productive, than for seeking one between Adorno and Heideg-
ger, which, nonetheless, has been the far more dominant trend, it is
necessary to clarify the basic differences, as Adorno sees them, between
Kierkegaard and Heidegger.
According to Adorno, Heidegger erroneously reads the question of
the “meaning of existence” out of Kierkegaard because, for
Kierkegaard, “existence” is not to be seen as some “manner of being”;
rather, the question for Kierkegaard is what gives existence meaning. In
other words, unlike Heidegger’s “fundamental ontology,” which holds
that there is a meaning to which existence must correspond, the mean-
ing that Kierkegaard would find is generated entirely out of the
domain of existence itself. Without a contribution from the subject,
existence itself is meaningless. Consequently, Kierkegaard would have
found Heidegger’s fundamental ontology as intolerable as Hegel’s sys-
tem, for it fosters the kind of objectifying attitude toward existence that
Kierkegaard so thoroughly denounced.

[Kierkegaard] critiques not only the scientific comprehen-

sion of the objective world, but equally the “objectifying”
interpretation of subjectivity and, therefore, a priori, the pos-
sibility of an “existential analytic of existence.” Fichte’s “I am
I” and Hegel’s “subject-object” are for Kierkegaard hyposta-
tizations under the sign of identity and are rejected precisely
to the extent that they set up a pure being of existence in
opposition to the existing “particular individual.” . . . Because
the existing takes the place of existence, ontology is removed
from existence the more that the question of the existing is
directed toward the existing particular person. Individual
existence is for Kierkegaard the arena of ontology only

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26 SARTRE AND ADORNO

because it itself is not ontological. Hence the existence of the

person is for Kierkegaard a process that mocks any objectiva-
tion. (K, pp. 70–71)

More broadly, as this passage suggests, what ultimately differenti-

ates Kierkegaard and Heidegger is that Kierkegaard is a philosopher of
nonidentity, while Heidegger is a philosopher of identity. Because, for
Kierkegaard, there is no transcendent meaning that is at a distance
from the individual’s interpetation of his own particular existence, and
because the move toward his “ultimate sphere of existence,” the reli-
gious sphere, necessitates a “leap of faith” into “absolute difference,”
Kierkegaard’s thought is negative. (Conversely, Heidegger’s ontology,
despite the so-called ontological difference, is positive, as I shall discuss
in the next chapter.) Of course, given its objectless inwardness,
Kierkegaard’s “infinitely negative” subject arguably becomes something
positive due to its indeterminate nature, which would suggest that, like
Heidegger, Kierkegaard’s thought ultimately collapses into an identity
theory. Still, due to Kierkegaard’s refusal to equate the attainment of
what he would deem a truly Christian comportment with a state of
reconciliation in either a spiritual or secular sense, it seems to me that
he fundamentally remains, like Adorno, a philosopher of nonidentity
and negativity. Like Adorno, Kierkegaard longs for a reconciliation
that cannot be spoken and is a keen critic of mass society who seeks to
revivify individual subjectivity within it.

ADORNO’S KIERKEGAARDIAN DEBT

Given Kierkegaard’s unremitting attacks on the pretensions of
Hegelian reason, with its supposed ability to sublate “otherness,” his
embrace of irony, and his use of pseudonyms (which presages the idea
of a decentered subject), deconstructionists frequently take
Kierkegaard to be a harbinger of many of their own positions.14 And,
in certain respects, they might be right. Still, the “Kierkegaard as
proto-deconstructionist” line can be pushed too strongly, for every one
of the aforementioned theoretical commitments is in the service of that
which deconstruction cannot abide, namely, an efficacious subject who
is far more than just a function of language. Indeed, although it goes
without saying that deconstruction is heavily influenced by Heideg-

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 27

ger’s thought, what it disagrees with most in it is Heidegger’s idea of

existential authenticity, which is the very point at which he draws most
heavily on Kierkegaard.
Given Habermas’s rejection of every “philosophy of the subject,”
which is a position that he shares with deconstructionists, it is ironic
that it is exactly Kierkegaard’s defense of individual subjectivity that
prompts him to assert that elements of Kierkegaard’s thought are
indispensable to his own enterprise, which is based on the idea of
“communicative rationality.”15 But while the appeal that Kierkegaard
holds for Habermas is, in some sense, understandable—in the absence
of robust personal subjectivities the uncoerced consensus of Haber-
mas’s “ideal speech community” rings a bit hollow—it is hard to con-
clude that Habermas’s attempt to incorporate Kierkegaard into his
own project is anything but misconceived. If, as Kierkegaard contends,
only subjective thought can be meaningfully communicated, and then
just “indirectly” so as to only provide an occasion for the listener to
come to his own subjective truth, how can meaningful intersubjective
agreement be reached within the rationalistic confines of Habermas’s
ideal speech community? Such agreement smacks of the very objectiv-
ity that renders “direct” communication superfluous. That is to say, if
intersubjective agreement can be reached, then both the speaker and
the listener were already in possession of the truth, which is the case
with what Kierkegaard describes as that unmeaningful “objective
thinking [that] is indifferent to the thinking subject and his exis-
tence.”16 Under these conditions, however, the very notion of subjective
truth goes by the wayside, and therefore so does the robust individual-
ism with which Habermas would energize his system. Consequently, to
fit within Habermas’s architectonic, Kierkegaard’s thought would have
to be domesticated to the point that it would fail to meet the very
needs for which it was imported.
Unlike deconstructionists and Habermas, Adorno never explicitly
sought to connect with Kierkegaard’s philosophy, and his basic criti-
cisms in Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic were never explicitly
renounced. Still, a comparison of the works of Kierkegaard and
Adorno suggests that various Kierkegaardian themes were assimilated
by Adorno—albeit, of course, in a considerably different framework.
This was not by accident. As a very young man, Adorno was engrossed
in Kierkegaard’s thought,17 and it might well be the case that as Adorno
increasingly came to focus on the fate of the individual in “the totally

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28 SARTRE AND ADORNO

administered society,” his earlier work on Kierkegaard came to be

increasingly salient.
Along these lines, it should be recognized that Kierkegaard was
unlike most of Adorno’s other works in that it was written before
Hitler seized power in Germany. And although, in one sense, Adorno’s
work was relatively unified over his lifetime—one cannot clearly dis-
tinguish between an early and a late period in his works as is often the
case with other philosophers—it is, in another sense, undoubtedly the
case that his war experiences led him to stress different aspects of his
thought. In Kierkegaard, Adorno attacks Kierkegaard for breaking off
the subject-object dialectic by positing an “abstract self ” whose
“abstractness is the counterpole to the abstractness of the universal” (K,
p. 75)—in other words, his attack on Kierkegaard’s “abstract self ”
comes from the viewpoint of the universal, which dialectically shapes
the individual’s existence. But, during the war years, when it became
increasingly clear that “the abstract universal” (namely, advanced capi-
talist society, both in its fascist and liberal forms) was tending to wholly
assimilate individuality with its homogenizing impulse, Adorno turns
his attention toward the individual’s viewpoint so as to revivify his sub-
jectivity—albeit, of course, without sacrificing his earlier criticisms of
abstract subjectivity, which are the flip-side of the dialectical coin.
“World history is for Hegel what the individual is for Kierkegaard” (K,
p. 74), and in Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, which
were written around the time of the war, Adorno no longer feels com-
pelled to show that the individual cannot escape world history. To the
contrary, he seeks to expose world history so that he might at least
open up spaces for critical thought to think against it. Accordingly,
during this time period, Adorno also advances a more favorable analy-
sis of Kierkegaard in “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” which will
briefly be considered below.
In the opening paragraphs of Minima Moralia, for instance,
Adorno declares that Hegel ultimately denies his own thought by fail-
ing to carry through the dialectic, and that this failure, which arises
from his system’s claim to totality, leads him to give short shrift to the
individual:

The dismissive gesture which Hegel, in contradiction to his

own insight, constantly accords the individual, derives para-
doxically enough from his entanglement in liberal thinking.

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 29

The conception of a totality harmonious through all its con-

tradictions compels him to assign to individuation, however
much he may designate it as a driving moment in the process,
an inferior status in the construction of the whole. The knowl-
edge that in pre-history the objective tendency asserts itself
over the heads of human beings, indeed by annihilating indi-
vidual qualities, without the reconciliation of general and par-
ticular—constructed in thought—ever yet being accomplished
in history, is distorted in Hegel: with serene indifference he
opts once again for the liquidation of the particular. . . . The
individual as such he for the most part considers, naively, as an
irreducible datum—just what in his theory of knowledge he
decomposes. (MM, pp. 16–17)

Although Hegel’s “method schooled that of Minima Moralia” (MM, p.

16), his “large historical categories” not only reflect history’s “objective
tendency” to destroy individuality but also help facilitate the process,
and are thus “no longer above suspicion of fraud” (MM, p. 17). There-
fore, Adorno states, it may have become necessary for resistance to
revert back to the individual:

In the period of his decay, the individual’s experience of him-

self and what he encounters contributes to knowledge, which
he had merely obscured as long as he continued unshaken to
construe himself positively as the dominant category. In face of
the totalitarian unison with which the eradication of difference
is proclaimed as a purpose in itself, even part of the social force
of liberation may have temporarily withdrawn to the individ-
ual sphere. If critical theory lingers there, it is not only with a
bad conscience. (MM, pp. 17–18)

It is clear from these statements that Adorno stands in an ambivalent

relation to Hegel, and that the source of this ambivalence arises from con-
cerns that are similar to those of Kierkegaard. At the very least, it would
seem that the way in which Adorno would deal with these concerns—
that is, “a withdrawal to the individual sphere”—puts him in closer prox-
imity to Kierkegaard than one might have initially suspected given his cri-
tique in Kierkegaard. In what follows, I shall try to put Adorno’s
interpretation of Kierkegaard in a somewhat broader perspective.

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30 SARTRE AND ADORNO

In Kierkegaard, Adorno rails against Kierkegaard because he, like

Hegel, fails to carry through the dialectic. But in legitimately attempt-
ing to recuperate the individual in the face of Hegel’s idea of world his-
tory, Kierkegaard catapults to the other extreme. In order to vindicate
the individual’s existence in the face of objective history, he does away
with the object, external history, and nature, thereby leaving the indi-
vidual in objectless inwardness. As a result, Adorno contends, existence
is actually no less abstract for Kierkegaard than Kierkegaard claims it
is for Hegel: “Kierkegaard’s doctrine of existence could be called real-
ism without reality” (K, p. 86). Jettisoning both the social and the nat-
ural world, Kierkegaard’s idea of individuality is based on an infinitely
negative “vertical” relation to God. Conversely, as we just saw, Adorno
is no less troubled by Hegel’s individual, who is concretized—indeed,
in a real sense, all too concretized. Hegel’s concept of sittlichkeit is
based on a view of “horizontal” relations among people. The commu-
nity is the ethical substance of the individual, and if it is “rational,”
Hegel declares, the individual should be reconciled to it. According to
Adorno, however, Hegel’s ethical community achieves its harmony by
crushing the particularities of individuality. Thus, harmony—or at least
what has historically passed for harmony—is the “totalitarian unison”
to which Adorno refers.
Adorno thus buys into neither Kierkegaard’s “vertical” model nor
Hegel’s “horizontal” one. Indeed, since both ultimately succumb to
idealism’s siren song, he thinks that neither one gives “the other” its
due. Nevertheless, both have an undeniably strong influence on his
thought. Of course, this influence has always been much clearer in the
case of Hegel, for there can be no question that Adorno embraces the
moving impulse in Hegel’s dialectic, determinate negativity, if not the
ends with which he precipitately brings the process to a conclusion.18
(And, of course, it is just as clear that he rejects the indeterminate neg-
ativity of Kierkegaard’s wholly inward dialectic.) But in terms of
Adorno’s attack on the unrelenting drive toward systematic totality in
Hegel’s philosophy, Kierkegaard’s influence has been underappreci-
ated. In trying to resuscitate the subject in the face of a society that has
left him with few resources with which to resist it, Kierkegaard and
Adorno share a number of theoretical and stylistic commitments.
Above all, Kierkegaard and Adorno are averse to Hegel’s “meta-
physics,” which both take to be a system that purports to reconcile
thought and being at the latter’s expense. By rejecting the notion that

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 31

this is a relation of identity, they converge in their aim to open up

spaces for “the other,” which is just what Hegel’s “system” closes off. By
“the other,” however, they mean very different things. In Kierkegaard’s
Philosophical Fragments, which is the exact title that Adorno and
Horkheimer first selected for what would become Dialectic of Enlight-
enment,19 Johannes Climacus offers up the “absolute paradox” to con-
found all attempts to identify “the absolutely different” (which he calls
“the god”), of which there is not even a distinguishing mark.20 This
“absolutely different” is designed to escape thought, and the price of
reconciliation, as we saw, is intellectual suicide. For Adorno, who still
defends a self-conscious form of enlightened thought, “the paradox”
itself is an illicit resort to metaphysics, “the other” is not “absolute”
because everything is mediated,21 and the job of philosophy is to try to
“unlock” the ephemeral other from the petrified sociohistorical forms
within which it has not been permitted to express itself.
Despite their differing theoretical conceptions of “otherness,” both
also play Kant and Hegel off one another—although, for Kierkegaard,
this methodological approach is less self-conscious than it is for
Adorno. According to Adorno,

Kierkegaard’s project is the precise antithesis of the Kantian

thesis and the Hegelian synthesis. Against Kant, he pursues the
plan of concrete ontology; against Hegel, he pursues the plan of
an ontology that does not succumb to the existent by absorbing
it into itself. He therefore revises the process of post-Kantian
idealism; he surrenders the claim of identity. (K, p. 74)

As an initial matter, it should be noted that if we substituted “dialectics”

for “ontology” in this passage, it could refer to Adorno himself. More-
over, as antitheses to the “Kantian thesis” and the “Hegelian synthesis,”
Adorno and Kierkegaard could not help but draw on the thought of
both. On the one hand, Adorno’s debt to Hegel is clear enough. And
although Kierkegaard’s “existential dialectic” culminates not in a
Hegelian synthesis but rather in a final either/or, it is impossible for even
the staunchest anti-Hegelian to deny that “the existential dialectic” bears
strong similarities to Hegel’s characterization of consciousness formation
in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Despite its cheapening of individuality,
then, Hegel’s dialectic furnishes a level of concretion that is missing in,
say, the Kantian subject, the transcendental unity of apperception.

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32 SARTRE AND ADORNO

On the other hand, while Adorno’s debt to Kant’s aesthetics is

also clear enough, less clear is the fact that both Adorno and
Kierkegaard draw sustenance from the Critique of Pure Reason. Thus,
although the critical philosophy proffers the kind of “constitutive sub-
jectivity” that Adorno so ardently rejects in the Introduction to Nega-
tive Dialectics, Adorno claims that Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself
at least acknowledges the ultimate impossibility of obtaining a con-
ceptual stranglehold on reality—although, clearly, Adorno does not
want to buy into its deeper metaphysical implications. Instead, for
Adorno, the thing-in-itself is the phenomenon grasped from the
standpoint of a sociohistorical reconciliation. Of course, such socio-
historical reconciliations do not attract Kierkegaard—or, at least, not
in the same way as Adorno—but, despite Kant’s emphasis on reason,
Kierkegaard also adverts to him so as to protect “otherness” from
being conceptually hypostatized. It is Kant, after all, who limits the
pretensions of reason in order to make room for faith, which includes
rejecting those proofs of God’s existence that Kierkegaard perceives as
an affront to Christianity. Furthermore, while neither Adorno nor
Kierkegaard buys into Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason, both of them
avail themselves of the space that it affords to critical thought. Despite
his rejection of Kant’s transcendental subject on the basis of its
abstractness, Kierkegaard sees in irony the ability of subjectivity to
detach itself from all determinations, which is precisely why Adorno
claims that the Kierkegaardian subject is in no way less abstract than
the Kantian one (see K, pp. 74–75). Still, Adorno, too, “presupposes a
standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope
of existence” (MM, p. 247)—although, to be more precise, Adorno
would argue that this “hair’s breadth,” which runs against the grain of
existence, is actually to be accounted for by drawing on that which is
already in the realm of existence but has not yet been conceptualized
due to identity-thinking. Implicitly referring to Hegel’s claim in the
Philosophy of Right that “philosophy paints its grey in grey,” which
means that “philosophy succumbs to the existent,” Adorno declares
that “grayness could not fill us with despair if our minds did not har-
bor the concept of different colors, scattered traces of which are not
absent from the negative whole. The traces always come from the
past” (ND, pp. 377–378). Thus, although Kierkegaard and Adorno
have differing theoretical commitments, the form of their thought is
more than superficially similar.22

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 33

This similarity in form is principally due to the fact that both

Kierkegaard and Adorno passionately embrace “the negative” and both
hold fast to the idea of a “negative utopia,” albeit for one this idea is
theological, while, for the other, it is sociohistorical. Thus, in the Pref-
ace to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Kierkegaard declares that
“dialectically understood, the negative is not an intervention, but only
the positive.”23 And, in the chapter titled “Possible and Actual Theses
by Lessing,” he states:

The negative thinkers therefore always have the advantage that

they have something positive, namely this, that they are aware
of the negative; the positive thinkers have nothing whatever,
for they are deluded. Precisely because the negative is present
in existence and present everywhere (because being there, exis-
tence is continually in the process of becoming) the only deliv-
erance from it is to become continually aware of it. By being
positively secured, the subject is indeed fooled.24

As this passage suggests, the negative has a number of connota-

tions for Kierkegaard. It is the source of our freedom; as was suggested
above with respect to irony, the individual is always in a position to
detach himself from “what is” and try to reconstruct it through his own
actions. The negative also reflects our essential existential position in
the world; there is no resting place, no end point at which we can just
“be done with it.” It is only through the wholly negative phenomenon
of death that this can come about. (The will to metaphysics is thus a
will to death.) In life, however, we who actually “exist” are trapped in a
negative relation between the rock of being and the hard place of
thought,25 and thus must bear an interminable deferral of truth. Yet,
Kierkegaard says, we must strive toward this deferred truth in pas-
sion—that is, we must keep the negative tension alive—lest we become
“deluded” and “fooled” persons that fail “to exist.” For Adorno, in con-
trast, the negative does not refer to metaphysical inquiries, but, instead,
to the dialectical relation that constitutes such linked dualities as sub-
ject and object, individual and society, and nature and history. The fluid
tension that is supposed to internally characterize these dualities, how-
ever, is fractured by the prevalence of identity thinking, which, in the
pursuit of control and, ultimately, self-preservation, eradicates not only
the other, but the self as well. (Kierkegaard would see identity thinking

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34 SARTRE AND ADORNO

as the result of the subject’s confused desire to be “positively secured.”)

Nevertheless, these dualities must be viewed from the standpoint of
their potential reconciliation, just as Kierkegaard’s existing person must
constantly embrace the Absurd with an eye toward his metaphysical
reconciliation—regardless of whether the price of this metaphysical
reconciliation is “the Absurd,” or it is absurd to believe in this meta-
physical reconciliation. And, indeed, more like Kierkegaard than one
would expect given his atheism, Adorno speaks of a utopian social rec-
onciliation (while questioning its prospect) in theological terms:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in

face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they
would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption.
Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by
redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Per-
spectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the
world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent
and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.
To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely
from felt contact with its objects—this alone is the task of
thought. . . . Beside the demand thus placed on thought, the
question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly
matters. (MM, p. 247)

It is from this “standpoint of redemption” that Adorno advances a

rather more favorable interpretation of Kierkegaard in “On
Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,”26 which was written in 1939, the same
year that Adorno and Horkheimer began their collaboration on Dialec-
tic of Enlightenment. This article begins with an examination of
Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, in which Kierkegaard upholds the univer-
sality of a Christian love that is ultimately based on pure subjective
inwardness. But this love is like the Kantian ethics of duty. Concerned
more with its own status than the other, the inward self must abstract
from all natural preferences that its empirical self may harbor regarding
the particularities of others in order to meet the requirement of univer-
sality. Such an undiscriminating love, however, can easily turn into its
opposite, a universal hatred of other human beings, and, according to
Adorno, this is what happens in the case of Kierkegaard. To this point,
Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love reflects his prior cri-

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 Adorno and Kierkegaard 35

tique in Kierkegaard. The demand that the purely inward self love the
universalized other reflects an expulsion of nature, and, in turn, nature
revenges itself on this abstract self in the form of a mythical taboo
against the preferences of natural love, which ultimately transforms into
a universal hatred. Yet, Adorno goes beyond this analysis:

Kierkegaard’s misanthropy, the paradoxical callousness of his

doctrine of love, enables him, like few other writers, to perceive
decisive character features of the typical individual of modern
society. Even if one goes so far as to admit that Kierkegaard’s
love is actually demonic hatred, one may well imagine certain
situations where hatred contains more of love than the latter’s
immediate manifestations. All Kierkegaard’s gloomy motives
have good critical sense as soon as they are interpreted in terms
of social critique. Many of his positive assertions gain the con-
crete significance they otherwise lack as soon as one translates
them into concepts of a right society.27

Kierkegaard’s hostility toward the masses, in other words, implicitly

incorporates in it a hostility toward the dominating mechanisms of a
society that turns human beings into a mass. And, in contrast to a pos-
itivistic outlook, this hostility can arise only because it is opposed to the
ever-present moment of “possibility” in Kierkegaard’s thought, the pos-
sibility of a transfigured world. (Moreover, Adorno says, “as a critic, he
actually grasped the instant, that is to say, his own historical situation . . .
Kierkegaard was Hegelian enough to have a clean-cut idea of history.”28)
Finally, despite the differing nature of their substantive commit-
ments to “the other”—that is, the difference between seeing “the other”
in theological-metaphysical terms (which raises questions of “immedi-
acy” and “self-presence”) and seeing “the other” in sociohistorical terms
(which, among other things, raises questions about “the good life”)—
Kierkegaard and Adorno converge in the tactics that they use to facili-
tate their ends. (For instance, Kierkegaard would have us “believe against
the understanding,”29 while Adorno, who emphasizes the need to retain
conceptuality, would have us understand against the existing under-
standing.) In particular, they share remarkably similar perspectives on the
nature of communication. There is no reason to find this surprising, of
course, since both are preoccupied with resurrecting the individual in the
face of an intransigent social context that would do its best to wipe out

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36 SARTRE AND ADORNO

all particularity. Under these circumstances, to spoon-feed a doctrine—

even an “antidoctrine”—would just reinstantiate the type of passive indi-
viduality that is being mass-produced. Consequently, the very form of
the communication must also be its content to perform its therapeutic
task, and this is indeed the case for both Kierkegaard and Adorno.
In the first of his four “Possible and Actual Theses by Lessing,”
which deals with the “paradox” of communication, Kierkegaard says that
there are really two types of communication. The first type, which is not
of particular interest, is that “direct” form of communication that “is
completely indifferent to subjectivity and thereby to inwardness and
appropriation.”30 It has no “secrets,” but simply seeks to impart objective
knowledge that is already possessed by all parties to the communication.
It is only the second type of communication, the “indirect” type, that is
meaningful. Instead of conveying “objective” truths, it respects the free-
dom of all parties to the communication by only providing the occasion
for the recipients to come to their own subjective truths. For Adorno,
too, the objective is to communicate in a fashion that forces the recipi-
ents to contribute something to their assimilation of the communication
(which is precisely what mass society tends to discourage), and it is this
objective that motivates the complex and fragmentary nature of his
works. Even Adorno’s most “systematic” works, such as Negative Dialec-
tics and Aesthetic Theory, appear to be little more than a constellation of
essays structured around a loose organizing principle, while other central
works, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia, are com-
prised (in part and whole, respectively) of aphorisms. Accordingly, in
contrast to Hegel’s systematic “dialectical theory, [which] abhorring any-
thing isolated cannot admit aphorisms as such,” Adorno’s antisystematic
style seeks to open up spaces for late capitalism’s overdetermined subject:
“If today the subject is vanishing, aphorisms take upon themselves the
duty to consider the evanescent as essential” (MM, p. 16).
Ultimately, of course, Adorno, in contrast to Kierkegaard and the
later Heidegger, will not identify his philosophical form with poetry,
for in trying to break through language’s reified form, Adorno still
relies on “the labor of the concept” to illuminate sociohistorical truths.
Still, by virtue of Kierkegaard’s attempt to resurrect the subject through
language, he stands in much closer proximity to Adorno than does
Heidegger, who believes that a proper understanding of language will
lead to the elimination of that very notion of subjectivity to which the
works of Kierkgaard and Adorno are ultimately geared.

© 2007 State University of New York Press, Albany