Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Sons from well-off families who become artists or scholars have to deal with envy and hostility by others who do not have a family that can support them. However, they are also looked down upon by society as a whole. Furthermore, scholarship and creativity are now treated like a business, with the middle-class intellectual or artist forced to specialize in one specific area without being considered a “‘professional’” (21).

Such people are forced to engage in a “division of labor” and “departmentalization of mind” (21) that see them separate the work they are passionate for and the work that earns them a living. Even those who can make a living through their art or scholarship or just take “pleasure in [their] work,” still have to sell their work and have it meet “standards” that are “in ways inseparable from elements of [their] superiority” (21).

Adorno claims that parents have been losing their power compared to their children. This is a result of them becoming more impoverished or, as Adorno terms it, their “economic impotence” (22). However, the older generation represented a “bad world” but had “an inkling of the truth,” while Adorno’s generation has come to represent a world that is “even worse” (22). While the bourgeois family of his parents’ generation oppressed the individual, it also made them more powerful. With the decline of the bourgeois family, governments have taken their place in people’s lives.

With the development and concentration of industry in the mid-20th century, people are less economically independent through traditional business. More middle-class men have to work as “agents and go-betweens” (23). The results include there becoming less of a distinction between someone’s work life and personal life, and society “becoming hierarchical” (23). Instead, people are expected to constantly “be ‘after’ something” (24). This has produced a class of people who belong to all political categories and have dedicated their own individualism to their jobs and the pursuit of profit.

Adorno muses on the obituary of a businessman that reads, “The breadth of his conscience vied with the kindness of his heart” (24). He interprets this as inadvertently saying that the deceased actually “lacked a conscience” (24). Adorno’s reasoning is that, if one develops a wide conscience, then that person loses their sense of specific, individual wrongs. Instead, for modern individuals their sense of the world is shaped not by what they love, but their “hatred for the inappropriate” (25).

The “little pleasures, expressions of life” (25) are no longer innocent. Beauty like tree blossoms are always in the shadow of horrors, casual conversations are plagued with mistrust, and Adorno finds that movies only leave him feeling “stupider and worse” (25). There is no way to even try to relate to other human beings without exercising some kind of power over them. Only the “sufferings of men […] should be shared” (26) between people.

If someone tries to remain isolated from and critical of society, they risk thinking of themselves as better than others. While someone might try to keep separate from capitalistic concerns, only through capitalism does that person have the luxury.

Intellectuals might rightfully notice that the standards of learning and literacy have declined. However, Adorno argues that each intellectual just thinks of themselves as having made the “superior choice” (27). Adorno sees this as an artifact of an older bourgeois point of view, where people see themselves as better individuals than everyone else while also putting more value in others than themselves. The only way out of this conundrum is to “deny oneself the ideological misuse of one’s own existence,” or “conduct oneself in private as modestly, unobtrusively and unpretentiously as is required” (27-8).

Even intellectuals have to compete with each other for their livelihoods. Such intellectuals praise the “simple folk” (28), but such average people tend to only encounter intellectuals when they are trying to sell something. Adorno blames the anti-intellectualism of his day on the fact that writers do not understand the fact that even intellectuals are competing with each other for sales.

Adorno states that for artists and intellectuals “the effort of producing something in some measure worthwhile is now so great as to be beyond almost everybody” (29). Artists of all kinds are now suppressing their urges to engage in anything but the most original work. This, along with the pressure to conform and the need to make money, causes artists and intellectuals to degrade their own work.

In Adorno’s view, modern society forces citizens to “own up the better to hunt them down” (30). To survive, people have to lie, even if lying is still seen as “repellent” (30). Overall, lying to someone only means that you do not care about them or their opinion of you.

Instead of being a union based on “mutual responsibility” as would be ideal, marriage is usually just “an enforced community of economic interests” (31). This inevitably demeans both partners in a marriage, even if they are rich.

Adorno muses that divorce renders both parties bitter toward each other, more so when finances and property are involved. Women are especially disadvantaged, because of a “husband’s barbarous power over the property and work of his wife” (32). Further, both partners who get a divorce are stigmatized by society because they represent the failure of marriage itself to become a “true universal” (32).

Adorno reflects that, in the past, men sought affairs with “chorus girls” (32), bohemian women, and certain types of courtesans. Now, in a capitalist society, many women seek relationships in order to advance their own careers. The only women that men can get “uncalculating love” (32) from is a traditional wife, the very sort of woman that men in the past cheated on.

Reflecting on his own experience, Adorno writes that any male intellectual who migrates from his home country is “mutilated” (33). This is because he is outside the context of his own language and national history. Adorno believes there is no longer such a thing as a private life, and public life is just being loyal to a “platform” (33). The only solution is to constantly be aware of oneself and to avoid people who only want a relationship out of self-interest.

Fascism exists to preserve a failing economic and social order, specifically property rights and the bourgeois family, through fear and force. However, even outside fascist nations, bourgeois values have become “corrupted utterly” (34). Facing its own decline, the bourgeois has now become alienated from its own community and hostile to new migrants to their countries.

Adorno claims there are now two types of avarice. The first is the person who hordes wealth or possessions for themselves. The second is the “miser of our time” (35), who gives away nothing unless it is “necessary” (35) or they receive something in return.

The German writer Goethe was aware of the alienation people would experience in the coming industrial age, so in his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, he proposed “tact” (35) as a way to preserve relationships between individuals. However, Adorno argues that tact only worked in the context of the bourgeoisie recently freeing itself from absolutist monarchies, and it has since gone into decline. The problem with tact was that it “demanded the reconciliation […] between the unauthorized claims of convention and the unruly ones of the individual,” something Adorno deems “impossible” (36).

People have begun to find tact offensive, since they confuse it with a lack of interest in someone’s personal life and well-being. Tact also previously depended on social distinctions, but in a time when there is an “ever more rigid hierarchy that encompasses everyone” (37), tact only helps power by keeping people silent, and does not help individuals themselves or their relationships.

In the modern age, even powerful generals have to fear being executed by fascist leaders. This is one dramatic example of how the freedom of individuals has been completely curtailed in favor of the state.

The quality of houses has also declined. The homes of the middle class have become generic buildings or are basically “factory sites” (38). Nor can people comfortably sleep, because everyone is expected to always be on-call for their jobs. The poor have to live in slums or in their cars, trailers, or with no home at all. Homes and all private property “no longer belongs to one,” because in modern consumerist society everything has become “abundant” (39). People have no respect for things because they are abundant and thus disposable, which also leads to a lack of respect for people.

Adorno points out that human actions are now dictated by technology, to the point that technology “expels from movements all hesitation, deliberation, civility” (40). He gives the example of car and refrigerator doors, which have to be slammed. This puts people out of the habit of closing doors quietly. The technology of Adorno’s day, from windows to cars, “already have the violent, hard-hitting, unresting jerkiness of Fascist maltreatment” (40). At the same time, modern technology has to be operated in a specific way, further limiting daily human experience.

Citing the philosopher David Hume, Adorno notes that Hume praised “epistemological contemplation, the ‘pure philosophy’” (40). In a heavily commercialized society, tenderness and other human qualities are damaged. There is a “taboo” (41) against talking business, but that is only because everything is secretly about business. Anything that is frivolous to human conversation or relationships is stripped away. For Adorno, this is part of the process by which people are treated like “things” (42).

Adorno writes that people in his time are “forgetting how to give presents,” with charity just serving as “the planned plastering over of society’s sores” (42). An example of this is the rise of “gift-articles” (42), which gives the recipient the means to choose their own gift and does not require any consideration from the giver. Adorno sees this trend as coming from the larger amount of consumer goods available even to the poor. He views it as another way that people are becoming dehumanized and turning into things.

Mass culture is based on a lie. This lie is twofold: It presents “the illusion of a society worthy of man that does not exist” (43), and that people do not have to work to survive. Cultural criticism is an “ideology” (43) that reduces everything in culture to economic and material relations. Even Marxists have bought into culture being dominated solely by material relations, and have given up on the search for “utopia” (44).

Adorno argues that modern society is not a true collective—even though society is becoming more oppressive—but is instead a collection of individuals. Each individual is like “an internalized robber band” (45) who has to control their own potential for violence.

Virility among men has now been “democratized” (45). Further, all masculine men carry with them a threat of violence and a tendency toward masochism. They lie about their own homosexuality and become sadistic “agents of repression” (46). This causes them to constantly shift between “two extremes” (46) of masculinity and effeminacy, making them embody the connection between homosexuality and totalitarianism.