Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

“The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become ‘practical’, a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry.”

Intellectualism itself has become standardized under capitalism, reflecting The Perversion of Culture by Commercial Interests. It is a result of positivism, which attempts to understand everything through data and scientific analysis, and “late capitalism” (133), a phase of capitalism where everything is subjected to economics and the free market.

“The subjugation of life to the process of production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice.”

Insolation is one of the consequences of society being controlled by work and profit. People become “alienated human beings” (35)—not only from each other and their communities, but from their own human nature.

“In principle everyone, however powerful, is an object.”

Modernity leads to dehumanization of everyone, even people in high political positions. In Adorno’s view, they become objects, either in terms of becoming commodities on the market or of falling under the power of the collectivized state.

“Inexorably, the thought of money and all its attendant conflicts extends into the most tender and most sublime spiritual relationships.”

In Adorno’s sense of modernity, the crisis is not just that money and the market have corrupted society, but that it has also corrupted people’s ability to comprehend themselves and their potential as human beings, leading to The Deterioration of Human Experience in Capitalist Societies.

“The idea that after this war life will continue ‘normally’ or even that culture might be ‘rebuilt’­—as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation—is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for?”

One of the themes Adorno returns to is progress and barbarism, and how the two can co-exist. One of his many concerns is that the violence of World War II, even violence taken against the Nazi leadership after they are put on trial, will only serve to perpetuate barbarism in Western culture.

“It is part of the mechanism of domination to forbid recognition of the suffering it produces, and there is a straight line of development between the gospel of happiness and the construction of camps of extermination so far off in Poland that each of our own countrymen can convince himself that he cannot hear the screams of pain.”

In a bold claim, Adorno states that the danger of psychology in modern society is that it imposes false and standardized ideals on individuals in order for them to achieve happiness. This is something that could potentially lead to fascism because, for Adorno, it represents a submission to an overbearing and mechanistic social order.

“The admittance of women to every conceivable supervised activity conceals continuing dehumanization. In big business they remain what they were in the family, objects.”

Adorno does not believe that capitalism results in the liberation of women. Instead, women’s true emancipation will have to come from reforming society itself.

“Without hope, the idea of truth would be scarcely even thinkable, and it is the cardinal untruth, having recognized existence to be bad, to present it as truth simply because it has been recognized.”

This passage represents one of the more difficult concepts in Minima Moralia. Adorno suggests that hope should not be rejected on a positivistic basis, meaning that there is little rational reason for hope. Instead, hope should be seen as an emotional truth, a way humans seek to manage harrowing situations.

“Things have come to a pass where lying sounds like truth, truth like lying.”

Modern societies are filled with propaganda and tools used to alienate people from their own natures as human beings. As a result, the truths emerging from human nature may seem like lies, while lies spread by those in power and which are motivated by only economic self-interest are presented through mass culture as truths, reflecting The Perversion of Culture by Commercial Interests.

“The world is systematized horror, but therefore it is to do the world too much honour to think of it entirely as a system; for its unifying principle is division, and it reconciles by asserting unimpaired the irreconcilability of the general and the particular.”

Minima Moralia is often peppered with Adorno’s pessimistic statements. A major reason why Adorno takes such a dim view of modernity is that it encourages alienation, leading to “division” and “systematized horror.” He does, however, suggest elsewhere in the text that this state of affairs is not inevitable and should be resisted.

“A breed of men has secretly grown up that hungers for the compulsion and restriction imposed by the absurd persistence of domination.”

Even non-totalitarian societies in the modern era are oppressive and collectivized in a way, leading to The Decline of Independent Thought. This domination operates in such a way that force is unnecessary because people regulate themselves and censor their own thoughts and feelings.

“The overbearing matter-of-factness which sacrifices the subject to the ascertainment of the truth, rejects at once truth and objectivity.”

Here, Adorno is making another critique of positivism. Rather than being objective, positivist statements ignore deeper, emotional truths that cannot be captured through scientific observation and logic.

“Succumbing to the universal mechanisms of competition and having no other means of adaptation to the market and making good than their petrified otherness, they plunge passionately into the privilege of their self and so exaggerate themselves that they completely eradicate what they are taken for.”

One of the dialectical contradictions that Adorno sees is that with increased individualism, societies become more oppressive and collectivist. Essentially, this is because by embracing individualism, people are placing their identities on the market, rather than discovering their authentic selves through communion with others.

“If today the trace of humanity seems to persist only in the individual in his decline, it admonishes us to make an end of the fatality which individualizes men, only to break them completely in their isolation.”

The tension between individualism and an increasingly oppressive society comes out of how people are alienated. By becoming alienated from each other and from society, people become weaker and more controlled by social forces, leading to The Deterioration of Human Experience in Capitalist Societies.

“A mankind which no longer knows want will begin to have an inkling of the delusory, futile nature of all the arrangements hitherto made in order to escape want, which used wealth to reproduce want on a larger scale.”

Drawing from Karl Marx, Adorno suggests here that technology does have the potential to bring an end to poverty and income inequality in society. However, there are social systems in place that perpetuate poverty.

“Really, they no longer want ecstasy at all, but merely compensation for an outlay that, best of all, they would like to save as superfluous.”

The spread of market values over every facet of life affects even sex. People view sex itself as only a way to receive material benefits from their partner, thinking in terms of “compensation” and “outlay” instead of genuine connection.

“The barbaric success-religion of today is consequently not simply contrary to morality: it is the homecoming of the West to the venerable morals of our ancestors.”

For Adorno, progress and barbarism can co-exist and modern societies can embrace barbarism through the normalization of violence. Likewise, barbarism also expresses itself in how greed has become accepted under the values of late capitalism.

“The socialization of mind keeps it boxed in, isolated in a glass case, as long as society is itself imprisoned.”

Intellectuals are not immune to the processes of social domination and alienation that Adorno describes. Their increasing isolation and the marketization of art and culture has led to The Decline of Independent Thought. People must reject such isolation and commercial values to truly thrive and create.

“The film has succeeded in transforming subjects so indistinguishably into social functions, that those wholly encompassed, no longer aware of any conflict, enjoy their own dehumanization as something human, as the joy of warmth.”

Adorno views the entire medium of film as complicit in the problems of modernity and as being a reflection of The Perversion of Culture by Commercial Interests. Like industrial and technological processes themselves, the film is a tool for society to impose false ideals of happiness that further alienate people from their true natures.

“Happiness is obsolete: uneconomic.”

Adorno often distinguishes between the false happiness encouraged by psychology and the true happiness that comes from authentic emotions. He adds here another reason for the decline of genuine happiness: It is no longer useful to a society obsessed with labor and finances, leading to The Deterioration of Human Experience in Capitalist Societies.

“The task of art today is to bring chaos into order.”

Similar to Friedrich Nietzsche, Adorno sees art as a means for people to find meaning and to become familiar with their own natures as human beings. In this way, art disrupts the mechanized, standardized society that Adorno condemns, and is one potential tool against The Decline of Independent Thought.

“Only a humanity to whom death has become as indifferent as its members, that has itself died, can inflict it administratively on innumerable people.”

Death has lost its special, metaphysical qualities, in no small part because everyone seems replaceable in modern society. Adorno sees this as not only another symptom of the problems with modernity, but also one of the situations that can lead into fascism.

“Panic breaks once again, after millennia of enlightenment, over a humanity whose control of nature as control of men far exceeds in horror anything men ever had to fear from nature.”

There are multiple reasons that Adorno believes that people turn to occultism, rather than traditional religion. One of these is the horrors of what authoritarian societies are capable of in modernity.