Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Everyone has a life or personality that reflects a character from fairy tales. Examples listed by Adorno include a beautiful person who looks at themselves in the mirror like the Evil Queen from Snow White, the boy who sets out on an adventure to find his fortune, and women who deal with dangers as they set out in a city like Little Red Riding Hood.

A man from petty bourgeois origins has to express himself loudly and with arrogance to “make himself heard” (88). It is out of people who feel such powerlessness, anger, and “[w]eakness posing [as] strength” (89) that gives rise to fascism.

Drawing on the philosophy of Friedrich Schiller, Adorno argues that sex is an equalizer because it makes everything else an object. The philosophy of Idealism, developed by thinkers like Kierkegaard, does something similar by making everyone abstract through “the unfettered sovereignty of thought” (90).

Adorno speculates women are haunted by the pain of sex and as such are “objects of violence” (90). Modern society has removed this pain, but the memory of it especially affects petty bourgeoise women. Society remains patriarchal, and it pressures women into sex with men. The only power society gives women is the right to refuse a man’s sexual advances, but it is understood that each woman has to give in eventually. Denying women freedom, in modern society women can only achieve happiness by making others happy.

Adorno compares the domestic dramas of the playwright Henrik Ibsen, the children’s book Der Struwwelpeter, and 19th-century family photos. All the family figures being depicted in all these cultural artifacts look like “agitated marionettes” (92), people who are suffering and completely manipulated.

Ibsen’s plays were once a radical attack on bourgeois values, but by Adorno’s day they seemed “old-fashioned and outdated” (92). Still, his work has a certain relevance in depicting how “reasonable” people can allow the “unreasonable behavior” of others (92). Adorno believes this is illustrated by the case of women. Even though women are now allowed more freedom in society, they are still treated as “objects” (92). In both Adorno’s and Ibsen’s time, some women were ready to help enforce the rules of their own oppression and help punish women who defied social norms. It is because this trend still exists that the female characters in Ibsen’s plays are “called ‘modern’” (93).

In the 19th century, when Victorian bourgeois morals were strong, people had to confront the bourgeoisie on both economic and moral levels. Opponents of bourgeois values combated the idea of “goodness” (94), which made morality a matter of the individual’s conscience instead of a matter of social morality. Without a concept of social good, people can only seek to ease, not cure, the causes of their suffering. The lack of social good also denies any idea of all people deserving a certain standard of life.

True beauty is opposed to goodness. Goodness imposes a universal social standard on all individuals, while beauty favors each individual’s “particularity” (94). Adorno gives the example of one of Ibsen’s heroines, Hedda Gabler, who commits a social offense as an act of protest against an unhappy marriage, as a case where beauty acts against goodness. The paradox is that, to do a moral act, one sometimes has to act against what is considered moral.

Ideas of femininity are just a creation of a society dominated by the masculine. Bourgeois society claims that femininity is part of “nature,” but this is a “lie” (95). Instead, femininity is a social construct that serves the purpose of making women subservient to men.

Adorno agrees with the philosopher Fredrich Nietzsche that, with the decline of religion and the secularization of philosophy, “restrictive prohibitions lost their inherent authority, their substantiality” (96). In the 19th century, the person who lived this philosophical view was a selfish hedonist. Now, however, Adorno believes Nietzsche’s “amoralist” who resists social norms would “be as kind, gentle, unegoistic and open-hearted as Nietzsche was then” (96).

Adorno discusses Nietzsche’s argument against Christianity: Simply because one has hope that something is true, it does not make that thing true. However, Adorno sees this as contradicting another of Nietzsche’s ideas, amor fati (“love of fate”), which means accepting whatever happens to you. There is no more reason to love what happens to us than to “believe true what we hope” (98). Rather, Adorno sees no reason to deny that hope and truth are related. Just because we have to recognize the “world’s horror” (98) does not mean that we have to accept that as the only truth and deny that hope can ever be truth.

Reflecting on the works of the writer Anatole France, Adorno writes that France’s writing leaves him with a sense of “uneasiness” (99). This unease stems from how calm and assured France’s tone is in his work. France’s “detachment” comes across as a “concession” (99) to the horrors of the world. Due to how modern society distinguishes between “professional conversations” and “strictly conventional” conversations, it is no longer possible to express oneself “without arrogance, without trespassing on the time of others” (99).

Disappointed by how the public of his own time received his work, the 19th-century novelist Gustav Flaubert hoped posterity would have a better opinion of his work. However, no intellectual can even hope that they will be well-remembered by posterity without “sinking into conformity” (100). In a way, being forgotten is the same as becoming famous. When they become celebrities, people are no longer themselves, but instead become “alien and incomprehensible to themselves” (100-1).

The more specific a writer is, the less clear their writing is to readers. Meanwhile, the more “loose and irresponsible” (101) a writer’s style is, the easier they are understood. This is because a lot of style hinders people’s understanding, but a free and conversational style is easier to engage. Unpolished writing allows readers to imagine the points they would like to see and already believe, while more specific and polished writing forces the writer’s point of view on readers.

The cause of workers is undermined by the fact that their spoken dialects are seen as less cultured than written language. This is partially because the language of the poor and workers are shaped by the need “to endure desperate situations without despair, to mock themselves along with the enemy” (102).

Adorno asserts that the claim that all individuals are equally as dangerous encourages governments to eliminate differences. Adorno suggests the idea that people can be “different without fear” (103) is preferable. As proof, Adorno claims that even advocates of equality turn on groups that do not conform.

The atrocities committed by Nazi Germany defy understanding, especially because from the beginning the Nazi agenda was enacted and carried out without “pleasure” (103). Adorno argues that, even in 1870 when the history of German imperialism began with the creation of a unified German state, there was a sense of pessimism and looming collapse, what Adorno calls the “destructive drive” (104).

Sympathy for victims of atrocities decrease in proportion to how much the victims look like readers. Adorno asserts that this tendency made the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust possible. Authoritarian governments also exploit this tendency to reduce their victims into “things” (105).

Adorno muses on the argument that Germany could have won World War II if not for Hitler’s “stupidity” (105). However, Adorno argues that this stupidity came from the fact that the people running Nazi Germany had been excluded from power in the past. Their lack of political knowledge gave them the recklessness to start World War II in the first place, and the stupidity that doomed their cause. Hitler also did not see how liberal capitalism outside of Germany was “establishing […] its irresistible domination” (106).

Nazi Germany failed to produce a single successful work of art. Average people generally practiced “passive resistance” (107) to the culture the Nazis tried to impose. Nazi culture also failed to significantly influence the military and political aspects of the country. The example Adorno gives is military strategy. He argues that Nazi Germany’s military strategy did not actually exist, because the German army was based completely around industry and its actions were wholly mechanized. This mechanization meant that World War II was “conducted […] as if by a schoolboy sticking flags into charts” (107).

All information is filtered through a “culture industry” (108). As a result, not only are lies presented as truths, truths can seem untrue. For example, the “implausibility” (108) of Nazi Germany’s atrocities made them difficult to believe for the German people and even the English press. Fascist governments operate by blurring the distinction between lies and truths.

Adorno lists a number of various points here. First, he views an artist’s talent as “successfully sublimated rage” (109) that expresses itself in their work. Adorno considers the Biblical verse “Kick against the pricks” (Acts 9: 5), an idiom referring to the pointed sticks used to fence in cattle and meaning fighting against something that is inevitable. Instead, he says people in his time kick with the pricks, meaning they side with the irresistible forces of society. Certain objects carry “modes of behavior,” like how slippers represent the “hatred of bending down” (110).

The rude and defiant behavior of teenagers shows that “freedom comes to mean the same thing as insolence” (110). When Germans lie, they believe it themselves. The German expression, “It’s completely and utterly out of the question” (110), is a declaration of defiance that comes out of necessity and reflects the history of Nazi Germany. Bread factories have made the prayer “Give us our daily bread” obsolete, which Adorno sees as a strong argument against Christianity being true. Antisemitism is “the rumor about Jews” and foreign words in German are the “Jews of language” (110). Using incorrect standard German grammar, which came out of the dialect of German Adorno grew up speaking, made Adorno nostalgic for his childhood at a time when he was already in a sad mood.

A work of literature may be difficult to read, but it can still enter tradition. For this, Adorno gives the example of the second part of Goethe’s Faust, which is heavily quoted. Adorno describes each work of art as an “uncommitted crime” (111). All tragedies contain an echo of early humanity’s fear of demons. Sunrises are always “faint […] like a hope that all may yet be well” (111). Adorno claims one can tell when a woman speaking on the telephone is attractive because the voice contains “ease” (111) and confidence. Even pleasant dreams are spoiled slightly by the awareness that they are only dreams.

The only way to know one was happy is if you no longer feel happy. Returning to one’s childhood home always feels like a fresh experience, even if nothing about the home has changed. Since flowers soon die, picking and keeping them “serves only to perpetuate the transient” (112).

Finally, Adorno reflects on how society is no longer ruled by public opinion, but by the economy. In modern society, individuality is “null and void” even though the system also depends on “division” (113).

The optimism of the workers’ rights movement paradoxically grows the more capitalism takes over society. Everyone has faith that technology, not political change, will improve society soon. Anything stating that progress would have to come over a longer span of time or would require “public enlightenment” (114) has been ignored. Among leftists, anything short of optimism is seen as abandoning the cause.

The recently discovered skeleton of a dinosaur, the Loch Ness Monster, and King Kong “are collective projections of the monstrous total State” (115). Adorno sees the widespread fascination with prehistoric animals and places like zoos as a sign of people needing to believe that animals could survive humanity’s impact on the environment, and even spawn a new species better than humans.

At the same time, Adorno muses that the new design for zoos—the use of open spaces rather than cages—is worse in a way because it blatantly teases the animals with freedom. Still, Adorno admits that animals suffer more in cages. However, the open spaces of zoological gardens do reflect a control of nature stemming out of 19th-century colonialism and European nations’ domination of rural environments, like those in Central Asia and Africa.

People cannot even sit at a café without feeling pressured to leave as soon as possible. The quality of the service at hotels is also getting worse, in Adorno’s view. Specifically, “no-one is concerned for the client’s comfort” (117). He regards this as another symptom of the impact of technology and the division of labor on society, because the staff do not know what options are available at their own establishment and there is no space for fulfilling a specific request that is not already on a list of options.

Technological development has reached a point where industrial manufacturing is practically “autonomous” (118). This has encouraged a social attitude where people only buy what is new and already popular. At the same time, people are compelled to consume everything completely, even a book or a film, even though the number of options available are massive.