Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Adorno interprets the fairy tale of Snow White as melancholic. Even though the story has a happy ending, it still presents death through Snow White’s mother’s death in childbirth and the deep, death-like sleep Snow White falls into. Snow White’s happy ending of just leaving with a prince she only has kind feelings for also seems hollow. Adorno sees this as reflecting how people, despite melancholy in their own lives, can hold onto the hope that “one day, in spite of all, real deliverance will come” (121). This may be an “illusory belief,” but it is also, in Adorno’s view, “inseparable” (121-122) from truth.

The belief that the intellect benefits from a lack of emotions is itself a symptom of ignorance. Instead, Adorno argues that the intellect and emotions both suffer from not having enough of the other. He gives the examples of how love depends on memory and desire is connected to the imagination. Another example is that fantasy, rather than being “childish” (122), is an essential part of how the mind forms judgments, since fantasy helps people conceive of the relationships between objects. Without fantasy, people make judgments based only on what they already know. Also, without emotion, reason actually “serves only the purpose of preventing thought” (123).

Adorno compares the modern world to what the Nazis believed the Weimer Republic was like. Modern society dominates individuals not by using force, but by making people “their own voluntary and zealous overseers” (124). Even scientists suffer from a “sickness” (124) of the intellect that prevents them from thinking independently.

Adorno sees thought itself as having been “reduced to replaceable, exchangeable dispositions” (124). Ideas are important or unimportant based on how useful they are to an organization. By strictly organizing the world and ideas according to supposed importance, it is easier to ignore “social injustice” (125). The value of philosophy itself is reduced to the supposed importance of its subject. By trying to find the truth in this way, modern thinking instead rejects truth.

To understand the world, a person’s thoughts must have a certain distance from the subject being contemplated. This allows the thinker to consider the object in ways beyond the purely factual. Adorno agrees with Hegel and Nietzsche that “every thought involves play” (127), which is in contrast to positivism, which is “guided by the control mechanisms of science” (128) and wrongly claims to understand the absolute despite the subjective nature of “human knowledge” (128).

Adorno advises intellectuals to “let no-one represent you” (128). Representation only supports the mistaken idea that anyone in an organization who does intellectual work is interchangeable when it comes to their work. To strike the important balance between individualism and collectivism, intellectual workers have to turn to “free collaboration and solidarity” (129).

The strict distinction between play and work that defines modern life “is a basic rule of repressive self-discipline” (130). Mixing leisure and work is what used to define life and the lives and careers of intellectuals like Nietzsche, but modern society is increasingly hostile to such activities.

Influential men view other people as “objects” who are either “usable” or “an obstacle” (131). The Nazis took this to an extreme in their treatment of the Jews. Instead of distinguishing people as either enemies or friends, Adorno urges the reader to avoid thinking about people with such a simple binary.

Intellectuals, especially philosophers, are estranged from “practical life” (132). However, practical life is necessary for intellectuals to write about the world in the first place. They have to choose between “sinking to the level of what [they are] dealing with” (132), or they allow their thinking to become so abstract that they deal with the representation of reality rather than reality itself. In a way, this means that individuals have to choose between being a child and becoming an adult.

There is a type of intellectual that Adorno describes as being like “wrestlers” (133) who are wrestling with themselves and trying to assert their individuality against social pressure. The danger is that some of these intellectuals choose to vent their struggles against another target. Adorno compares this to Martin Luther, who struggled with his conscience and fought against the Devil but, in reality, struck out against Jews and peasants.

Even with society becoming more overbearing, individuality continues to exist. By defining themselves against society, individuals can still assert themselves or, as Adorno puts it, a person “in relation to the general becomes particular” (135). The pressure of living in a society where the capitalist market makes everything into a competition causes people to exaggerate their own individualism, what Adorno calls the “privilege of the self” (135).

People give advice to someone else to assuage their guilt that they cannot or will not help that person. In a society where people have no options, advice “equals condemnation” (136). This is especially apparent with people who try to help their most vulnerable friends with advice, but they talk with a “sombre, threatening air” (136).

By standardizing how people learn to speak through the general education in schools, the ability of people to express their own ideas weakens. Since people speak in standard and institutionalized ways, the subject of speech has become unrelated to the speech itself.

Instead of debate, speech has become “sportified” (137), with people simply trying to assert their power rather than convince each other. At the same time, “great and trivial political slogans” (138) have become more widespread, to the point they have begun to influence even the most private aspects of people’s lives.

Haste and “nervousness” (138) have spread like a disease. People are constantly having to work, even during their free time. The concept of haste is driven by people trying to survive by going along with the demands of the collective. This manifests in the mobility of people in the modern era, whose constant movement erodes differences between rural and urban areas and contributes to the decline of the traditional home, dealing another blow to individualism.

Adorno believes that one of the results of the Enlightenment was the abolition of the power images had over humanity. Instead of traditional images, people are now in thrall to data and categories of classification, with abstraction in decline. The images that do exist, like the “little silhouettes of men or houses” (140) seen in signs and advertisements, represent the general and average. Such illustrations now stand in for everyday concepts like jokes.

The principle behind film is a radical naturalism, seeking to recreate reality. However, inadvertently the truth of the film becomes a lie, meaning the images promoted by films become a new reality. This “ambiguity” between “reason and communication” (142) is something that exists within all artistic work.

The tendency of film to blur its own representation of reality has made historical recreations more difficult. The playwright Friedrich Schiller thought it was difficult to represent political history in a play because it requires the writer to ignore the emotional element. Literary fiction in Adorno’s day addresses this problem by trying to humanize historical figures, but this is impossible in film. Instead, cinema simplifies history and reduces it to “archetypes” (144), which makes it impossible to portray fascism in film. While it is possible to portray freedom through simple narratives of heroism and resistance, it is impossible to depict complete unfreedom, which can only be “recognized” not “represented” (144).

Art caters to people’s taste for works that shock, or which sympathize with people who do not fit in with society. While claiming to challenge the dominant culture, such works are still “mimetic” (145), meaning they still impress on the viewer or reader elements of the dominant culture. Artistic subjectivity is shaped by people’s emotional reactions rather than political or social contemplation, although even these subjective reactions are influenced by the “cultural industry” (145). Under this influence, people reject even portrayals of the erotic.

Completely individual responses to art are fading, but at the same time there is no collective understanding of art arising to take its place. Still, it is impossible for any artist to resist the demands of “collectivization” (146). Even when artists try to make their work a “demand for positive community” (146), it eventually gives rise to totalitarian expressions of art. Only the fact that emotions and aestheticism still shape culture prevents the culture from entirely giving way to what Adorno describes as “brutal Futurism” (146).

Under modern culture, people relate to the technological and capitalist forces that keep them alienated while being disconnected from the “human component of culture” (146). Adorno sees this as springing from “kitsch” (147)—overly sentimental and cheap cultural products.

Kitsch has existed since antiquity, but it has become widespread with industrial manufacturing. There has always been a tension between kitsch and culture, but in modern society the lines are becoming severely blurred. Culture is now shaped by kitsch instead of true art.

People retain their individuality, but that individuality is shaped by social rules and their resistance to it. Reactionary critics of modern culture blame the “decay” (148) of individualism on individuals themselves. However, this ignores the social and material forces that affect all individuals. While in the modern era people seemed to enjoy the most freedom as individuals, at the same time fascism was on the rise. Adorno sees this situation as the result of a culture that celebrates individuals and their emotions, while ignoring social ties and conflict that also contribute to the way people define themselves.

Adorno argues that people obviously benefit when they are freed from oppressive societies. However, they are also damaged when they are alienated from their society, because individuals need social ties to other people in order to achieve true freedom. Similarly, the Christian doctrine of personal salvation recognized the need to “embrace humanity” (150). Individual freedom alone ignores the possibility of improving society for all. Adorno urges us to “make an end of the fatality which individualizes men” (150).

The point of dialectical thought is to transcend logic, but it still depends on logic. Logic constrains dialectical reasoning. This is an example of how any order can only be overcome by a universal principle derived from the order itself. This is also how history—which Adorno sees as a series of economic stages of development—progresses, as ideas within an existing order clash against and negate their antithesis.

Responding to the cliché that history is written by the victors, Adorno adds that any study of history should also include the “waste products and blind spots” (151) left behind by the dialectical process driving history. These things manifest as heretical and eccentric people and ideas.

Such “waste products” are best seen in art. Adorno even notes that literature for children, like Alice in Wonderland, generally better represents this tendency than art for adults. However, some artists like the French composer Erik Satie represent this quality.

With the decline of religion, bourgeois culture now most values “geniuneness.” By this, Adorno means the idea that an individual “should be wholly and entirely what he is” (152). Such an idea also shaped fascism, which promised a heroic cult of the individual.

Even this genuineness is not equal to truth. The self-reflection that is part of psychology does not necessarily reveal the authentic self because it involves “play-acting” (154). Genuineness is an act of defiance against society, but humans develop their selves through imitating other humans. In light of this, genuineness is a fetish, something arbitrarily given value when it is not actually a “foundation” (155).

If people ask “what is the goal of an emancipated society,” the answer is often “the fulfillment of human possibilities or richness of life” (155). However, the answer should instead be that no one goes hungry. The danger is not one of individuals becoming decadent through luxury, but of society becoming “savage” (156). Adorno muses that a truly liberated society, one liberated from “want” (157), would become aware of, and abandon, the social arrangements designed to avoid want but which only create more want among society’s people.