Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

When someone runs on the street, they look afraid. Even a person running to catch a bus looks like their primeval ancestor who was running in terror. In the past, bourgeois culture valued walking as a way to have solitude. With the decline of bourgeois liberalism, people have turned to cars. Even then, people will easily resort back to running when situations like work demand it.

When someone fears something for no rational reason, that thing often comes true. Adorno gives the example of someone fearing that a certain person will meet their loved one, and the two are eventually introduced to each other. This is especially seen in people’s fears of being persecuted, a specific type of fear Adorno thinks is “contagious” (163). In practice, fascism is initiated by people obsessed with the possibility of their own persecution, leading to the realization of its victims’ own persecution fears.

A person being hurt by their lover is comparable to “agonizing pain” (164). The person who loses their lover turns from the individual feeling of being loved to a general sense of being abandoned by everyone. However, the scorned lover also becomes aware “of the inalienable and unindictable human right to be loved by the beloved” (164).

A sleepless night when someone is only able to sleep when morning is about to come is similar to the experience of someone who knows they will soon die. In both cases, people become very aware of losing time. This has become even more true in the modern era, when people have no power over their own lives.

Adorno somewhat agrees with the saying that a person’s memories are the only thing that cannot be taken from them. However, he adds that memories can also fade or change because of later experiences. The emotion of despair particularly can ruin one’s memories of the past.

The French writer Proust predicted what would happen with love in the modern age. Love has been corrupted by capitalist market values. Since there is no time left in people’s lives for love, lovers now cynically expect a return on their investment rather than giving of themselves freely.

Adorno views the most attractive women as the ones who lack imagination and self-awareness. This is especially seen in literary works about impoverished or suffering women like the Marquis de Sade’s Justine, because imagination has to give way to practicality. Bourgeois men are drawn to the “nomadic experience” and naivete expressed by such women because society has taught them to hate their sense of their own “soul” (170).

Very beautiful women “are doomed to unhappiness” (171). They either trade in their beauty for success and happiness, which eventually leaves them with nothing, or they use their beauty to try to achieve independence, although eventually settle for “domesticity” (171).

In bourgeois society, love is supposed to be “involuntary” and “a dispensation from work” (172). Nonetheless, love is still affected by social and economic pressures. Even though love is spontaneous and involuntary, eventually it still becomes a “tool of society” (172).

Patriarchal marriages are simultaneously built on two assumptions: That women are inferior, and that the husband is “the victim of manipulation” (173) by the wife. In practice, women become the masters of their own domains while husbands have to surrender a certain degree of control. The power imbalance is only kept in place by husbands’ status as wage-earners. Adorno concludes that women can only be emancipated by reforming society.

Adorno cites a poem by Goethe, which has a scene “to the effect that immortals bear aloft wanton children in arms of fire” (174). Instead of a scene supportive of sexual freedom, Adorno interprets it as instead reflecting bourgeois sexual values. Specifically, it represents how conditional the forgiveness of the traditional Christian interpretation of God can be, especially in the cases of sex workers.

Society discourages the pursuit of pleasure because society’s “nature is to demand more than [it] gives” (174). Adorno muses on the philosopher Schopenhauer’s pessimistic observation that even the satisfaction from achieving pleasure becomes not enough to keep humans happy, and eventually they become bored with their existence itself. However, Adorno deems Schopenhauer’s concept of suicidal boredom as coming from a bourgeois who simply does not have a real job. As for the working classes, Adorno argues that working people suffer from the domination work has over their lives and the limitations on leisure time, so they do not have the luxury of boredom.

Adorno believes that true freedom is incompatible with boredom. Instead, the bourgeoisie suffer from “shame” (176) brought about by the knowledge that their freedom is built on the work of others. The bourgeoisie cannot even fully enjoy sex within marriage because, for them, it is tainted by “material interests” (177). Adorno suggests this is why bourgeois values prefer asceticism.

Children are excited when visitors stay in their home during a holiday because the visitor brings with them unfamiliar objects. They talk to the child without “condescension” (177). The visitor’s presence is proof that the child’s own family is not the entire world.

Adorno claims we can tell if someone is truly a friend based on how they tell a person when someone has insulted them behind their back. It depends on how much the insult can “relate directly and transparently to shared decisions” (179). However, even a well-meaning person can, by relating someone’s criticism of another, act as a tool of society in putting social pressure on the person being criticized or insulted.

People facing “violent catastrophes” (179) often find themselves unexpectedly unafraid. When a person is faced with an event much larger than they are, they view it calmly, just as something “external” (179). Similarly, when someone encounters a person acting very badly against moral norms, like reading about a murder in the newspaper, they struggle to feel anything other than indifference. This is because people feel that they are detached from such significant events.

Nevertheless, some people also tend to be enraged by small social offenses. Adorno believes that this shows how society objects to “impropriety” but not “inhumanity” (181). People who do genuine good deeds identify themselves wholly with broad moral laws. Those who feel and act more strongly against violations of propriety identify with society and have a “private life that is formless” (181). Such people, Adorno believes, are kind to their enemies out in the world and are cruel to their loved ones and friends at home and in the community.

The fact that society imposes “mindless tasks” on citizens means that people have suffered a “permanent regression” (182). Even the people in power submit themselves to some of the oppression they maintain, which is why the psychological character of people across economic classes tends to be consistent. The wealthy sympathize with and are drawn to the poor, something based on their guilt over their privileges and the poverty of the lower classes. Conversely, people who rebel against society and are punished start to identify with those in power. Adorno asserts that even in the Nazi concentration camps, the victims identified to a degree with the officers running the camps.

Industrial standards have shaped even personal relationships between people. Every person’s speech has to be on the same level as everyone else’s and conversations are about “the most obvious, dullest and tritest matters” (183). This causes disagreements to be settled in impersonal ways and even splitting people’s opinions off from their personal experiences.

Morality is determined by social oppressors. The Greek philosopher Aristotle first described people’s moral or internal self as reflecting their external position in society. In this view, the rich are under an obligation to be an example of morality, even though the rich are inherently morally corrupt since they benefit from “brutal economic inequality” (186). Since the rich control production, they appear moral because it seems like they are giving something up by providing products and services, even though they profit from the process. Furthermore, the morality of today’s business-dominated society is based on the greed that was considered immoral in the past.

The elites distance themselves from blatant expressions of their own economic interests. While the rich can ignore the economic inequalities they benefit from, the poor are mostly prevented from seeing such inequalities. An example of this is how the 18th-century French aristocracy participated in the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, oblivious to the dangers to themselves.

Similar to the French aristocracy, Adorno perceives the haute bourgeoisie (upper bourgeoisie) of his own time as being similarly oblivious to their economic decline. While before the haute bourgeoisie believed in and worked toward progress, today they are anti-intellectual, culturally shallow, and think “workers are too well-off” (189).

Adorno reflects on how he met a wealthy German woman who sympathized with Hitler. Even though her individual personality was at odds with support for the Nazis, Adorno speculates that her social identity as a member of the elite instead compelled her to have a positive view of Hitler.

Continental Europe has become fascinated with English culture. Adorno speculates this is because in England culture is not treated as something separate from daily life. Otherwise, in people’s daily lives, they are encouraged to say and do only what benefits themselves. There is thus an appeal in “Anglomania,” which allows for the “aestheticizing” of “everyday life” (189), especially for people who are rising into the upper and middle classes. Still, this all takes superficial and shallow forms, like “the boredom of cocktail parties” (190), and does not represent a truly fulfilling life.

Once again, Adorno lists a group of short sayings. The “freed slave” says, “I hate the vulgar rabble and shun it” (190). It is impossible to imagine that evil people will one day die. Meaning “I” when you say “we” is an insult. We do not really dream, but instead dreams come to and act upon us. When people reach their 85th birthday, the most pleasurable gift they can receive is a “guide to the realm of the dead” (190). The fact that the character of the servant Leporello from the opera Don Giovanni is hungry and poor “casts doubt on the existence of” (190) Leporello’s employer Don Juan.

Adorno reflects on being a child and thinking that men who shoveled snow because they had no jobs got “what they deserve” (190). He defines love as “the power to see similarity in the dissimilar” (191). A circus advertisement claimed that the circus is more authentic than the cinema or the theater. A movie made following the strict censorship rules of the Hays Code could be fantastic art, “but not in a world in which there is a Hays Office” (191). The art form of Expressionism is that it shows people who are totally alienated from each other, meaning they are practically “dead” (191).

The work of the poet Rudolf Borchardt, who reworked German folk songs, is like a work of law. In order to support “progressive enlightenment,” thinkers will have to resort to “reactionary arguments against Western culture” (192). Truth is found in thoughts that the person thinking them do not fully understand. Every thought seems simple in the light of “oblivion” (192). Only through vulnerability can someone truly find love.

Adorno believes that the coming of fascism in Germany was clear from his own childhood memories. For example, Adorno remembers when a schoolmate was beaten by other students and complained to the teacher, who called him a “traitor” (193). He also believes one could see the beginnings of fascism in the pupils who mocked a top student when they made a mistake, and in the rebellious students who, after they graduated, nonetheless joined with their former teachers in the beer halls.

Workers are “less and less aware that they are” (193) workers. Adorno credits this lack of awareness to industrial technology reaching a point where many jobs do not require skills. This state of affairs also makes it seem as if anyone can become successful enough to join the elite. Technological progress does hold out the potential to erase economic inequality and privilege, but social forces prevent it. Instead, everyone— even those at the top—is at risk of being fired for unclear reasons, creating economic precarity for many people across society.

In Europe, the time before the rise of the bourgeois is still reflected in the “shame felt at being paid for personal services or favors” (195). However, in the United States, Americans do accept such tips, which makes American workers appear undignified to Europeans. It also undermines the reality that there are certain services that should not be subjected to the “exchange value” (195). Such an attitude discourages spontaneity in human interaction and standardizes relationships.

Thought itself has been reduced to just solving problems. It is assumed that any intellectual issue has a definitive, right answer. This prevents people from imagining how to reform society. What keeps the mind so inhibited is the “socialization of mind” under a society that is itself “imprisoned” (197).