Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Though largely unknown outside of certain obscure academic circles, Theodore W. Adorno was, without a doubt, the foremost socio-political theorist of the 20th century. For truly intelligent, literate, questing minds (free of occultist nonsense) Adorno's MINIMA MORALIA is absolutely indispensible. A compendium of always eloquent, surprising, mournful, and deeply humane musings on modern capitalist society in all its terrible unfreedom, this book is among the most uncompromisingly radical ever written (cf. Max Stirner's THE EGO AND ITS OWN). To read and understand Adorno--even imperfectly--is to experience the tremendous pleasure of being in the presence of impeccable historical awareness, great moral rectitude, and visionary wisdom.

Adorno, at first grown up upper-class-protected, became acquainted with the horror only outside the family (his mother was a classical musician). Outside: on the school-yards, pursued and pushed by his peer group, because he always was teacher's darling. Outside: being a Jew walking on Nazi-streets of a pre-Hitler Germany with subtle racial discrimination. They soon would build Auschwitz. The same pattern, which at first as the contempt of mediocre school-gangs came into much too close contact to Adorno, secondly reached more painful intensity in the shape of the ideological constructions and daily realities of the National Socialism in the Third Reich. Though no one had a presentiment of the coming Holocaust, Adorno told, that the exploding of inhumanity did not astound him, after all that he had to suffer in the years before. Adorno fled to the U.S. for political reasons and because his father had Jewish roots. He worked in New York in the "Institute for Social Research". After exile (in the 1950s) Adorno returned to Frankfurt. He soon became a hero of the student revolts of 1968, but unfortunately students prefered a style of discussion and acting (Adorno's lectures were disrupted by bare breast girls), - a style of discussion and acting, which the (latent conservative) upper-class child Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno (called "Teddy" by the students) disliked in the beginning, in the middle and at the end of his life. His literary and philosophical masterpiece MINIMA MORALIA however is a testament of a razor-sharp philosophical mind, using an élitist, brilliantly aphoristic language. He continually followed the principle, that the only method to write nowadays is an essayistic, non-systematic, code word analyzing method, considering the fact, that big mega-philosophies (fascism, marxism ...) always tumble down after a while or seep silently, trickle away by the working process of dialectic thinkers. Since the attack against the World Trade Center in New York the understanding grows, that living in bondage with a false philosophy or a fundamentalist religion or an impudence nation (sometimes difficult to decide) nearly inevitably leads into a catastrophe. It is a maybe confusing but easily remembered coincidence, that Adorno's birthday is on a "September Eleven" (9/11/1903), duplicating the hint at the warning that ideological instigation gives rise to an escalation of terrible disasters. Like a Noam Chomsky or a grandchild of Nietzsche, Marx and Kierkegaard this German philosopher, co-founder of the so-called "Frankfurter Schule", provides with ample food for thought with his dense, challenging prose. But on the other hand he very lowly uses language as a poet, describing daily life and it's false consciousness: leading the view to Proust or Sigmund Freud, to "Golden Gate" or "Tough Babies", to cats or mammoths, to marriage and divorce, to "L 'inutile beauté" or "Wishful Thinking", to "Il servo padrone" and "They, the people": if you decide to rea

...when it comes to praising this book. as a european refugee in this country, i feel that adorno's lucidity is almost uncanny. many times i read and reread one page, enjoying and deeply respecting his wisdom and intellectual courage, shocked by his insight. it is not an easy reading and it is mostly painful...but very, very rewarding. i love books more than anything, and i spend all my money and time on them, but until now i have not read anything comparable. the only other book i know of that offers such challenge and such solace is le mythe de sisyphe by camus. by the way, i hope the english translation is good, but i recommend to read it in german.

The paradox of Adorno is that he is known as a "difficult, complex, and hard to read" writer...but the typists at the Princeton Radio Research Project, at which Adorno spent a few unhappy years, found his work quite readable. The administrators at the project found him difficult as a writer and perhaps personally because they were so embedded in the very system Adorno had identified ("the administered world") that they could not think outside its categories.Although Minima Moralia does presume some knowledge of Continental philosophy and German literature, it is quite readable, entertaining, and at the close rather moving: its "finale" reminds me of the ending of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto.Now, the "Logical Positivist" philosopher Rudolf Carnap has called philosophers like Heidegger and Adorno "musicians without talent." This shows a mistaken view of music (inherited from Plato) as at best entertaining sounds without meaning, and it fails to account for entertainment, which is taken as a primitive.There is a musical quality in Minima Moralia but even as the informed concert-goer finds layers of meaning in good works, Minima Moralia rewards the patient reader.Teddy would shudder at my saying this, but Minima Moralia is a good buy because it repays re-reading.

Although the Frankfurt School enjoyed some popularity in the US during the 1960s, its greatest writer never gained a following. Read this book and you may understand why: Adorno's thought is dense, allusive, and difficult to assimilate. It assumes quite some background in European, and especially German, intellectual history.The right reader, however, will find Minima Moralia a tightly written, polished masterpiece. It is essentially a series of aphorisms in the style of Nietzsche. Adorno blends sharp observations about daily life in the 20th century with choice gleanings from philosophy, literature and history. The result is a unique work of cultural criticism that defies characterization or summary.Almost every sentence of Minima Moralia contains a devastating insight into modern culture. Must reading for anyone who cares about Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, and all related strands of thought.