Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

Content Warning: This section contains explicit descriptions of the Holocaust and antisemitism.

Theodor Adorno describes his purpose in writing Minima Moralia as attempting to revive the now-dead philosophy of “the teaching of the good life” (15). Once the goal of much of philosophy, the philosophical question of the “good life” is now ignored because modern people have dedicated their lives to capitalism or, as Adorno puts it, “mere consumption” (15). Adorno argues that people have now dedicated their entire lives to production and to work. In fact, Adorno suggests modern people have lost their very essence, and only by “virtue of opposition to production” (15) can individuals reclaim their humanity.

Adorno turns to the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He states that he copied Hegel’s “method” (16) in writing Minima Moralia. Specifically, Hegel (and Adorno) reject the idea that an individual human being’s experience of the world purely comes from “being-for-itself” (16), meaning our own consciousness and self-awareness. Instead, Hegel suggests that our experience of the world is dialectical, emerging from a relationship between two opposed or interconnected forces. For Adorno, all individuals are in a dialectical relationship with the society around them.