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Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life
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Key Figures
Theodor Adorno
Theodor Adorno was a philosopher and musicologist. He was born on September 11th, 1903, in the German city of Frankfurt. Adorno came from a well-off, upper-middle class family, but one where both his parents were outsiders to Germany in one way or another. His mother was a former professional singer from Corsica named Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, while his father, the owner of a wine export business, was Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, a Jewish man who converted to Protestantism. As his mother was proud of her aristocratic heritage, she insisted on something rare at the time, which was that Adorno be given both his parental surnames, becoming “Theodor Wiesengrund-Adorno.” It was shortened to just Adorno later in his life.
Over the course of his adult life, Adorno worked as a concert reviewer and as a university philosophy teacher. His thought and writing were deeply shaped by his life during the World War II era. Since his father Oscar was Jewish, Theodor faced persecution and was banned from any position teaching philosophy at universities under the Nazi regime. Adorno was able to migrate to Britain in 1934 and later to the United States. He would not return to Germany until 1949. Adorno’s experiences with persecution and state authority informed his deeply negative views on modern governments, especially his view that even non-fascist modern governments are increasingly authoritarian. He died in 1969 while on a trip to Switzerland.
Friedrich Hegel
One of the philosophers that most influenced Theodor Adorno, Hegel was a major philosophical figure from the late 18th/early 19th centuries. He was born on August 27th, 1770, in the German town of Stuttgard in what used to be the Duchy of Württemberg. His father Georg was a civil servant and his mother Maria Magdalena came from a middle-class family. After going to a seminary, Hegel’s views on Christianity became more radical. He earned a PhD in philosophy from the University of Jena in the northern German region of Thuringia. He had a career teaching philosophy at various universities around Germany until his death in Berlin on November 14th, 1831.
Hegel was famous for a number of views, which he expressed in a series of publications like The Science of Logic and The Phenomenology of Spirit. Among his most influential ideas—all of which would influence Adorno— were the idea of love being the real essence of all religion, including Christianity; that an individual’s consciousness develops from their interactions with other people; and the idea that individuals are not complete unless they are considered as part of all humanity. However, Hegel’s greatest legacy for Adorno was dialectical reasoning, which Adorno practices throughout Minima Moralia. It is an approach to logic that involves comparing two apparently contradictory ideas and concepts to better arrive at a truth.
Hegel most famously applied the concept of the dialectic to history. Each stage of history is shaped by the clash between two contradictory or opposed concepts. For example, the US Civil War represented a conflict between the US ideal of liberty versus the reality of enslavement. When this clash happens, society develops greater personal freedom. It was this view of history that inspired Karl Marx and his claim that history passes through distinct and occasionally overlapping economic periods.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15th, 1844, in the German region of Saxony. He was the son of a Lutheran pastor, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, and his wife, Franziska Oehler.
Nietzsche studied to become a pastor at a monastery school and continued his education in theology at the University of Bonn. While still a student, Nietzsche lost his faith in Christianity and switched his studies to classics and philology, the study of the language used in historical sources. At the age of only 24, he became a professor of classical philology at Leipzig University, making him one of the youngest classics professors to this day. However, Nietzsche was forced to give up this position as a result of his bad health. Instead, he lived off a pension he received from briefly serving in the army of the Kingdom of Prussia, and royalties from his published works. Plagued by health problems and mental health issues which led to him entering the care of his mother and sister, he died from pneumonia on August 25th, 1900.
In his own lifetime, Nietzsche’s writings were successful, and he remains to this day one of the most widely-known philosophers in world history. His most famous publications include The Gay Science (1882), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Twilight of the Idols (1888), and The Antichrist (1888). In his works, Nietzsche expressed a number of highly influential and notorious ideas that shaped Adorno’s own thought. Among them was the concept that “God is dead,” meaning that religion’s once-powerful role in society has come to an end, leaving Western society in search of meaning, which Nietzsche thought could best be found through art.
Other concepts key to Nietzsche’s philosophy were the will to power (the sense of self-determination and independence shared by all humans), and the need for a new sense of morality and ethics that would replace Christianity and be embodied in a figure called the Übermensch (“Superman”). It is the idea of the collapse of traditional religious values and attempts to replace them, along with Nietzsche’s argument that mass culture was bringing down intellectual and cultural standards, that are most apparent in Minima Moralia.
Lastly, Nietzsche actually disliked authoritarianism and argued against antisemitism, even cutting ties with one of his book publishers because of his antisemitic opinions. Nonetheless, Nietzsche’s philosophy would be appropriated by the Nazi Party, tainting his reputation to this day.
Marcel Proust
A famous French novelist, short story writer, and essayist of the 19th century, Marcel Proust was born in Paris on July 10th, 1871. His mother was a Jewish woman of German descent, Jeanne Clémence Weil, and his father Adrien Proust was a doctor and scientist.
Proust was a bestselling author embraced by the Parisian upper class despite—or because of—his writing that criticized middle-class morality, romantic relationships, and sexual lives. His most famous work was a seven-volume novel published between 1913 and 1927, In Search of Lost Time. In his writings, Proust explored issues of sexual desire and how that desire could defy bourgeois morality, and the growing impact of new industrial technology on daily life. These are themes that Adorno would explicitly explore himself in Minima Moralia.
Proust would probably identify as a gay man today. Although he never would publicly admit to his same-sex desires, Proust’s relationships with men like his chauffeur Alfred Agostinelli and the painter and novelist Lucien Daudet were well-known among high society. Some of Proust’s characters were also gay and bisexual women and men. He died of pneumonia on November 18th, 1922.
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