Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life

“What the philosophers once knew as life has become the sphere of private existence and now of mere consumption, dragged along as an appendage of the process of material production, without autonomy or substance of its own.”

This one sentence summarizes Adorno’s pessimistic view of modernity and why it is a problem. The fact that economics now dominates social and political conditions means that even everyday life and the human experience have been compromised by economic forces. This introduces the theme of The Deterioration of Human Experience in Capitalist Societies.

“The occupation with things of the mind has by now itself become ‘practical’, a business with strict division of labour, departments and restricted entry.”

Intellectualism itself has become standardized under capitalism, reflecting The Perversion of Culture by Commercial Interests. It is a result of positivism, which attempts to understand everything through data and scientific analysis, and “late capitalism” (133), a phase of capitalism where everything is subjected to economics and the free market.

“The subjugation of life to the process of production imposes as a humiliation on everyone something of the isolation and solitude that we are tempted to regard as resulting from our own superior choice.”

Insolation is one of the consequences of society being controlled by work and profit. People become “alienated human beings” (35)—not only from each other and their communities, but from their own human nature.