Minima Moralia

What Hacker News says

1. maxbendickJul 2025
   Love this article. If you'd like a book that works deeply through the topic of commodified humanity, Minima Moralia by Adorno is painfully pertinent here.
   thread
2. DiscourseFanSep 2024
   A great text about this feeling:

   https://monoskop.org/images/2/27/Horkheimer_Max_Adorno_Theod...

   And other works by Adorno, such as Minima Moralia. It comes from Benjamin, of course, but Benjamin's conception is more complex and Adorno serves as a better introduction.

   thread
3. pasabagiAug 2021
   Maybe Adorno's Minima Moralia might be nice? It's well written, in the sense Nietzsche is well written. Can also recommend Walter Benjamin.

   In terms of interpreters of Nietzsche, it's considerably more difficult, but Deleuze wrote a really good book on Nietzsche that's worth reading.

   thread
4. malenoDec 2019
   'Dialectic of Enlightenment' might be a good place to start when it comes to thinking about thinking. If you want something a bit more fragmented/playful/debatable, then 'Minima Moralia' would be interesting. 'The Culture Industry' is well worth reading too.
   thread
5. voidhorseAug 2019
   Sure, I can clarify. By critically potent, I mean specifically philosophy that can serve as a value critique--"moralizing philosophy" if you will.

   Wittgenstein's philosophical work is incredible and was fundamental to the discipline and to logic and mathematics, but his work is typically not value critique (excepting Culture and Value which is not considered important by most readers of his oeuvre).

   Heidegger is, I suppose, another contender, but again, I don't consider the majority of his philosophy oriented around value critique (though his essays on technology do fit into this category and are excellent). Heidegger's thought, I find, is also less coherent, and he really stood by this image of the philosopher as "holier than thou" bearer of truths (this is actually touched upon in the article) which is an old model (actually, a mythic model concerned with power) that I think is impracticable. Not to mention, Sarte's conception and formulation of existentialism had a much greater general impact on human thought than Heidegger's, which, though in vogue for a while, has been mostly re-confined to the academy.

   I'm not as familiar with Richard Rorty's work as I should be, so he may qualify. But Adorno has him beat on timing--Rorty's Bibliography doesn't start until '52 (https://web.stanford.edu/~mvr2j/rr/biblio_2007.html). Meanwhile, Horkheimer and Adorno had already published Dialectic of Enlightenment at that point (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_W._Adorno_bibliography).

   I am not familiar with David Stove or his works. So he may qualify. I'll certainly check him out later, however!

   As for the works of Adorno's that are worth reading:

   Negative Dialectics, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Minima Moralia, Aesthetic Theory, His works on Hegel. And there's more--those are the major works.

   Your last sentence smacks of someone who has never even read a page of Adorno but rather has some generic, skewed conception of "critical theory" and thinks that's an adequate account of the thought of a philosopher (which, clearly being familiar with philosophers and the depth of their works, seems absurd that you'd adopt such a reductive and uninformed viewpoint on the matter). It's the equivalent to thinking Wittgenstein is reducible to a concern over "mere semantics" or Heidegger is reducible to, and dismissable on account of, his nazism. Rather presumptuous and rather close-minded.

   Show morethread
6. rexpopAug 2024
   I believe this is what Marx termed "commodity fetishism" in the first chapter of Capital.

   > Adorno was born a German Jew at the end of the nineteenth century; he saw Hitler come to power via popular vote; and, in 1941, he was forced to flee Germany for the United States. Once there, however, he observed conditions of isolation and aloofness that made him worry: post-war American culture looked, to his eye, too much like pre-war Germany. The post-war “baby boom” had resulted in the growth of the American suburbs, sprawling sections of land developed for first-place functionality (private residence) and located within commuting distance to second-place nuclei (cities, office buildings, places of work). Adorno watched Americans shuttle back and forth in their cars between work and home, and he critiqued what he saw as ever-deepening habits consistent with conditions of social alienation. “He who stands aloof runs the risk of believing himself better than others and misusing his critique of society as an ideology for his private interest,” Adorno argues in his 1951 work Minima Moralia. In other words, Adorno says, isolation begets feelings of superiority, but not solely because the isolated individual lacks opportunities for comparison; rather, isolation begets superiority because the isolated individual has no audience but himself, no one to receive (and, perhaps, critique) his image of himself, to test whether or not it is even accurate.

   --Sheila Liming, "Hanging Out" (2023)

   Show morethread