The Best Revenge
Forty-odd years ago, the most formidable, and the most tormented, intellectual I have known introduced me to a then-obscure philosophical masterpiece, Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia,¹ a text I later chanced to overhear described by a reverential graduate student as “the most beautiful book ever written,” an appraisal with which I still find it difficult not to concur for all that it has troubled my sleep these many years.
A series of dense, brief, perturbing, intimately dialectical, and always counter-intuitive reflections concerning the morality of everyday life, Minima Moralia was created in the mid-to-late 1940s during Adorno’s American exile as a eulogy for the lost European culture and the now quaint and infinitely remote system of ethical convictions in which he and its dedicatee, Max Horkheimer, had come of age, melancholically tinged by the disparity between its memory and their life in that most un-European, that most disconcerting of cities to a European of Adorno’s experience, Los Angeles, California. It would be published in an edition of 2000 copies in 1951 and very slowly make its way into the wider consciousness.
Given the enormity of the global cataclysm under the shadow of which it was written – where the problems of [a few] little people didn’t amount to a hill of beans – Minima Moralia understandably hews to the lesser, more “private” registers of human affairs, themselves constantly in danger of being consumed by the looming disaster but notionally still under our individual, or at least someone’s, control; indeed, the title, invoking Aristotle’s Maxima Moralia (or Great Ethics), suggests that we’d already failed to do justice to the greater human concerns and that ordinary life at least may be a realm in which some modicum of decency is yet to be salvaged. Specifically alluding to Nietzsche, whose Gay Science was a self-conscious effort to defy the arrant pessimism of his erstwhile intellectual mentor, Arthur Schopenhauer, with whose grim view of the nature of things he otherwise more or less concurred, Adorno informs us that “the melancholy science from which I make this offering to my friend relates to a region that from time immemorial was regarded as the true field of philosophy...the teaching of the good life,” which in the America, the Los Angeles!, of his day, where “the good life” suggested something quite other, must have seemed hilarious to the typically dour thinker.
It might not be impertinent, given the circumstances of its composition, to think of Minima Moralia as noir philosophy. Though Adorno would no doubt repudiate the suggestion of influence from the domain of cinema, which at least in its American axis he deplored, or crude popular literature, the at once fatalistic and apprehensive ethos of the diaspora intellectual community was pervasive, and the notion that a vast, intractable, and malign conspiracy lay behind even the most innocent-seeming facades was ready enough to hand, while the deep suspicion of a mauvais fois animating the innocuous if not altogether impersonal machinery of society was difficult to gainsay. From L’Etre et le neant to The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, The Third Man, Molloy, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and The Catcher in the Rye or the films of Hitchcock, Siodmak, Wilder, and Preminger, things were, if we knew nothing else about them, not what they seemed.
Although it must be understood in the ampler context of the reflection that it concludes, of the book in toto, and of the times, not to mention Adorno’s own intellectual development, one brief, gnomic, notoriously untranslatable sentence in particular captivated, and at times during the intervening years, all but paralyzed me: Es gibt kein richtiges Leben im falschen. In the often rather cumbersome or misleadingly glib English of its first translator, it read: Wrong life cannot be lived rightly, which, if I’d read it only in English, I don’t imagine would have quite produced the effect that it did, had it produced any at all. What does that even mean?
It certainly means at least two things that are difficult to convey in an English sentence of similar pith. First, that one can’t live an honest life in fake surroundings. This rather modest contention, fraught though it is with the overtones of Adorno and Horkheimer’s epoch-making 1944 critique of the “culture industry,” The Dialectic of Enlightenment, speaks primarily to the overt topic of the passage, entitled, “Asyl fur Obdachlose,” or “Refuge for the Homeless,” in which it occurs. Adorno argues that one is perforce a stranger in one’s own home nowadays, whether it be a recently constructed cookie-cutter job filled with commercially mass-produced furnishings to which one has and can have no organic relationship or a relic of the past appointed with a connoisseur’s passion for the deracinated fragments of a disrupted culture or even, if for different reasons, the venerable family estate; and that “Dwelling in the proper sense, is no longer possible.”² And if it were possible here and there, in light of the mass evacuation of Europe and the destruction of its domestic traditions, along with so many tens of thousands of its very domiciles, “It is [now] part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” To be too comfortable in one’s home would be to deny the first and essential truth of the times: that no one should feel at home in such a world, nor, for that matter, in their own skin given what our fellow humans have suffered, and perpetrated.
If this sounds a bit like Adorno’s famous and often contested dictum to the effect that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbarism,” this is no doubt because it is animated by the same despondency in the face of the human prospect that the genocidal carnage of two great wars and the evident failure of the socialist dream had engendered. Adorno is indeed a disappointed Marxist: he continues to accept the devastating critique of capitalist society as self-evident, which it is, but sees no means of extricating humanity from its constantly mutating, ever more encompassing contemporary form. When he begins his masterwork, Negative Dialektik, with the words, “Philosophy, which once seemed outmoded, lingers on because it missed the moment to realize itself,” he refers dispiritedly to the ghostly afterlife of thought in a world that is no longer susceptible to the change that Marx envisioned, in which the fact of the alienation of labor from its laborers brought to class-wide consciousness (under the ministrations, as it happens, of the intelligentsia) would have sufficed to ignite resistance against universal injustice. Such alienation, though diagnostic of capitalist society, was once only a symptom of its disparities and not a normal, universal, internalized, and successfully hidden condition. If once there were, on the one hand, perpetrators, and on the other victims, things had changed: we have all become both perpetrators and victims of our own complicity, our alienation, which we now create as well as suffer, no longer enough to save us. In fact, we have been sufficiently pacified by consumer culture scarcely even to recognize it, while any potential revolutionary solidarity has been systematically effaced avant le lettre by the solidarity of comfort, insidious self-estrangement, and ever-increasing consensus, to which purpose the mundane, often trivial, and mostly invisible forces at work in the “culture industry” are constantly devoted.
Confronting the spirit of Hegel elsewhere in Minima Moralia, Adorno declares, Das Ganze ist das Unwahre: The whole is the false. (Or, the whole is the untrue.)³ As specifically regards Hegelian dialectics, I’d venture to say that he wants to deny the possibility of all-encompassing thought (Hegel’s Absolute Knowing) and to assert that the notion alone falsifies the project, or perspective, of thought from the outset – it might even be seen as the very model of totalitarianism. But he does, positively, if you will, also want to say that the socio-economic totality is pervasively and inescapably false (from an evolved Marxian standpoint), though that would, at the very least, put in question whether thought itself can still elude its grip. It is in conjunction with this position that the second and more expansive reading of Adorno’s now almost proverbial “soundbite”⁴ – evidence in its way of the bitter truth it embodies – must be understood: No one can live a true life when everything is false.⁵ And its implications are profound. The impervious, all-absorbing, all-infusing totality that the false absolute of commodification, in conjunction with the homogenization of the inner life that the culture industry has conspired to perfect, means that every individual action or inaction, every social structure or decision, every point of contact among its denizens or between its denizens and the system, however large or small, public or private, complex or simple, contributes, even against their active will, to the propagation, increase, and maximization of its profound and thoroughly distributed inequity, helplessness, and ignorance, to the innumerable anti-human desires and unnecessary needs on which it sustains itself, and that it cannot do otherwise. Our lives are not merely effects of this false system, we are the system, and it accompanies us everywhere, not least from the larger world back into our homes.
If, and I’m not insisting that Adorno wants to go this far, much though he believes that no honest depiction of our present state can be too bleak, all reflexive action, that is, everything unreflective, spontaneous, unguarded, naïve, even innocent, in effect all immediacy, implicitly accepts, approves, and reinforces an immoral totality; if to be unsuspicious is to be a dupe, a pawn, or a shill of the system, while programmatic distrust is eo ipso evidence of the contamination of consciousness that nullifies the very basis of a good life, is moral action even a possibility any longer?
If to make others happy, to give them pleasure, even joy, is to enfold ourselves in the system, to integrate, to spread the virus; if even to love under such conditions is to embrace the falsity, how can the greatest happiness of the greatest number be anything but mass delusion, mass capitulation? When the will of the whole is not good and our will is not ours but its, how can good will be a good at all, much less the only unqualified good?⁶ When universal law is already the problem and not the solution, if to love one’s neighbor as oneself when to love oneself without shame or blindness is impossible, what is the categorical imperative or the golden rule but a lie, a delusion, or mere propaganda?
It is the fact that it seems to suggest the impossibility of both a “better world” and even of simple moral action, no matter how dearly we may want it or need it, that makes Adorno’s assessment of the human situation so particularly distressing. When once upon a time it seemed possible, yet so few among us cared to attempt moral behavior, the fact was offset by the understanding that this was, at least, our choice, a real option; now, when we are more aware than ever of the disaster of bad choices that is human history, we are confronted by the fact that good ones are no longer even possible. And that the inner life is every bit as compromised as the outer, that there is no refuge from the false, the compromised, the utterly ruined, and not just in the past but going forward. Ok, but what about outside the system altogether, for that little word “in” seems to imply that that is where hope may yet reside? Of course, we may hear Adorno echoing Kafka, that is precisely where our hope resides: nowhere at all.
If this sort of conceptual Ice-9, superficially reminiscent in its stark implacability of Dworkin’s “All sex is rape,” Lacan’s “The real does not exist,” Baudrillard’s “For us, the only real experience is death,” Heidegger’s “We are born guilty,” or “Only a God can save us” or, for that matter, such popular culture products as Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Night of the Living Dead, Fight Club, or The Matrix, has not yet utterly demoralized us as it bids adieu to a civilization slipping into moral cryptobiosis, it is precisely because thought, puny and defenseless and irrelevant as it is, can at least reject the seductions of comfort, can still “bring chaos into order,”⁷ can refuse to feel at home anywhere (much less everywhere), can refuse to rest, to cleave, to dwell. And, of course, because it is, after all, only thought.
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1 Of course I realize that one cannot make such a statement without at least minimally satisfying the curiosity that it arouses: David Lachterman was a professor of philosophy at Swarthmore College when I was a student there. Though still quite young – he never managed to become otherwise – he was brilliant and astonishingly erudite, a fact that had adverse effects on his creative life. Had it not been for Stanley Rosen – who informed me many years later that “Lachterman was the one person I knew who might, I say might, have been smarter than me” – editing down his 1000-page manuscript to a manageable, if ultra-dense, 232 pages, his only lifetime book publication, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity, would never have seen the light of day. The first line of its preface reads: To write a book is to be schooled in the abridgment of ambition.
2 This would certainly seem to be a jibe at Heidegger and his “jargon of authenticity,” within which “dwelling” (wohnen) becomes a more significant concept at just about the time Minima Moralia was published.
3 See Minima Moralia, section 29.
4 Some knowing version of “Adornos berühmter Satz ist längst zum Kalenderspruch mutiert.” (Adorno’s famous sentence has long since devolved into a saying reproduced on calendars.) often accompanies discussion of its meaning nowadays.
5 I include a few from among the scores of provisional translations that have occurred to me over the years in the hope that their totality might contribute something to an approach to the original that none on its own seems to accomplish:
There’s no honest way to live a lie.
There’s no right way to live a lie.
Truth can’t be built on a foundation of lies.
If everything is wrong, nothing can be right.
There’s no justice in an unjust world.
You can’t live a true life in a false world.
No one can live a true life when life itself is false.
There is no right living when everything is wrong
There is no way to live a good life when the whole world is bad
No one can live a decent life in a dishonest world
No one can live a good life in a bad world
You can’t live an honest life in a dishonest/sham world.
No one can live right/ly when everything is wrong.
You can’t live rightly when life (itself) is wrong.
If the world is wrong, no one is right.
There is no good life in a bad world.
No one is free when the world is in chains.
You can’t live a free life in a prison.
When you’re part of a degenerate system, you cannot live rightly.
You can’t live well under a sick system. Or be good in a bad one.
You can’t live a real life in a phony/fake world.
If the world is a lie, then your life can’t be true/is too.
You can’t be true to a lie.
The good life is not possible in a bad world.
Everything we do serves evil interests.
6 I refer to Kant’s well-known remark in The Critique of Practical Reason.
7 The task of art today is to bring chaos into order. Minima Moralia, section 143.
John Wronoski is a former antiquarian bookseller, art dealer, and curator. He is the author of the book-length exhibition catalogue, Boris Lurie: A Life in the Camps, and has essays in numerous art-related publications, most recently, Heide Hatry’s Icons in Ash (Station Hill Press).