'Magna Moralia'

I have started to read the ‘Magna Moralia’, which may or may not have been written by Aritotle, but which gets included in his 'complete works', such as the revised Oxford translation (1984), which adds a note to the reader stating that: “the traditional ‘corpus aristotelicum’ contains several works which were certainly or probably not written by Aristotle. A single asterisk against the title of a work indicates that its authenticity has been seriously doubted; a pair of asterisks indicates that its spuriousness has never been seriously contested.” (The ‘Magna Moralia’ gets one asterisk.)

That aside, what, if anything, does the text have to tell us in the 21st century? I am curious.

I am using the Loeb translation of the ‘Magna Moralia’, which is possibly more quaint than the revised Oxford translation (but seems fine and has the benefit of including the Greek text beside the English translation). It begins with references to character (‘without character, a man can achieve nothing in association with his fellows’) and moral worth (‘moral worth means possession of the virtues’), and then looks at the nature and origin of Virtue (here the Loeb translation uses a capital ‘v’).

Next there is a run-down of what Pythagoras had said of virtue, then Socrates, and then Plato, with errors and confusions noted. Aristotle (or whoever it is who wrote this text) then sets out to concentrate on: “not of what is absolutely good, but good for us men. We are not to deal with the good the gods enjoy; other science treats of this, and the consideration of it is of a different nature. The good of man in society is, then, the subject of our discourse.”

The good of man in society. Hmmm. Stay tuned.

It occurs to me that Adorno’s ‘Minima Moralia’ was a blog of its time. The book we can dip into preserves 153 separate jottings from the years 1944 through to 1947. It was a dark time, hence Adorno’s dark sub-title: ‘Reflections from Damaged Life.’

The title ‘Minima Moralia’ does intrigue me. Centuries ago some Greeks produced a work called ‘Magna Moralia’, which the Loeb Classics people translated as the ‘Great Ethics’ and published in its ‘Aristotle in twenty-three volumes’ series. Was Adorno thinking of the Greeks and their ‘Magna Moralia’ when he came up with the title ‘Minima Moralia’? More recently (1988), a Romanian writer by the name of Andrei Pleşu published his own ‘Minima Moralia’, which the person who wrote the Pleşu entry for the Wikipedia refers to as ‘The Moral Minimum’.

I think of these things and wonder what is an appropriate ‘moralia’ for our new technological age.

Minima Moralia

‘Minima Moralia’ is the title of a book that was published in 1951 and which remains in print to this day.

It carried a dedication, ‘For Max, in gratitude and promise’. This reference is to a different Max, but it is the kind of book where it is nice to have an association with it, even if only by name. And it’s a book that is still worth reading in our big new information age.

It seems a nice thing to open a blog using this name. For people who haven’t got into books, it may be a bit irrelevant if I tell them that, in the State Library of Victoria’s book-stacks, Minima Moralia by Theodor Adorno sits right next to a three-volume work called The Principle of Hope by Ernst Bloch, written in the USA in the years 1938-1947, revised in 1953 and 1959, and published originally in German in 1959. Somehow it is reassuring to me that Minima Moralia and The Principle of Hope sit side-by-side in a place like the State Library of Victoria in a new century where we explore new technologies with new hope.