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.